Unveiling the anthropo(s)cene: Burning Seas, cinema of mourning and the globalisation of apocalypse

Abstract

Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen’s 1995 film Yugant offers a surprisingly prescient reading of what is now understood as signs of the arrival of the Anthropocene. One of the earliest films from the Global South to have invoked the marauding ecological effects of globalisation, Yugant resists easy categorisation as feminist, national or leftist cinema. Primarily a sea narrative in complex, understated ways, the film is about an urbane and estranged couple despondently attempting and failing reconciliation while on vacation on an Indian east coast beach. The film reads their climactic and catastrophic dénouement as symptomatic of the violence against the planet and the sea as both a contrarian participant and spectacular casualty of it. Interrogating the film from the distance of 20 years, the chapter also foregrounds how the film manages to raise a range of questions that humanity can bring to the climate change debate.