Digital Culture & AudioVisual Challenges

The present paper investigates the early period of European postmodernism in cinema through the work of some of its most emblematic filmmakers, in order to identify those elements which, first appearing at that time, constituted the point of departure for the contemporary animistic gaze in twenty-first-century cinema. It is proposed that this gaze emerged as a result of postmodernism’s broader challenge to the dominant grand schemes and narratives, at the core of which lay pervasive anthropocentrism. Through this challenge, in cinematic production between 1960 and 1980, and within the framework of a destabilized narrative model, the environment, matter, and landscape ceased to function as a passive backdrop and acquired will, agency, and psychological intensity. A comparative and phenomenological analysis of films by emblematic creators such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Werner Herzog will demonstrate a decisive ontological shift from anthropocentric modernism toward a worldview in which space, its architecture, objects, and nature begin to lose their passive role and instead function as active “characters.” The paper argues that this current offers an early reading and mapping of the Anthropocene and constitutes the first—if not consciously articulated, then at least subconscious—foundation of today’s “neo-animism” and the eco-critical aesthetics of the twenty-first century.