MAR 9: Christine Marran on ‘Johnny Depp Goes to Serbia: Temporality and Landscape in Films about Environmental Toxins’ through Japanese film

Christine Marran addresses how Noriaki Tsuchimoto’s film Minamata Diaries (2004) and Levitas’ film Minamata (2020) tell the story of the poisoning of an inland sea and its fisherfolk by toxic methyl-mercury. Both films juxtapose still and moving images to depict the tragic damage visited on this place and its denizens by this disease, now called Minamata disease. Yet only one provides us with an ecocritical temporality that visually attends to the damaged environment as subject. Marran shows the relevance of making reclamation land the primary cinematic landscape in Tsuchimoto’s film and how this approach to landscape stages a visual allegoresis of living on a damaged planet.