An Anthropocene Viewing Condition

Abstract

This essay explores what I call an Anthropocene viewing condition, a contemporary spectator position in which images of nature, particularly moving images of natures past, resonate with present and future environmental loss. Analyzing natural disaster melodramas such as The Trail of'98 (1928) and Deluge (1933) alongside popular science films about glaciers from the 1920s, I explore endangerment as both an explicit and latent structure of feeling in the Anthropocene.