The Rhythms of the More-than-human Matter in Azucena Losana's Eco-developed Film Series Metarretratos

Abstract

This essay explores the eco-developing project Metarretratos by Mexican filmmaker Azucena Losana, addressing it in the context of a set of cinematic gestures concerned with the environmental impact of film. Focusing particularly on the film Ceibo/Erythrina crista-galli, the article argues that the series contributes to the three main axes that characterize academic debates about film and environmental concerns: a) with regard to cinematographic modes of production, b) concerning the thematization of the more-than-human and its relationships with humans and the environment, and c) with reference to the understanding of images as matter and imagination as action in the world. As part of a broader movement searching for less environmentally harmful film-developing solutions, the Metarretratos series has the particularity of experimenting with the chemical and curative properties of native plants from South America. Additionally, it depicts the plants/trees used in the developing recipe, foregrounding vegetal worlds as protagonists. Specifically, this paper discusses how Ceibo/Erythrina crista-galli engages with the healing properties of plants, drawing from indigenous knowledge systems and the philosophy of vegetal life. It explores the botanical significance of the Ceibo tree depicted in the film, as it exists in a particular soil and geography, the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, while simultaneously communicating with the spatialities and temporalities that exceed it. I suggest that what the eco-developing project reveals — reveal being the Spanish word for develop — is the very agency of both cinematic and vegetal matter in the creation of forms, images, and the world itself, exposing the inseparability of nature and technology. The cinematic dispositif that Metarretratos involves, we may speculate, is affected by the curative properties of the plants used; it seems to accommodate, translate, and transpose these qualities beyond itself, functioning as part of a curative mechanism of eco-traumatic aspects of landscapes.