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Slow Ecocinema, the Forest and the Eerie in

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“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 27

Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and

the Eerie in Experimental Film
and VR (360-degree) Nature Videos
Kornelia Boczkowska

Due to their remarkable ability to retrain perception and create

an evocative “illusion of preserving nature,” avant-garde film and
VR nature videos often draw on slow and ecocinema aesthetics to
offer an alternative way of engaging with a technologically medi-
ated cinematic representation of the natural world (MacDonald,
“Towards an Ecocinema” 108-109). Unsurprisingly, slow and ecocin-
ema’s rendering of uninterrupted spatio-temporality is increasingly
adopted not only by experimental filmmakers, including James
Benning, Peter Hutton, Sharon Lockhart, Bill Viola, and others, but
also in online wildlife and nature videos, as evident in their recent
proliferation on the contemporary avant-garde scene and on various
video sparing websites. Indeed, both avant-garde film and nature
videos foreground the visual nature of the film and video medium,
address the viewer’s cognitive skills, and offer a lesson or adventure
in perception, simultaneously posing questions about new ways
of seeing that evoke “expanded consciousness” (Youngblood 72)
and explore “the camera’s ability to emulate and enhance human
visual perception” (Curtis 12).1 In so doing, experimental film and

This work is funded by the Terra Foundation Research Travel Grant to the United
States (0614-4-3b), ESSE Bursary for 2018 and the National Science Centre, Poland,
under the project “Lost highways, forgotten travels: The road movie in the post-war
American avant-garde and experimental film through the lens of women and men
filmmakers” (grant no. UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/01553).
1
For examples, see, respectively, Wees; Sitney, The Avant-Garde Film xxxiv; Sharits,
“Hearing: Seeing” 69 and “Cinema as Cognition” 65; Taberham 5; Snow in Sitney,
Visionary Film 356; and Brakhage in McPherson 11.

27
28 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

new media build on ecocriticism and slow ecocinema to enhance

one’s aesthetic appreciation of nature and consequently represent
environmental processes that are outside human perception in the
sense that they are simply too slow to be experienced by the human
body’s visual apparatus. Despite the growing popularity of ecocriti-
cism in avant-garde film studies, however, most publications in the
field still downplay numerous links between experimental film
practice, slow ecocinema, and online nature videos. This remains
in a striking contrast to the increasing potential of slow ecomedia to
offer viewers an alternative model of how to reflect on and interact
with the natural environment and environmentalism-related issues
on screen. To fill this gap, this paper puts four stylistically distinct
works, ranging from selective, self-aware 16mm and digital experi-
ments of individual artists to environmental 360-degree videos, in
the context of slow ecocinema and discusses the ways they engage
with an environmentally conscious discourse through embodying
a sense of the eerie. Particularly, even though they resist adopting
an activist imperative, Emily Richardson’s Aspect (2004), James
Benning’s Nightfall (2012), and two VR nature films, Walking in the
Woods (2016) and the 360-degree video, Relaxing Walk in the Forest
(2017), evoke the eerie in their meditative rendering of the forest
land- and soundscape, seen as one of the key sites of environmental
humanities (Gómez-Barris 101; Morrison 260; Ramanathan 15),
and consequently fit in with the broader trend of slow ecocinema.
While all works encourage the practice of perceptual retraining,
Nightfall and Aspect provide a psychically charged and emotive ex-
perience of landscape, and the nature videos offer a more complex
form of an ecologically-oriented gaze through voyeurism as well as
the conflict between the virtual and the real.

Slow Cinema, Ecocinema, and the Avant-garde

In their introduction to the first collection of essays on slow
cinema, de Luca and Jorge point out that “the sheer pervasive-
ness of the term, together with its wider sociocultural resonance
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 29

and usage, demand that it be examined seriously in its discursive

formations and conceptual ramifications, rather than simply
dismissed” (4). Today seen as a creative evolution of Schrader’s
transcendental style, the term slow cinema was first coined by
Romney to define a trend within art cinema that surfaced as a
distinctive genre of filmmaking during the 2000s. Born out of
Linssen’s Slow Criticism Project, the slow cinema debate has
flourished since and has been pursued not only by scholars,
most recently by Çağlayan, but also by cinephile bloggers (Tuttle;
Shaviro) and New York Times journalists (Kois; Dargis and Scott).
Although the present-day criticism typically raises such issues
as slow cinema’s political and aesthetic agenda (Schoonover),
cinematic slowness (Lim; Jaffe), historical poetics (Çağlayan) or
influence on multimedia artistic practice (Koepnick, On Slow-
ness, The Long Take), there is still no consensus on whether it
should be defined as an official movement, a production trend,
a historical mode of narration, or, finally, a one-off cycle or a
long-lasting tradition. While Romney and Quandt emphasize
slowness as slow cinema’s most crucial descriptive factor, which,
akin to the slow movement, deliberately opposes the majority of
mainstream, fast-paced, and commercial cinema productions,
Quandt enumerates its specific features, including
adagio rhythms and oblique narrative; a tone of quietude and reticence
[…] attenuated takes, long tracking or panning shots, often of depopulated
landscapes; prolonged hand-held follow shots of solo people walking; slow
dollies to a window or open door framing nature [or] a materialist sound
design. (76-77)

Meanwhile, Matthew Flanagan’s PhD dissertation, the first

manuscript-length study of slow cinema, reframes the trend in a
much broader cultural context by encompassing various works
of endurance art and experimental film. Flanagan argues that
the label slow cinema has “become commonly accepted as a wide
signifier of a certain mode of durational art and experimental
film” that possesses the following characteristics:
30 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

an emphasis upon extended duration (in both formal and thematic aspects);
an audio-visual depiction of stillness and everydayness; the employment of
the long take as a structural device; a slow or undramatic form of narration
(if narrative is present at all); and a predominantly realist (or hyperrealist)
mode or intent. (“Slow Cinema” 4-5)

Therefore, although largely analyzed through the lens of some

common traits of slow cinema works of Rossellini, Bergman,
Antonioni, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Sokurov and other
notable filmmakers, the scope and framework of the genre has
been recently broadened to encompass the post-1960 avant-
garde, realistic documentary and, more recently, mainstream
films, such as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) (Molloy). De Luca
purports that a tendency toward realism in contemporary art
cinema “is steeped in the hyperbolic application of the long take,
which promotes a contemplative viewing experience anchored
in materiality and duration” and allows spectators to “adopt the
point of view of the camera and protractedly study images as they
appear on the screen in their unexplained literalness” (9, 24).
In contrast to slow cinema, ecocinema constitutes a rather
flexible category that transcends traditional generic classifications
and follows no particular conventions but for a widely defined
preoccupation with environmental criticism, particularly con-
cerning the experience of cinematic time and environmental
change expressed with slow, moralist, or kitschy eco-aesthetics.
Ecocinema-oriented criticism, which has so far focused mainly on
narrative film, wildlife film, and environmental- or consciousness-
raising documentaries (Bouse; Ingram; Mitman), proposes that
art and experimental film clearly foreground slow viewing and an
environmentally sensitive gaze. For example, while MacDonald
defines ecocinema as a tradition of filmmaking that “provides an
evocation of the experience of being immersed in the natural
world” (“Towards an Ecocinema” 108), Willoquet-Maricondi
emphasizes its “consciousness-raising and activist intentions,”
hence distinguishing it from environmentalist films (“Shifting
Paradigms” 45). Indeed, motion pictures falling under the
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 31

ecocinema tradition work on one’s perception of nature and

of environmental issues through lyrical and contemplative or
overt activist styles, though some films may not necessarily be
bound to political ideologies and are indeed “far richer in con-
tradictions and more ethically, emotionally and intellectually
satisfying than much of what passes for eco-politics” (Cubitt
1). Also, the recent publications on the theory of ecocinema,
including Transnational Ecocinema, Ecology and Contemporary Nor-
dic Cinemas, Ecocinema in the City, or Italian Ecocinema Beyond the
Human, point to its ability to transgress the boundaries of Hol-
lywood, wildlife, independent, and avant-garde film, though, as
Ivakhiv notes paraphrasing MacDonald, “the real potentials for
cinematic expression of nature and of ecology lie precisely with
avant-garde, independent and experimental filmmaking” (14).

The Eerie Lurking in the Woods

Interestingly, although the examined projects rely on the Roman-
tic sublime propelled by slow ecocinema aesthetics, they differ
in the way they evoke the eerie, which plays a crucial role in the
construction of the forest landscape, through their reliance on
the city symphony (Aspect), structural film (Nightfall), and walk-
ing film conventions (Walking and Relaxing Walk). Building on
H.P. Lovecraft’s theory of the weird and Freud’s concept of the
uncanny, Fisher defines the eerie as preoccupied with surreal-
ism and involving an encounter with the strange based on “the
conjoining of two or more things which do not belong together”
(11). Similarly to the weird, the eerie clearly transcends or dis-
places Freud’s “unheimlich” through its preoccupation with
questions of agency and the outside, the latter of which “lies
beyond standard perception, cognition and experience” and
evokes both fascination and apprehension or even dread (6).
While the weird, constituted by “the presence of that which does
not belong,” often clings to enclosed spaces, however, a sense
of the eerie, composed by “a failure of absence or by a failure
32 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

of presence,” is grounded in serenity and disengagement from

mundane reality, hence becoming more evident in depictions
of sublime natural landscapes (Fisher 61). In an attempt to
elaborate on his definition, Fisher suggests that “the sensation of
the eerie occurs either when there is something present where
there should be nothing, or [...] there is nothing present when
there should be something” (61). Whereas the failure of absence
concerns the unknown or, more specifically, “a sense of alterity,
a feeling that the enigma might involve forms of knowledge,
subjectivity and sensation that lie beyond common experience,”
the failure of presence pertains to abandoned archaeological or
historic structures and the mystery of their origins (62). In other
words, what appears to be intrinsic to the eerie are various forms
of speculation and suspense regarding not only the very nature
of such a phenomenon, but also the existence of agency itself
and some fundamental questions that it raises. Similarly, Aspect,
Nightfall, Walking, and Relaxing Walk tend to trigger the eerie
feeling through the failure of absence grounded in a mysteri-
ous sensation generated by the surrounding woods, which also
points toward a new kind of eerie emerging out of the modes of
immersion provided by both 16 mm celluloid filmmaking and
digital video enhanced by VR technology. In this sense, the eerie
stems primarily from eco-realism and the artists’ ability to offer
“visual/auditory training in appreciating the experience of an
immersion within natural processes,” which sensitizes viewers
to the ongoing transformation of the forest landscape and en-
vironmental changes unfolding either in real or non-real time
(MacDonald, “The Ecocinema Experience” 19).
In her recent book, The Forest and the EcoGothic, Parker fore-
grounds the sublime and eerie qualities of the forest seen as a
binary space that is both “a remedial setting of wonder and en-
chantment (…) [and] a dangerous and terrifying wilderness,” “an
archetypical site of dread in the collective human imagination”
(1), and, finally, one of the classic landscapes of fear (Tuan 1).
Similarly, Hackett and Harrington note that scholars continually
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 33

“see the forest designated as a ‘threatening’ space, filled with hor-

rors of human or supernatural creation” and “a place of archaic
connection with primordial fears” (2). Rather than depicting
the forest as an ominous “site of trial, trepidation, and terror”
(Parker 2),2 Aspect, Nightfall, Walking, and Relaxing Walk connect
with the larger ecocritical theory, particularly with the notions of
the eco-sublime and eco-phobia. While the former term implies
imagining “new ways of feeling, alternative ways of thinking about
our contingent place within ‘nature’ and all forms of collective
empathy towards all manner of human and non-human others”
(Palmer 70; also see Hitt; Rozelle), the latter concept, largely
theorized in Estok’s recent book, Ecophobia Hypothesis, speaks of
“a heightened state of concern over the environment” (Shaffer
111) and “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural
world” (Estok, “Ecomedia” 132), which both stem from one’s
little control over the non-human environment (Levy 210). Un-
surprisingly, in all works, the eco-sublime and eco-phobia come
into play as the forest landscape emerges as both terrible and
overwhelming, consequently eliciting the feeling of awe and fear
in one’s confrontation with a vast, unpredictable, and potentially
dangerous power of nature. On the other hand, to some extent
conjuring the presence of terror in the woods, Aspect, Nightfall,
Walking, and Relaxing Walk move away from the eco-sublime
and eco-phobic experience to encompass the eerie properties
and symbolic ambivalence of a remote forest wilderness, which
remains both a pristine, mysterious idyll, where viewers can (re)
gain their lost connection to the natural environment, and an
ongoing source of threat, ambient dread, and the unknown.
Instead of exposing the mass subjugation of and indifference to
nature, posited by ecophobia and the constantly present danger
of ecological disaster, or presenting the woods as a repository for
malevolence and eco-sublime transcendence, the works display

2
The eco-Gothic is discussed at length in recent scholarship published in the 2019
inaugural issue of Gothic Nature (Parker and Poland; also see Alaimo),
34 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

conservationist and pastoral sensibilities of nature (Schneider

vii) and are more concerned with restoring one’s ability to view
the forest as “strange, monstrous, and enchanting” (Harrison
121) based on the idea that an unsettling absence rather than
a sinister presence underlies it.

A Tale of Two Forests: Nightfall and Aspect

While Nightfall’s digital format draws on some typical slow film’s
conventions, such as static framing, extended take, minimal
editing, and camera movement or diegetic sounds, the 16mm
Aspect seems to revitalize the city symphony tradition in its use
of a hypnotizing juxtaposition of images and music, kinaesthetic
visual modes, rhythmic editing, hyperkinetic camera choreogra-
phy, speeded up sequences, and time lapse photography (Ver-
rone 127). Despite their dependence on various stylistic traits,
both works pay an emphatic attention to the way the light plays
with the featured environment. Whereas Nightfall “presents a
deliberately unassuming composition recorded late enough in
the day to allow its titular phenomenon to occur within a di-
gestible timeframe” (Pattison), Aspect condenses the forest year
into a few minutes in an attempt to trace the movement of light,
color, and shadow travelling across its surface and abstracting
the real environment. Such compositions situate both films in
the broader context of slow and ecocinema and encourage the
practice of perceptual retraining “meant to model a resistance
to the determination of modern corporations to promote hys-
terical consumption of their products, a tendency that has con-
siderable environmental costs” (MacDonald “Panorama” 636).
While Nightfall depicts “the natural world within a cinematic
experience that models patience and mindfulness—qualities of
consciousness crucial for a deep appreciation of and an ongoing
commitment to the natural environment” (MacDonald, “The
Ecocinema Experience” 19), however, Aspect offers a more typi-
cal representation of the sublime and luminous landscape in its
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 35

evocation of the accelerated sublime. Therefore, despite differ-

ing in the narrative and visual composition, both films can be
characterized by the decentring of human action and narrative,
aesthetic and temporal estrangement, as well as attentiveness to
nature on-screen. Whereas Nightfall evokes the natural sublime
through encouraging a practice of simple looking to “medi-
ate [... a landscape] experience and […] highlight the subtle
changes that a given site undergoes” (Lam 210), Aspect celebrates
the accelerated sublime, which transforms the passive viewing
of nature into a technologically augmented, immersive, and
kinesthetic experience where viewers act as adventure tourists
accelerating through sublimity (Bell and Lyall 121). This effect
is also amplified by the score; whereas Nightfall relies merely on
the diegetic sound, In Aspect “fragments of unconscious forest
sounds, ants in their anthill, the wind across the forest floor,
the crack of a twig are reconfigured into an audio piece which
articulates the film (and the forest) in an illusive and ambigu-
ous way” (Richardson).

Nature Videos and the Walking Film

Nature videos, which are typically digitalized, authorless, ubiq-
uitous, and situated within the visual culture of conservation
movements (Lam 214), both offer an ecologically-oriented gaze
and evoke the eerie through voyeurism as well as the conflict
between the virtual and the real (Kamphof 261). In her analysis
of nature cam videos, Lam argues that, while they can be consid-
ered a form of slow-eco media as they fulfill viewers’ desire for a
more direct and palpable contact with the wilderness and remote
places, such venues exist within relatively flexible networks of
production and circulation and thus lack much aesthetic value
(210). Instead, VR nature videos build intensive time connec-
tions between the viewers and featured remote sites as well as
encourage both attentive viewing and place attachment to elicit
intimate feelings about and sensuous knowledge of a given lo-
36 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

cale. Similarly, Walking in the Woods (2016), a 20-minute nature

video posted on the 4K Relaxation Channel, presents a largely
de-dramatized view of the forest landscape, demands patient
viewing, and provides an almost tangible point of contact between
the virtual reality and the actual location through imitating the
real time connection. Similarly, Relaxing Walk in the Forest (2017),
a 17-minute, 360-degree video produced by Real Virtual Movies,
offers a highly immersive VR and first-person experience of the
titular walk seen as an affective space both through its dependence
on the phenomenology of conservational websites (Kamphof
259) and interactive and environmental storytelling, which es-
tablishes plot points and increases suspense (Haake and Müller
154). In contrast to nature videos based on the structural film’s
conventions, particularly the fixed shot, however, both Walking
and Relaxing Walk utilize the slow tracking shot to simulate the
act of walking, hence resorting to the use of the walking film’s
key stylistic trait.3
While “linked with urban modernity and the preponderance
of the flâneur and flâneuse in post-war cinema” (Gorfinkel 130),
walking and wayfaring have become a frequent narrative motif
and visual trope not only for modern art film and the avant-garde
moving image, but also for slow and ecocinema (Finnane 115;
Gorfinkel 130). Similarly to contemporary walking films, the
videos rely on the long take aesthetics to create the impression
of a constant unfolding, where “real world locations are filmed
by literally walking the camera or by some variation of tracking
shot through them” (Finnane 117). Finnane further posits that,
whereas “the video walk may involve the filming of an actual per-
son who ‘leads the way’ through the landscape or places [,]” in

3
Works that typically depict journeys on foot, referred to as walking films, also repre-
sentative of itinerant cinema, the balade-form (Deleuze 280), a cinema of l’errance
(Goldmann 11-16) or a cinema of walking (Flanagan, “Towards an Aesthetic of
Slow”), have emerged as an important mode of artistic and cinematic expression in
the pre- and post-digital era.
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 37

the “absence of such a figure in the image, the camera proceeds

to ‘walk’ through a place in place of such a figure” (117). Indeed,
in the absence of a wayfarer, pedestrians in the cinematic space
“compose their own, individual trajectories, which demonstrate
liberation from the spatial and temporal constraints of vehicular
mobility” (Verhoeff 53). Akin to mainstream and independent
feature films, which move away from “the amorphousness of an
earlier itinerant art cinema mode to a noticeably particular and
local specificity in the treatment of place” (Finnane 118), the use
of wayfaring, wandering, and walking in avant-garde films and
nature videos transforms space into place yet further eschews its
traditional narrativity and sense of time by means of extended
slow time sequences, minimalism of plot, downward gaze of the
characters, or decentering of the human to explore the motif
of walking. In contrast to art films produced between the 1960s
and 1980s and “constructed around an attenuation of narrative
plot and character and the replacement of plot by wandering
journeys in which figures appear in ambiguously defined loca-
tions” (Finnane 118), however, nature videos depict the walk as
a bodily experiencing of spaces and places that does not lead
to any particular outcome within the narrative. Therefore, they
can be also situated within the experimental tradition of slow
ecocinema as they offer a parallel viewing experience, which
should ideally elicit the sublime response from the viewer based
on awe, wonder, and appreciation.

Walking in VR and 360-degree Nature Videos

In this context, the serene first-person tracking shot not only
enables spectators actively to retrain their perception and pos-
sibly rediscover a mediated connection to nature, but also makes
them part of the larger slow movement. Compared to driving or
riding, walking constitutes the least dynamic and evocative means
of travel, yet it simultaneously remains the most privileged move-
ment and key cinematic motif that exposes its experimental form
38 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

and ecology or slow movement-oriented subtexts. Particularly,

due to its rhythmic and non-goal driven nature, the tracking
shot coordinates the surrounding space, simultaneously inten-
sifying and hindering vision, and foregrounds an unemphatic
and modulatory movement, integral to the idea of duration
rather than time passing. Jayamanne argues that the mise-en-
scene of walking lies in “a tension between perspectival and
non-perspectival space,” which is “played out in the interest of
disturbing the distinction between background and foreground”
and consequently changes one’s quality of focus (57). Similarly,
in Walking, viewers’ centralized, anthropocentric, and targeted
perception gradually evolves into a more internalized and holis-
tic perspective, which activates synesthetic modes of vision and
thought, ultimately enabling them to experience an extended
contact with nature and recognize it as a temporal condition.
Akin to highly perceptive riding and driving sequences, Walk-
ing relies on rhythmic editing; it does not give rise to a strong
sense of kinaesthetics, however, but subtle sensory experiences
generated by motion, which inculcate an almost tactile encoun-
ter with the mise-en-scène. In this context, the forest landscape
forms both an integrated and fragmented vision, and it is the
kinematic nature of walking that frames it in cinematic terms.
Like driving, walking creates a hypnotic sensation of movement,
but it counters the disorientating effect by means of continu-
ity rather than creative montage and sensitizes the viewer to
perceive environmental change as micro-movements and an
ongoing source of contemplation. Similarly, Relaxing Walk relies
on walking as the primary mode of representation, yet due to its
interactive, 360-degree video format, it can no longer use cuts
or establish pre-defining shots and image composition so that
there are almost no limits on the degree of viewers’ interaction
with the surrounding environment except that the story is told
from a single and unchangeable setting size (Haake and Mül-
ler 155). Also, the viewing perspective is restricted by the fixed
camera position unless spectators decide to move around and
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 39

alter the viewing direction themselves with the click of a mouse.

Drawing on the 360-degree and omnidirectional camera’s ability
to record simultaneously the view in every direction and diegetic
sounds, Relaxing Walk presents a linear experience of moving
through the forest landscape and, akin to contemporary walk-
ing films, relies on the long take aesthetics and a continuous
tracking shot to create the impression of a constant unfolding.

The Failure of Absence:

The Eerie in Nightfall and Walking in the Woods
Nightfall’s unsettling quality stems from the long, static, tripod-
mounted digital camera shot, which reveals solely a partial
view of the west Sierra Nevada woods and reflects Benning’s
philosophical stance of looking and listening based on the idea
that landscape is a function of time and duration. Intended
by the artist to serve as a “portrait of solitude” (Benning), the
film provides the audience with an information-rich image of
the elusive time and wilderness being gradually shrouded in
darkness, which plays with their feelings, ranging from extreme
focus and attention, wandering and restlessness to enchantment,
tranquility, and sleepiness. The imagery’s affective power lies in
its eerie partiality epitomized by a fragmentary representation
of the forest, which is never revealed in its entirety, as well as
the diegetic soundscape whose origins mostly remain unknown,
particularly after dark. Also, such a fractured depiction of the
location fosters an uncanny sense of nostalgia in its ability to
encourage a desire to recreate wholeness and a self-conscious
awareness of passing time.
A similar effect is achieved in Walking where the long tracking
shot, despite clearly conveying a sense of exploration, prevents
the audience from getting the complete view of the surround-
ings, simultaneously allowing them literally to walk with and im-
merse into the narrative. Since the camera moves smoothly and
consistently through space horizontal to the ground in a forward
40 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

direction, it tends to merge the external space and interiority,

the latter of which is represented by a character’s identity and
psychological state, here related to the heightened conscious-
ness and personal growth. In other words, a single dolly shot
and longitudinal camera movement act as spatial and temporal
metaphors, which both foreground walking as a natural psychi-
cal state and simplify its dynamics and emotional complexity.
The camera works to create the feeling of cinematic immersion,
which on the one hand gives spectators both an observational
and participatory role, but on the other restricts their perspective
to frontal views only, making them more aware of the direction
rather than of the surrounding space. Therefore, although the
shot provides some elements of orientation and balance, which
reinforce viewers’ perceptual engagement with the imagery and
their non-judgmental observation, a largely diminished spatial
awareness, enhanced by purely diegetic sounds, gives rise to the
eerie feeling. It seems, then, that it is the video’s long-tracking
and single-shot structure that destabilizes the spectator’s spatial
relationship to the narrative and prevents their experience of
interiority. On the other hand, a sense disassociation, evident in
the fact that the audience is both blinded to the space located
outside of the camera’s range and uncertain of the direction
in which they are walking, is always paired with an emphatic
moment of association with nature.

The Presence That Does Not Belong:

The Eerie in Relaxing Walk in the Forest
Contrary to Walking, Relaxing Walk offers its users a full and om-
nidirectional panoramic field of view, essentially putting them
in the traveler’s shoes. While based on the diegetic attentional
cues, including gazes, motion, sound, context, and perspective,
contrast, or lighting, the video demands more interaction and
involvement on part of the audience, which increases one’s
control and feeling of presence (Gödde et al. 187). Although
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 41

the primary story elements are located up front and in reference

to viewers’ seating alignment or initial viewing direction (IVD),
action is positioned all over the scene to exploit the entire poten-
tial of the 360-degree space and to locate one’s point of interest
(POI) in various places. As walking naturally places the direction
of movement in the front, the preferred viewing direction stays
mainly in the front 180 degrees in relation to the IVD, yet spec-
tators can still view and interact with secondary story elements
through engaging in the VR 360-degree spatial storytelling.
The narrative, based on the long tracking shot and enhanced
by environmental storytelling, unfolds linearly in the space and
effectively aligns temporal and spatial story density with each
other, making viewers simultaneously look to the front of the
scene and capture it as a whole. In this way, the eerie sensation
emerges primarily from one’s full immersion in and perceived
feeling of the almost tangible presence of the surrounding for-
est. Although the video does not incorporate cuts, editing, or
dolly-shots, it still follows the classic cinematographic travelogue
structure and creates an increasing tension of the story devoid of
a dramatic climax, the latter of which is common for interactive
VR fiction films or video games (Reyes 295).
In contrast to Walking, Relaxing Walk triggers the eerie not
only through its interactive format, which enables a multisensory
integration in the virtual environment and shapes the flow of the
narrative, but also through its unique ability to create a strong
and subjective illusion of presence (Bracken and Skalski; Lom-
bard and Ditton), typically provided by immersive technologies.
Compared to regular 2D environmental videos, Relaxing Walk
leads to increased audience and cognitive engagement, which
consequently locates the eerie within the induced feeling of physi-
cal presence in the woods. While higher levels of user presence
reinforce the realism and authenticity of the viewing experience
and induce full immersion and largely positive emotions like
enjoyment, pleasure, and contemplation (Suh et al. 427), they
also facilitate a sensory conflict between virtual motion and the
42 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

real-world sense of physical motion. In this way, the eerie feeling

arises from viewers’ inability to affect the visual stimulus and a
largely fractured reception of the walking environment, which
endangers a sense of emotional connection between audience
and image and consequently distorts one’s sense of presence
characterized by “attention to continuities, connectedness and
coherence of the stimulus flow” (Singer and Witmer 226).

The Living Portrait in Transition: The Eerie in Aspect

The eerie in Aspect technically relies on a highly embodied view-
ing experience based on time-lapse, long exposures on single
film frames, fixed shots, dynamic close-ups, and an evocative
score composed by Benedict Drew, which amplifies the forest’s
natural sounds. In the larger context, the eerie lies in the liv-
ing portrait of the site in transition embodied in the captured
changes of light and subtle movements, which occur only when
subjected to fast motion. Again, it seems that the images’ eerie
potential derives from their fragmentation, which forms the basis
for an altered perspective of landscape replete with an emotive
sense of transcendence. Except for a few panning shots, which
to some extent reveal the range of the Kings Wood, the location
is depicted in a largely disintegrated way, mostly due to rapid
editing and fast cutting. As the subtle changes of light, color,
movement, and activity are clearly inscribed in the place and
matter and the immaterial are in constant counteraction, the
eerie takes the form of the presence, which is not easily detected
by the human senses in normal conditions. Particularly, the eerie
sensation is born out of the forest’s rhythmic, kaleidoscopic,
disorientating, and hypnotic representation, specifically from
its interaction with the light—which not only delineates nature
but also functions as an autonomous and visible entity—as well
as from some accompanying audio-visual effects, such as grow-
ing shadows, shimmering barks, trembling branches, shaking
or shivering trees, or flickering sunlight.
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 43

From 16mm to 360-degree in Slow Ecocinema

As seen, Aspect, Nightfall, Walking, and Relaxing Walk seek inspira-
tion from the tradition of slow ecocinema with various stylistic
means, including the city symphony, structural, and walking
film conventions. Similarly to avant-garde film, some nature
videos have recently evolved to incorporate slow experimental
eco-aesthetics evident in their use of a more varied experimental
film formula in the sense that they “alight upon singular events
(in isolation, series or superimposition) rather than narratives,
and [their] explicit function is to interrogate both the filmic
apparatus and the spectator’s perception of those events” (Fla-
nagan, “Slow Cinema” 42). Walking and Relaxing Walk take the
forest as its subject matter not only to provide an alternative
breathing space in an oversaturated media landscape, but also
to experiment with the narrative structure and visual composi-
tion through its embrace of an artisanal and personal mode of
filmmaking (Smith 395), negation of mainstream culture and
commercial media (Skoller xxiii; Verrone 9), or short and non-
narrative format and tentativeness (O’Pray 5). All four projects
attempt to communicate largely imperceptible timescales along
which the environmental processes occur; while Aspect and Night-
fall clearly work within avant-garde and experimental modes
of filmmaking, however, Walking and Relaxing Walk constitute
a more accessible and popular form of slow eco-media with
the aim of reaching a wider audience. Also, despite sharing an
analogous visual strategy, they clearly differ in their evocation of
slow ecocinema’s sensibility, which is manifested in their reliance
on either slowness, duration, anti-narrative and documentary,
and sensory realism or the accelerated sublime aesthetics, the
latter of which exposes natural sublime through stylistic excess.
Whereas the structural film’s fixed frame and extended duration
convey a largely unmediated or uninterrupted representation
of reality, the walking film’s long tracking shot and continuity
editing facilitate an almost sensory or somatic relationship be-
44 PLL Kornelia Boczkowska

tween audience and image. Similarly, stylistic excess and haptic

visuality of the accelerated sublime, expressed with virtuosic
camera choreography, defamiliarizing angles and cuts, and other
transformative special effects, including the use of soundtrack,
encourage embodied spectatorship and create the impression
of a holistic unity with nature.
Aspect, Nightfall, Walking, and Relaxing Walk open up a space,
in which viewers dwell on the image by reframing and mediating
their experience of and relationship to the forest. In doing so,
they challenge perception and ways of seeing not only through
imitating the real time connection between audience and image
or presenting environmental changes in fast motion, but also
through evoking the eerie. While the latter sensation emerges
from a failed presence and partly incomplete depiction of the
woods, which highlights the evasiveness of time and confounds
viewers’ spatial awareness, it also brings about a different kind
of enigma. Namely, although the eerie takes the form of an
unexposed or partially exposed presence, it is simultaneously
embedded in a series of environmental changes not immediately
observable to the human eye as they are either too slow to be
detected or too fast to be mediated. Due to its combination of
various genres and filmmaking styles, the videos explore new
aesthetic possibilities by offering a psychically charged and
emotive experience of landscape and constitute a multimedia
and interdisciplinary spectacle, which forms a one-of-a-kind al-
ternative of what MacDonald refers to as avant-doc film practice
(Avant-doc). In this sense, Aspect, Nightfall, Walking, and Relaxing
Walk, even though they generally resist categorization and “eco-
media” labels, have the potential to illustrate the broader slow
and ecocinema tradition as they sustain viewers’ attention and
commitment to the surrounding environment and encourage
them to bond with specific sites, rendering them an inseparable
part of the biotic community.
“Slow Ecocinema, the Forest, and the Eerie” PLL 45

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