Natural is not in it: Irony, Environment and Genre in Spoor (2017)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Agnieszka Holland’s animal rights horror-thriller Spoor (2017) can be read as a revenge tale wherein women, non-hegemonic men and animals join forces against the hunters and, implicitly, against what they represent: the conservative worldview of the current nationalist government in Poland. Spoor offers a feminist, queer and ecological response to these values and, in the process, expands our comprehension of how ecocinema might look or feel. While narratively human-centred, the film uses several strategies to foster an aesthetic attunement to non-human beings and non-anthropocentric politics. However, Spoor also transcends ecocinema by putting itself in quotation marks. In its self-reflexive use of extreme genericity, Spoor exemplifies Nicole Seymour’s observation that politically engaged cinema can sometimes fail to follow the available scripts for ‘appropriate’ environmental feeling. This paper argues that, by merging tenderness and despair with more distanced modes, including irony, humour and metageneric playfulness, Spoor departs from serious approaches prevalent in environmental filmmaking, questioning the authenticity and proximity central to the very concept of ecology. Spoor’s aesthetic and affective complexity rests on blending fakery and feeling, which problematises existing ways of understanding how eco-films engage us.