A video essay attempting to explain the themes of the 2017 film, First Reformed. As written and directed by Paul Schrader.
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The notion of the Anthropocene, while relatively recent, has made a sizeable impact on the way many are considering the world, and how to represent it. One can only imagine how horrific it is to live through an ecological disaster, let alone be bombarded by images and sounds of it every day through news feeds and television sets. In First Reformed (2017), the main character, played by Ethan Hawk, acts as a stark representation of the contemporary individual, plagued with the loss of any hope for the future. A future that cannot be imagined without the conditions laid out by the present continued follies of capitalism and political regression. Indeed it is with this constant bombardment of image after image, whether it be the burning wildfires of Australia or the Amazon, the death of the Great Barrier Reef, or the multiple often underreported oil and chemical spills throughout North America- that this dangerously precarious state of this soon-to-be inhabitable planet is beginning to become unignorable. First Reformed allows viewers to see this phenomenon through an initially unassuming place, a relatively small middle American suburb, and through the eyes of Ernst Toller, a Protestant priest dealing with his own history of loss, and, as we find out in the film, stomach cancer. Through a close reading of First Reformed, as well as in reference to Isabell Lorey’s State of Insecurity, I plan to highlight the ways in which the film aims to instill a politics of precariousness and hopelessness in order to explore the ideas of radical action. As well, the film also aims to show how potentially problematic the wrong kind of radical action can be, as well as where one can begin to find a new belief in the self, in what appears to be a nihilistic age bent on self-destruction.
2 май 2024
