10

AGAINST GLOBALIZATION

Picturing the world*cinematic globalization in the deserts of Babel

Mads Anders Baggesgaard* Department of Aesthetics and Communication*Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

Abstract Globalization remains a challenge for the art of cinema.

No art form is more suited to the task of showing clashes

between cultures and the internal conflicts of a society, but

as films are both narratively and physically dependent

on locations*even if these can be multiple and dispersed throughout the world*and because of the logistics and the finances required for the production of film, cinema has

almost always been placed in a national or regional

framework. Reflecting the totality and networked nature

of the globalized world seems more readily attainable for

more conceptual forms of art. This article discusses

Alejandro Gonzales Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel, often cited

as the ‘‘first film of globalization,’’ asking the question of

whether this claim can be substantiated alone with

reference to the networked narrative of the film and use

of multiple locations, suggesting that the relationship

between cinema and globalization should in fact be

understood on the terms of the medium as a visual

reflection of images of the globe. Drawing on theories on

the visual nature of globalization by Arjun Appadurai,

Martin Heidegger, and W. J. T. Mitchell, this article thus

argues for a different conception of cinematic globalization

rooted in the history of cinema rather than in theories of

globalization.

Mads Anders Baggesgaard, PhD,

DFF Sapere Aude Postdoc in Com-

parative Literature, Aarhus University,

Denmark. Has published extensively

on contemporary French and Franco-

phone literature and film. Recent

publications includes ‘‘A World of

Emotions � Mediality in the Works of Pierre Alferi’’ in S.E. Larsen & L.

Sætre (eds.) Text, Action, Emotion, Aarhus University

Press and Confronting Universalities: Aesthetics and

Politics under the Sign of Globalization, ed. with Jakob

Ladegaard, Aarhus University Press, 2011.

Keywords: visuality; complexity; opacity; landscape

Globalization remains a challenge for the art

of cinema. No art form is more suited to the

task of showing clashes between cultures and the

internal conflicts of a society, but as films are both

narratively and physically dependent on locations

(even if these can be multiple and dispersed

throughout the world), because of the use of

spoken language, and because of the logistics

and the finances required for the production of

film, cinema is most often placed firmly within a

*Correspondence to: Mads Anders Baggesgaard, Department of Aesthetics and Communication*Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, DK-Aarhus, Denmark. Email: [email protected]

Journal of AESTHETICS & CULTURE Vol. 5, 2013

#2013 M.A. Baggesgaard. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY

3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided

the original work is properly cited.

Citation: Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, Vol. 5, 2013 http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/jac.v5i0.22704

1 (page number not for citation purpose)

national or regional framework. Reflecting the

totality and networked nature of the globalized

world, it may seem more readily attainable for

more conceptual forms of art.

Even if there is something in the nature of the

medium that encourages an interest in location,

this does not mean that filmmakers have re-

nounced the task of depicting the globe. Alejandro

Gonzales Iñárritu’s 2006 film Babel is often

mentioned as ‘‘the first film of globalization’’

because of the complex whole of the film* intertwining stories from three different conti-

nents in a storyline jumping with sophistication

in both time and space. Babel is a film on

globalization because it not only thematically but

also structurally mirrors the complex realities of a

globalized world, thus overcoming the limitations

of the filmic form and its link to location.

However, I would like to propose the idea that

Babel is a film about globalization not primarily

due to adaptation of the network structure but,

on the contrary, because it counters the idea

of globalization as network by exploring the way

in which globalization appears as a concrete yet

distant possibility in the lives of people in the

world. Babel is thus a prototypical film of globa-

lization exactly because it resists the ideas of

globalization as complexity and engages in an

exploration of the intimate relationship between

location and globality as it plays out within

the confines of the cinematic image. In Babel,

cinema depicts globalization exactly through its

foundation in location and language.

GLOBAL NETWORKS

This is not to say that Babel is not a complex film.

Structurally, thematically, and in the institutional

framework surrounding the production of the

film, Babel is without any doubt a prominent

example of what Hamid Naficy has termed multi-

plex cinema, a new genre of cinematic productions

adapted to the dual globalization of displacement

and migration and new digital media through the

use of ‘‘multilingual dialogue, multicultural char-

acters and multi-sited diegesis.’’ 1

These traits are

a near description of Babel, which is also empha-

sized by Naficy as a founding moment for the

upcoming genre.

The film consists of three basic storylines taking

place in Japan, Morocco, and the Mexico�US

border region. The storylines are not presented to

us chronologically, but the film cuts unsystemati-

cally between them and leaves it to the viewer to

reconstruct the plots and, not least, the connec-

tions between them. It comprises more than 2500

camera setups and approximately 4000 edits, and

it includes dialogue in at least seven languages

(English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Japanese

sign language, Berber, and Arabic), mixing well-

known actors from the United States, Mexico, and

Japan with amateurs.

The film is presented as a Mexican film,

directed by Iñárritu; written by his compatriot

and long-time collaborator, Guillermo Arriaga;

and marketed by Iñárritu’s own production

company, Zeta Films, based in Mexico. But as

Paul Kerr has described it, the production of the

film is the result of an international collaboration

with its main sources within the American pro-

duction system. 2

The bulk of the funding for the

film comes from three American companies

(American Media Rights Capital, Anonymous

Content, and Paramount Vantage) and the French

distribution company Central Films, all compa-

nies that, on different levels, specialize in the

production and distribution of so-called indepen-

dent and international art house productions

aimed at a global market. Even though films like

Babel are in this way an extension of the Holly-

wood system, Kerr convincingly argues that

the globalization of capital as an opportunity to

create international cooperation is a necessary

condition for the production of the kind of global

networked narratives that Babel exemplifies. The

cooperation provided the institutional framework

in different parts of the world that is needed for

producing and selling this particular genre of film,

for instance by securing access to the important

Japanese market by hiring the local star Kôji

Yakusho for a role in the Japanese subplot. Using

the network form makes it possible to make films

readable and relatable in many different parts of

the world, thus opening up supplementary sources

of income outside the heavily contested American

home market.

This is obviously an important point: the

complex story is constructed with great skill, and

in its networked totality it mirrors certain aspects

of globalized society in both a thematic and a

commercial sense. However, this correspondence

must not lead us to think that multiplex films are

M.A. Baggesgaard

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about everything at once. The networked narra-

tive does not make a film global, and even though

Babel is a complex film, it is structured around a

few main components, and a singular incident

serves to tie the storylines together. Two young

boys accidently, or at least unwittingly, shoot an

American woman in Morocco with a gun which,

it is later revealed to us, was given as a gift

from the protagonist of the Japanese storyline to

the father of the two boys in Morocco, and this

event, subsequently, causes the developments of

the Mexican subplot. The gun used thus serves

as the central metaphor tying the different threads

of the story together and marking a curious

relationship between singularity, universality, and

complexity in the structure of the film.

What are we to make of this gun? Is it simply a

serendipitous interlinking of disparate fates in

a complex globality? Do the linked persons form

a constellation within this whole? Or should

we understand the film in the sense that the

connections caused by globalization in fact add

coherence to individual existences lacking founda-

tion? The answer to this question is hardly clear,

although the character development in the indivi-

dual stories in most cases seems to suggest the

latter, namely, that connectivity does in fact allow

the persons to locate the essential, the ground in

their lives, with the Mexican subplot as a marked

exception. In any case, the relationship between

local lives and global order is a complex one in

which the global not only affects local cultures but

also pervades the most intimate parts of people’s

lives and affects both the way they see the world

and the way they see themselves. In order to

understand these relations, it would, however, be

a good idea to get a more precise understanding of

the concept of globalization, or, more precisely to

have a look at how the concept of globalization can

be used in relation to the cinematic image.

IMAGINING THE GLOBE

Globalization is and will remain one of the central

buzzwords of the time in which we are living for

the very simple reason that it provides perhaps the

best description of it. The term may feel over- and

misused, imprecise, and overly enthusiastic re-

garding the changes affecting the world today,

but the fact is that no term more convincingly

describes the demographic, economic, technical,

and cultural developments that we have experi-

enced over recent decades. If the term is unavoid-

able, the challenge then is to make an operational

definition of its use, in a given context, here in

relation to the art of cinema.

One of the more challenging descriptions was

made 15 years ago by Arjun Appadurai in his

Modernity at Large, when he famously describes

globalization as a process generated by the dis-

juncture between what he terms ‘‘five dimensions

of global cultural flows.’’ 3

Appadurai terms these

dimensions ‘‘scapes,’’ distinguishing between eth-

noscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finances-

capes, and ideoscapes, providing what could be

read as an updated version of the levels of society,

as known from Marxist theories of historical

materialism, that is capable of addressing the

complex reality of globalization.

The model builds upon Benedict Anderson’s

imagined communities, but with a marked shift

from the print-based imagination in Anderson

toward the visual as the basis of the construction

of imagined worlds, as he terms it. Both ideos-

capes and mediascapes consist if not entirely then

predominantly of ‘‘images,’’ with the visual serving

as the domain in which all other media can be

represented, be they textual, audial, digital, or

pure thought. This is, of course, also the reason

for the use of the term ‘‘scape,’’ employing a visual

metaphor to the different levels in Appadurai’s

model: ‘‘The suffix -scape allows us to point to the

fluid, irregular shapes of these landscapes.’’ 4

The

landscape is of course not an innocent model, but

a historically laden form of vision suggesting a

romantic dialectic between fragmentation and

unity, a strong sense of perspective, and perhaps

even an ocular-centric worldview. Understanding

globalization as a (however disjuncted) transform-

ing and layered landscape implies an effort to see

the world as an intelligible whole. Or, more

precisely, it entails that the world is always seen

from somewhere, that any take on globalization is

always limited in scope, but also that Appadurai’s

model is in fact an endeavor to see it all in one

view, taking in the globe.

An interesting point here is that this very

endeavor to see it all is closely linked to the idea

of globalization as complexity when Appadurai

continues to argue for ‘‘the need to combine a

fractal metaphor for the shape of cultures (in the

plural) with a polythetic account of their overlaps

Picturing the world

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and resemblances.’’ 5

Here, visuality is translated

into opacity in a figure that is simply too complex

to be seen, even though the desire for rendering

the globe visible is still alive in Appadurai. This

dialectics is well known, for example in descrip-

tions of global finance, which is in turn described

as a transparent global network and as a system of

total obscurity, depending on the success rate for

investments it seems.

Hinging this verdict on the choice of a specific

metaphor in Appadurai may seem a bit hasty, but

the fact is that visual metaphors abound in

descriptions of globalization, and Appadurai here

serves as a both useful and interesting case in

point. In a short essay, W.J.T. Mitchell traces and

categorizes the different visual representations

of our totality as globe, planet, cosmos, earth,

and world. 6

Mitchell’s vantage point is Martin

Heidegger’s famous analysis of the modern world

as the age of the construction of a ‘‘world picture,’’

a Weltbild, by the forces of technology and reason:

World picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man who represents and sets forth.

7

Heidegger understands modernity as the age in

which man for the first time places himself at the

center of existence, thus constructing not only a

new vision of the world but also a conception of

existence: in the modern world, only that which

appears to us as if in a picture is accepted as part

of the world.

Heidegger’s essay dates back to 1938 and has

been read as a rejection of the tripartite ideology of

modernism that was threatening to throw the

world into war under the headings of commun-

ism, capitalism, and, of course, National Social-

ism, 8

three ideologies constructing exactly an

image of the world based on technological ad-

vancement. This is no place to discuss the degree

and nature of Heidegger’s involvement with the

latter of these, but on the point of the advent of a

world picture, time has been kind to his ideas. 9

Through the technological advances instigated by

these ideologies, we can now see the world as if it

was put before us, as it in fact was in 1946 when

Clyde Holliday, a NASA engineer, strapped a

camera to a captured German V2 missile and gave

us the first grainy image of Earth as seen from an

altitude of 65 miles; and in 1968, when Apollo 8

gave us the first clear image of Earth as seen from

space*the famous ‘‘Earthrise’’ images as a direct result of the space race with the Soviet adver-

sary. 10

Through the technological development

stimulated by the ideologies pointed to by Hei-

degger, the world became available to us, no

longer as the outer frame of our existence, but as

an object placed before us, and, subsequently,

with the possibility of imagining it as something

put in our hands, as something that can be put to

use in its totality. Following Heidegger’s analysis,

you could argue that this is exactly the ideology

of globalization as a convergence of these three

ideologies which comes to itself in the political and

economic discourses of neoliberalism: the idea

that the globe, as it presents itself before the

cameras of Apollo 8, is a smooth medium for

the establishment of a borderless economy based

on advanced technologies of computing and

communication, rather than situated production.

This line of thought has been pursued by

numerous thinkers, for example Jean-Luc Nancy,

who in The Creation of the World, or, Globalization

reads globalization as the endpoint of the histor-

ical performance of capital, a state of total and

world-encompassing commodification in which

there is no longer room for the existence of lived

worlds outside the domination of global capital:

‘‘How are we to conceive of, precisely, a world

where we only find a globe, an astral universe, or

an earth without sky?’’ 11

Or Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak, who, throughout her later writings, seeks

to discard the ideology of globalization in favor

of situated comparative studies: ‘‘The globe is in

our computers. It is the logo of the World Bank.

No one lives there.’’ 12

Spivak resorts to the figure

of the planet as the alternative figure to the

globe, and Nancy sticks with the phenomenologi-

cal world, but they both seek an alternative to

Appadurai and other sociological theories on

globalization. The two different models represent

not only two different takes on the state of the

world today but also two fundamentally different

approaches to the visual nature of conceptual

representations of the globe. On the one hand,

Appadurai and others use visual metaphors to

highlight the ‘‘global’’ aspect of globalization; on

the other hand, Heidegger, Nancy, and Spivak

criticize the idea of the globe as visible, calling for

M.A. Baggesgaard

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descriptions founded in a broader spectrum of

sensual and cognitive approaches.

SMOOTH ZOOMS

Mitchell chooses a more pragmatic approach. He

dismisses Heidegger’s account through the rea-

sonable argument that worldviews are as varied

and abundant today as they were before the

advances of technology. He thus gives credence

to Heidegger’s analysis of the introduction of a

new form of globality, but he emphasizes that the

transparency of the neoliberal world order is only

one aspect of this reality. Instead, Mitchell points

exactly to the convergences between these differ-

ent aspects as points of interest:

There is no way to ‘‘zoom’’ smoothly and precisely from the global to the local, in other words, or from the heights of abstract infinity to the minute particular � the perspective must pass through a vortex which imposes a new regime of observation � up close and personal � on the spectator.13

The abstract heights of Google Earth or the view

from the bomb freefalling in the air over Iraq are

not translatable to the realities on the ground

when the bomb falls, or when Google Street View

accidently exposes a car on fire or a deer hit by

the Google Street View car. 14

The two levels are

equally real, and both are indisputably expressions

of globalization, but this does not mean that they

relate unproblematically to each other. This is of

course a matter of perspectives, as described by

Appadurai. The landscape of global warfare is not

the same as the Iraqi landscapes below, and the

disjunction between them is clearly a part of the

story of globalization.

However, even this explanation may be a

simplification of the problem, or, perhaps rather,

an overly complicated solution to the problem,

because the fact remains that even though there is

no way to translate the two experiences into each

other, these two distinct perspectives remain tied

to each other as experiences of globalization. The

bomb is there, and the Google Street View car is

there because of globalization, and because of

demands formulated on the global level; and,

conversely, Google Earth and the war on terror

are there as more or less pertinent answers to real

or perceived problems ‘‘on the ground’’ (e.g. the

very real problem of having the finances, the gas,

and the navigational tools to transport yourself

from one place to another). Both Mitchell and

Appadurai operate with a model of globalization

that consists, fundamentally, of layers of visibility

reduced to obscurity by the vorticose disjunctures

between them. But the interrelatedness between

the levels could suggest, as described in this

article, not only that they are connected but also

that it is exactly this connection that is character-

istic of globalization*that globalization can be understood as a specific way in which one set of

images, on the ground so to speak, relates to the

idea of a world picture.

BABBLING ABOUT THE WORLD

Although cinema is challenged by globalization on

the structural, organizational, and linguistic levels,

it is perhaps the art form most readily suited to

reflect different visual representations of globali-

zation. After all, film epitomizes the technological

production of images of the world that is the

objective of Heidegger’s critique, and as such it

is always caught up in the conflict described here.

The medial auto-critique of contemporary film

can to a certain extent be interpreted as an in-

vestigation of the role that film plays in the

establishment of world pictures. This can be

seen if we return to our first example, the reflec-

tion of globalization in Babel.

Babel is clearly not only a film about globaliza-

tion, but first and foremost a film about different

perspectives on the world of today. The different

parts of the film may not constitute a coherent

whole, but they do without a doubt present the

viewer with a series of perspectives that do not

readily translate into each other. Iñárritu says as

much in a 2007 interview on his film with New

Perspectives Quarterly: ‘‘Babel is about the point of

view of others.’’ 15

As simple as that. The net-

worked nature of film allows the director to

provide us with different worldviews, to show us

connected or related situations as they are per-

ceived within different cultures.

But these worldviews are of course not only

contrasted but, on the contrary, brought to inter-

act. The film is not only about different cul-

tural perceptions of the world but also about a

reflection on the nature of seeing in an intercul-

tural, global space, and, I would argue, on the

Picturing the world

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contrasting of exactly different world pictures in a

globalized world.

Let us for a moment return to the key scene

of the film. The scene of the shooting, or rather

the set of scenes that depict the act of shooting,

in which the gun serves to tie together the dif-

ferent storylines, is not only central because of its

structural function but also because it stages the

connection as one that is grounded in differences

in perspective and visual scope. The scene falls

into two parts presenting the event from each

of the two different perspectives: the unobstructed

view of the boys from a hilltop overlooking the

road on which the bus carrying the woman is

driving, and the viewing point of the tourist look-

ing out on the locals through the glass panes of the

bus. Both viewing positions are characterized

by a seeming clarity that veneers obscurity. 16

In

the bus, it is the large, clear windowpanes which

give the tourists an unobstructed view toward the

landscape they pass through and the locals who

inhabit it, but which of course also act as a barrier

separating the tourists from the world they are

travelling to experience. The glass barrier in this

central shot is a metaphor for the psychological

detachment from the world that the woman

is feeling after her husband and she have lost

a child, just as it points to the cultural separation

and to the fundamental separation between reality

and cinematographic image. But the shot gets

its distinct significance in contrast with the corre-

sponding shot from the boys’ point of view.

Whereas the woman is placed in a confined space,

the two boys stand in the open with a vast,

unobstructed view of the landscape before them.

However, as it becomes clear, this does not mean

that they have any real knowledge of what lies

before them. Seen from this distance, the bus

appears as nothing but an abstraction, a target to

be shot at like a piece of rock or the archetypical

empty can of beans in a Western, an illusion that is

broken only when the bus comes to a halt after

the shot. The limitlessness of their point of view

causes a delusion of mastery, which is comparable

to the delusion of the world picture as described

by Heidegger.

In both cases, space shows itself as structured

around a fracture between visibility and obscurity

that is equivalent to the vortex between different

regimes of observation described by Mitchell, but

this fracture takes on different forms in the two

cases. In the bus, it is the panes of glass, which with

their doubling of the motive (by both letting

through and reflecting light, as glass does) act as

a visual membrane between two worlds. And on

the hilltop, it is the dusty desert air that adds a

tactile quality to the apparent clarity of the view.

The view of the boys is unlimited, yet the dustiness

gives the scenery an air of mirage. These motives

appear in different variations throughout the

film, not least in the glass-dominated city of the

Japanese storyline, but by contrasting the two

different perspectives the shooting scene provides

the most concentrated example, emphasizing the

scene as not only a structural but also a visual axis

of the film. The scene serves not only to create

narrative connections but also to reflect upon

the ability of film to create connections on a purely

visual level, to reflect upon the abilities and li-

mitations of the filmic medium when it comes to

showing the point of view of others.

The parallel to the Western is not misleading.

The space constructed in the scene is, as with

most cinematic deserts, heavily indebted to

the mythologies of the desert landscape and the

frontier as they were developed in the American

Western tradition as a mirror relation between the

Indians as the image of human otherness and the

landscape as an image of the nature as other.

The Indian embodied the highly libidinal role of

the both feared and desired nature within man,

invoking fantasies of the purity and impurity of the

mind and of the blood. And there was an equally

ambiguous relationship with the landscape, con-

flating pictorial beauty with the voracity of nature,

to the point of implicating a libidinal relationship

between man and nature through the cinemato-

graphic gaze. 17

Similar connections can be drawn in Babel.

The shooting scene is clearly sexual in content

at both ends of the shot, most clearly perhaps in

the case of the two young boys, as illustrated

by the scenes leading up to the shooting, where

we first see the youngest of the two boys peeping

on his naked sister through a small hole in

the wall and later masturbating behind a rock

in the desert just prior to the shooting. This scene

is contrasted with the shooting, which from its

privileged, open vantage point succeeds in per-

forming the penetration, which is barred in the

M.A. Baggesgaard

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first case. After having pierced the membranous

panes of the bus, the bullet is received with a slight

sigh by the woman without any instant drama.

The film thus contrasts two forms of looking

related to two different contexts: the incestuous

gaze looking in toward the family, the identical,

and the rapacious view toward the other.

There is thus a connection between visuality,

the landscape, and the libidinal that has filmic

historical precursors, but the economy of these

connections is thoroughly changed. This is first

of all because Babel shows us both sides of the

equation; the other becomes the same, and vice

versa. And accordingly, because there are and can

be no embodiment of nature. There is no frontier

to act as an other to civilization, and no Indians to

disappear into the landscape. On the contrary,

both sides are barred from the landscape and have

neither access to it nor control over it. In fact, it

could be argued that it is exactly the landscape

as totality that threatens and allures the charac-

ters, rather than that which the landscape hides or

represents. And further, we are today in a situa-

tion where it is exactly the global that is the

otherness that threatens the security of our home,

or where, following Spivak, ‘‘the discursive system

shifts from vagina to the planet as the signifier

of the uncanny.’’ 18

In times of globalization, the

unheimlich is not the embodied other, or nature

within, but the totality that threatens the stability

of the social order from the outside.

What is the desert if not the place where

Earth appears at its most planetary, stripped of

life like the images from Mars or the Moon? 19

And

perhaps this was always the case. It could be

argued that this transference already occurred

in the classic Westerns of John Ford, that the

Western is exactly the genre that shows us the

movement from inner to outer nature. But in

Babel and other more recent films, the connection

becomes more explicit and connected to a new

world order in which the frontier can no longer

be used to amalgamate national identity. In a time

of globalization, the planetary is no longer meta-

phorized as a geographical and racial other (except

for in science fiction), but it is present as an

ungraspable reality in our everyday lives, or, as

Spivak phrases it elsewhere: ‘‘globalization makes

us live on an island of language in an ocean of

traces, with uncertain shores ever on the move.’’ 20

IMAGING THE WORLD

This analysis signals a pronounced shift from

Heidegger’s critique of the world image: even

though we can now see the world in one view,

this does not mean that it is in our hands. On the

contrary, it means that the planet is present as that

which is beyond our grasp in a way that it was

not in earlier times. This shift is, of course, also

dependent on the development in our under-

standing of the nature of the image. In the last

chapter of Gilles Deleuze’s two books on cinema,

he offers an analysis of the complexity of the

cinematic image in its development from silent

film, to talkies, to contemporary cinema. Specifi-

cally referencing the cinematic deserts of Pier

Paolo Pasolini and Michelangelo Antonioni,

Deleuze describes this development as the passage

from the viewable to the readable image:

It is as if, speech having withdrawn from the

image to become founding act, the image, for

its part, raised the foundations of space, the

‘strata’, those silent powers of before or after

speech, before or after man. The visual image

becomes archaeological, stratigraphic, tectonic.

Not that we are taken back to prehistory

(there is an archaeology of the present), but

to the deserted layers of our time which bury

our own phantoms; to the lacunary layers

which we juxtaposed according to variable

orientations and connections. 21

Through its technological development, the cine-

matic image has developed into a complex form

that is able to show us different layers of our visual

and cultural present. It is an archeology of the

present, far removed from the vision of transpar-

ency through technology underlying Heidegger’s

analysis. And it is exactly these powers that make

cinema apt for the exploration of the visual

structures of a globalized world, as is done in

Babel, by contrasting two barred visions of a

landscape within a single scene. The desert seems

to be a privileged space for these kinds of explo-

ration, not only in the films of Iñárritu, but further

study could be made on the many films on glob-

alization set in the deserts of Iraq or Afghanistan,

on the sexualized deserts of Bruno Dumont, or on

the relation between intimate spaces and open

landscapes in Abbas Kiarostami’s films. 22

In all these cases, the space of the desert acts as

the setting in which the intimate is confronted

Picturing the world

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with the global. This is in psychoanalytical terms,

following Spivak, as the making unheimlich of

everyday existence in a globalized world, or,

following Deleuze, as the visual archeology of

the power structures of globalized society. In both

cases, we are far removed from the transparency of

the pictures of the world envisioned by Heidegger.

The Earth or planet is not nature, not an origin,

but a construct that acts as an other in relation to a

perceived home or belonging. In The Origin of the

Work of Art, written shortly before ‘‘In the Age of

the World Picture,’’ Heidegger sums up the role of

the work of art in a short phrase: ‘‘In setting up a

world, the work sets forth the earth.’’ 23

In these

contemporary films, that relationship is reversed.

By setting forth the Earth, by traversing it and

letting it traverse our lines of sight, the work of

art destabilizes the world, opens it up, and lets it

interact with other worlds. In its engagement

with tactile images of specific locations, it be-

comes possible for cinema to reflect on the re-

lationship between the totality of globalization

and its influence on the everyday lives of people

in different parts of the world. By picturing the

planet in such a manner, the film shows us our

world.

Notes

1. Hamid Naficy, ‘‘Multiplicity and Multiplexing in

Today’s Cinemas: Diasporic Cinema, Art Cinema,

and Mainstream Cinema’’, Journal of Media Practice

1 (2010): 11�20, 15. David Bordwell has launched the concept of the ‘‘network narrative’’ to describe

this genre, thus focusing on the complexity of

the narrative instead of the broader range of multi-

plicities included by Naficy. David Bordwell,

‘‘Mutual Friends and Chronologies of Chance’’, in

Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008),

189�252. Almost every article on Babel highlights the use of network narrative. See e.g. Juan Pellicer,

‘‘Bridging Worlds: Transtextuality, Montage and the

Poetics of Babel’’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexica-

nos 2 (2010): 239�49; Todd McGowan, ‘‘The Con- tingency of Connection: The Path to Politicization

in Babel’’, Discourse 3 (2008): 401�18; Richard Locke, ‘‘Globalization and Its Discontents’’, The

American Scholar 2 (2007): 114�18; and Svend Erik Larsen, ‘‘Fletværk: fortællinger i en globaliseret

kultur’’, in Hvad er verdenskunst? eds. Mads Anders

Baggesgaard et al. (Aarhus: Klim, 2009), 39�66. 2. Paul Kerr, ‘‘Babel’s Network Narrative: Packaging

a Globalized Art Cinema’’, Transnational Cinemas 1

(2010): 37�51.

3. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural

Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, MN:

University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 33.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 46.

6. W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘‘World Pictures: Globalization and

Visual Culture’’, Neohelicon 2 (2007): 49�59. 7. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Age of the World Picture’’,

trans. William Lovitt, in The Question Concerning

Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper,

1977), 129�130. 8. Thomas Sheehan, ‘‘Heidegger and the Nazis’’, The

New York Review of Books 10 (1988): 38�47. 9. It is worth noting, though, the problematic link-

ing of the horrors of the Holocaust to a general

philosophy of technology in the infamous remarks

by Heidegger, who mentions the Holocaust only

twice, in two lectures both held on December 1,

1949: firstly in a comparison with the industrializa-

tion of agriculture, mentioning the ‘‘manufacturing

of corpses in gas chambers’’; and secondly in a

comparison with Chinese hunger victims, describ-

ing the victims as ‘‘mere quanta, items in an in-

ventory in the business of manufacturing corpses’’

(ibid., 41�42). See also Julian Young, Heidegger, Philosophy, Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1997), 171�213. 10. And in 1972, Apollo 17 produced the first full-Earth

image, widely known as ‘‘the Blue Marble.’’

11. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World,

or Globalization (Albany: State University of

New York Press, 2007), 47.

12. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Imperative to Re-

Imagine the Planet’’, in An Aesthetic Education in

the Era of Globalization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2012), 338.

13. Mitchell, ‘‘World Pictures’’, 56.

14. See Streetviewfun, http://www.streetviewfun.com/

2008/i-said-coolant-not-koolaid/ (accessed October

19, 2013) and http://www.streetviewfun.com/2009/

google-streetview-kills-bambi/ (accessed October

19, 2013).

15. Alejandro González Iñárritu, ‘‘Hollywood Must

Portray Point of View of Others’’ (interview), New

Perspectives Quarterly 2 (2007): 7�9. 16. In the vein of Alberto Moreiras’ reading of globa-

lization as, citing Althusser, the way that ‘‘‘a foreign

consciousness’ developed ‘as a veneer on a real

condition’.’’ Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of

Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural

Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2001), 52.

17. See e.g. Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the

Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (London:

BFI, 2004), 11�14. 18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 74.

19. In contrast to the image of Earth, the lunar land-

scape has been explored since Galileo’s invention of

the telescope more than 300 years ago, and it was

M.A. Baggesgaard

8 (page number not for citation purpose)

well known as a landscape of destitution long before

the first Westerns were made. David L. Linton,

‘‘Lunar Landscapes’’, Geographical Journal 136, no.

3 (1970): 344�64. 20. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘‘Sign and Trace’’, in

An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 493.

21. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II, The Time Image

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,

1997), 234�5.

22. And interesting counterpoint would be a study of

the way in which the jungle acts as a reservoir of

opposition to globalization in films by e.g. Apichat-

pong Weerasathekul or Werner Herzog.

23. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art’’,

in Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York:

Harper Collins, 1993), 172.

Picturing the world

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