Notes on the film
EXTRA LIFE (AND DECAY) is a search for nearness, for hospitality at all scales. It serves both as an intimate manifesto of total refusal and as a project of collective and interspecific rebellion against structures of domination/authority (over land, over bodies) that deny us care, assistance, solidarity, and the ability to create and maintain deep interconnections.
By focusing on the connections and affinities between species, it aims to make visible the processes of fragmentation at work in current politics and to remind us of the necessity for interdependent and supportive collective bodies in order to survive as individuals, being ourselves composed of a multitude of living organisms.
Through the pronouns She and They (Elle and Elles) used by the narrator, the intertwined existences of human and non-human communities and individuals facing labor exploitation unfold. These two spaces of struggle, forest environment and public childcare, threatened by the neoliberal practice of “simplification” and “fragmentation,” became part of my experience of parenthood, which began simultaneously with the pandemic, and the start of this project.
Isolated from their communities, means of subsistence, and support structures, both nuclear families and managed forest plots reveal themselves to be deadly structures.
“She” is composed of fragments of individual experiences and multiple perspectives, and “They” emerge as a collective body of human and other-than-human beings, a collective consciousness. These multiple testimonies, assembled from personal reflections, scientific observations, collected and exchanged words, are reclaiming common goods and strategies of resistance. The neoliberal processes and strategies of fragmentation and simplification (scientific/political terms used for landscape management, forestry, but also childcare management) have become increasingly oppressive to vulnerable human and non-human groups, even more so during the pandemic.
The capitalist concept of the nuclear family as the standard model of consumer unity, and the creation of the “Normalbaum” (or average/standard tree, invented by German forest scientists) as a measurable standard unit of wood production, are both driven by the same logic of optimizing life. Isolated from their communities, means of subsistence, and support structures, both nuclear families and managed forest plots reveal themselves to be deadly structures.
Film and Image Production
The film aims to manifest an experience of interdependencies/the multitude through its filmed characters, but also to find or create collaborative patterns throughout the film production. The film research aimed to conduct collective image experiments and reflection on the affinities that bind a multi-species group of beings living on the Plateau des Millevaches, in the center of France. We focused on a network of interactions between a few species threatened by the intensive Douglas fir monoculture led by scientific forestry in the region.
These affinity relations place hospitality and interdependence at the heart of what we now call interspecific diplomacy.
This inextricable network unfolds nested scales of hospitality and worldmaking nearing each other. The beech tree hosts the tinder fungus, itself hosting the beetle Boletophagus reticulatus, itself carrying colonies of acarid nymphs. A species of lichen attached on the beech serves as a bioindicator of air quality. The tinder fungus weakens the beech and allows the black woodpecker to carve and build its nest, subsequently benefiting non-architect species such as the Tengmal’s owl, the marten, and others. The weakening of the beech will lead to its decay and death, producing necromass, which will contribute to the regrowth of the forest and regeneration of the soil, as a digestion process.
These affinity relations place hospitality and interdependence at the heart of what we now call interspecific diplomacy. The forest images and collective audio/video archive material we produced as a group of colleagues were intended to highlight this “inextricable network of affinities” (Origin of Species, Charles Darwin), as well as to search for alternatives to the authority of the image, questioning the notions of readability, quality, framing, control, inherent in the Western scientific language used to reinforce domination over landscape.
The most essential element of this project is to recreate connections and hospitality.
Producing images off center, blurred, in perpetual motion, blown-up, with various filming devices, allowed us to portray an experience of proximity, of permeability to others, to our surroundings – and a desire to escape the reference points of measurement, quality, and control of the digital moving image.
Later in the year, with the colleagues who participated to the film research, we performed a collective reading of my script during an evening of performances organized around the film research. This is the last part of the film. These moments of collective work, at various stages of the filmmaking, both imprinted in the narrative and the production itself, constitute the most essential element of this project, which is to recreate connections and hospitality.
Stéphanie Lagarde
