Filmare la terra, filmare il cielo, filmare la storia naturale

Abstract

41.4376 ° N 112.6685 ° W. Since 1973, these geographical coordinates coincide with a well-known work of Land Art, Spiral Jetty by Robert Smithson. The eponymous film traces the power of the place, the natural history of the site, the human history of geology. This film, while telling and documenting the work, in fact gives it life. However, the film is presented as a theoretical gesture of a more complex theory of film and media that Smithson produces in his writings. Before the natural history, the artwork, as a film, is presented both as a medium and an apparatus of reading and production of meaning: environment – elemental medium – and cinema – human medium – bring together the public memory of an entropy, the relationship between anthropology and, as Claude Lévi-Strauss put it, entropologie.