Of sand and stone: Thick time, cyclicality, and Anthropocene poetics in ‘Nomadland’

Abstract

This paper presents an ecocinematic reading of Chloé Zhao’s 2020 feature No- madland. Drawing on David Farrier’s notion of Anthropocene poetics, it argues that the film presents an image of ‘thick time’ through which human’s embeddedness in deep time is figured. Through a multilayered temporal entanglement with different cyclical processes of erosion and resurgence, a critique to capitalist exhaustive hy- percyclicity is formulated. Decentering ‘the human’, Nomadland invites a cinematic Anthropocenic thinking and imagining in which a critical nomadic subjectivity is fig- ured as a transcorporeal subject that is materially enmeshed both spatially and tem- porally with the physical world.

Keywords

• anthropocene
• ecocinema
• geology
• hypercyclicity
• transcorporeality