On Ruins, Debris, and Ghosts

The Temporality of Disaster in the Film “Aral, Fishing in the Invisible Sea”

Author

Kseniia Bespalova

Abstract

In this article, I will investigate the temporality of disaster by focusing on environmental degradation as represented in the film Aral, Fishing in the Invisible Sea (Saodat Ismailova and Carlos Casas, 2004, Uzbekistan). The film investigates the consequences of the Aral Sea disappearing due to a failed Soviet irrigation project by following the lives of the three generations of Uzbek fishermen whose economic survival is under threat. Drawing on the idea that the empire is a “haunting structure” (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2013), the article considers the cinematic image of the Aral Sea disaster as a “theoretical object” (Bal 2015: 133) that allows investigation of the damaged relationship between local dwellers and the surrounding material environment. Drawing on Derrida's idea of “hauntology” (Derrida 2006), the article unveils the complex assemblage of ghosts and stories that shape the Aral Sea landscape, impacted simultaneously by past colonial ambitions of altering nature, the failed imaginations of the socialist industrial future, and contemporary global capitalism. Crucially, the figure of the Aral Sea disaster exposes the peculiar role of socialist modernity within the general project of western modernity. Soviet ideology pushed the Western idea of progress to the limits, creating a socialist subject obsessed with the future. Therefore, a post-socialist subject moves "against the flow of time" and "enters the present [the neoliberal modernity] from the future" (Groys 2018: 201). As a result, the dried-up sea, which is also a border between two states (Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan), becomes an image of the uncertain life between the past and future. Ultimately, I will demonstrate how the ambiguous temporality of the disaster transforms a cinematic landscape into the battlefield between the temporal layers, opening up the possibility of reinventing attachments to the land that has been damaged.

Keywords

imperial ghosts, Aral Sea disaster, environmental degradation, Soviet colonialism, post-socialist temporality, imperial formation, hauntology, ecocriticism.

Introduction

"To think with ruins of empire is to emphasize less the artefacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present" (Stoler 2008: 196).

Today, the Aral Sea disaster, news of which was silenced during Soviet times, is becoming a haunting media spectacle that offers a glimpse into what the future of the planet could hold. Over the course of the last six decades, its body of water has shrunk by more than 90% of its original size since the early 1960s, transforming the Aral from the fourth-largest lake in the world to a barren wasteland (Peterson 2019). While the “slow violence” of environmental change in other parts of the world poses representational challenges for cinema and other visual mediums (Nixon 2011), the Aral Sea disaster captivates with its impossible-to-ignore scale and speed. The stunning absence of the sea (Fig. 1), which now stretches over large distances of Central Asia, is the focal point of a number of films and artworks, including Saodat Ismailova and Carlos Casas' Aral, Fishing in the Invisible Sea¹ (2004, Uzbekistan), Almagul Menlibayeva's Transoxiana Dreams (2011, Kazakhstan), Katerina Suvorova's Zavtra more / Sea Tomorrow (2016, Kazakhstan, Germany), Olga Shurygina's Mirazh / Mirage (2020, Uzbekistan), and Anton Ginzburg's Walking the Sea (2013, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, United States), among many others. While a lot of works concerning the spectacle of the desiccated sea convey feelings of fascination and terror, Saodat Ismailova and Carlos Casas' film eschews the aestheticisation of disaster. This allows the film to lay bare the deeper structures of power and violence affecting the Karakalpak village presented in the film and, more broadly, the regions of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. In a talk given during focumenta fifteen (documenta fifteen 2022), Saodat Ismailova acknowledges that the film does not speak directly about ecology, nor does it condemn Soviet politics and irrigation experiments. Rather, the film addresses what is invisible and is no longer here.

Created by Uzbek artist Saodat Ismailova and Spanish filmmaker Carlos Casas, The Invisible Sea presents an ambiguous position: it simultaneously offers both the gaze of the outsider and that of the local. Despite living in Europe, Saodat Ismailova is embedded in the art world of her native Uzbekistan and Central Asia. Specifically, her films and installations investigate ancestral knowledge and traditions in relation to the natural environments that were damaged by Russian and Soviet colonial projects. Meanwhile, Carlos Casas’s works address diverse planetary ecologies. Apart from investigating the desiccated Aral Sea, he explored other extreme natural environments such as Patagonia and Siberia. The Invisible Sea ties together the motives found in the works of both filmmakers, weaving the local into the planetary and vice versa. Here, the sea becomes a “theoretical object” (Bal 2015: 133) that condenses multiple local and planetary histories.

Mckenzie Wark suggests several invisible relational threads that the image of the desiccated sea creates. In the introduction to Molecular Red (2015), she refers to the image of the Aralkum Desert² as a "Martian landscape" that is symptomatic of the contemporary era. According to her conceptualisation, the captivating power of the Aral Sea images emerges from the fact that the sea epitomises not only the failure of the Soviet Union but also the anticipated failure of the American empire. In this sense, the image transcends Karakalpak local histories pointing towards global systems of dominance and the exploitation of nature. The shipwreck serves as a symbol of the ruin of the contemporary era, positioned between the colonial past and the future of the environmental catastrophe that binds everyone. Wark compares it to the statue of Lenin, which previously symbolised a movement toward the socialist future. Nevertheless, the shipwreck symbolises the opposite – the defeat of the desire to tame nature: "[...] The ship itself is a wreck that recalls a power of a different kind: the capricious stubbornness of the natural world” (Wark 2015). This stubbornness entails a change of positions: “The human is no longer that figure in the foreground” (Wark 2015). As a result, the Aralkum is a powerful image of the agency that nature restores to itself, necessitating the need to reposition the human within the larger ecological system.

Wark’s insight reveals that the image of the Aral Sea illuminates the convergence of (post-)Soviet temporality, the temporality of the globalised world order, and the more-than-human time of the Earth. The cinematic landscape haunted by the disaster acts as a spatial assemblage where various histories and temporalities manifest, including the ghosts of the imperial and colonial past and of socialist and liberal modernities. In this article, I propose that by working through the invisibility and absence, Ismailova and Casas' film captures the persistent nuances of the colonial power relationships manifesting in the material ‘ghosts’ of the former imperial projects. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's idea of hauntology (2006) and Ann Laura Stoler's conceptualisation of imperial formations (2008), I will demonstrate how the film negotiates the past and the remaining colonial influences by stressing the liminality, the in-between temporal status, of its ghosts presented as disasters (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2013). Proposing that the ghostly presence of environmental ruination allows addressing the violent histories of the place, I will define the notion of the ghost in relation to the Aral Sea, describe the types of imperial ghosts that haunt the cinematic image, and elaborate on the specificity of the temporality introduced by the image of the environmental disaster.

Imperial Hauntology

The Aral Sea started to disappear in the 1960s, after a century of the "irrigation age", driven by a belief that science and technology can put water to work for the human benefit, that diverted rivers and man-made canals will turn steppe and desert into flourishing and fertile land (Peterson 2019: 14). Water from Amu Darya and Syr Darya, the two main rivers feeding the sea, was diverted away from the sea and directed towards reservoirs and agricultural fields. Instead of a paradise, a "toxic sandscape" (Peterson 2019: 3) of a salt desert appeared (Fig. 2). Moreover, waste from biological, biochemical, and nuclear tests, that were carried out on the islands of the sea, exacerbated the ecological disaster, harming even further the ecosystem and all living beings inhabiting the area. Although the desiccation is stunningly visible, the toxicity of the place is hidden from view. Indeed, what interests The Invisible Sea is this toxic milieu and the embeddedness of human lives in it. This toxicity is both the material contamination of the space and the carrier of the traces of past violence – it becomes the ghost of Soviet politics.

The ghostly toxicity manifests itself in small details comprising the filmic space and the quotidian reality of the locals. The Invisible Sea observes the daily life of a fisherman family that refuses to leave the unlivable place. The family consists of three generations – each of them carries different recollections of the sea, while the youngest child doesn’t even believe that it ever existed. By focusing on micro-events in their lives, the film denounces the recognisable symbols of the disaster in order to look beyond them and untangle the colonial relationships that these symbols obscure. In so doing, the film transmutes the image of the disaster from the spectacle into the nuances of the quotidian routine. The family’s daily life involves fishing for the scarce number of remaining fish and collecting scrap metal – the material remains of the shipping industry and navy. As a consequence, the central theme of the film revolves around the reciprocal interactions and a feedback loop between human actors and the ravaged milieu. The film’s setting is defined in the opening long shot depicting the devastated dry land that once used to be the bottom of the sea. Against this damaged backdrop, an old Soviet car – a ruin of the machine – enters the frame, accompanied by the small human figures collecting metal and other vestiges of the industrial past (Fig. 3). Then, the close-up shows the locals as they cut, manipulate, and transport metal. To survive, the fishermen manage to catch a few fish a day, although most of the fish species have disappeared due to increased salinity levels in the remaining body of water. The reality of the Aral is composed of living and non-living leftovers, pollution, metal scraps, and other industrial and military debris that invade the natural landscape, transforming it into a toxic post-industrial dystopia. The human-nature interactions become a perpetual confrontation with waste scattered across the landscape.

In The Invisible Sea, the environment itself represents a ruin dispersed over the larger area and the longer durée. It means that here, the ruin cannot be pinpointed as a single object; rather, the space itself is contaminated with the processes of ruination. For the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler, this kind of damaged landscape would constitute a site that reveals the longevity of the imperial structures of dominance, even if an empire has already ceased to exist legally (Stoler 2008). To conceptualise this invisible power, Stoler refers to the term "imperial formation" (2008: 194), which is different from that of empire: the latter is a legal structure, while the former indicates processual phenomena that preserve intangible forces of the persistent forms of domination. The power of imperial formations is defined through the "gradated forms of sovereignty and what has long marked the technologies of imperial rule – sliding and contested scales of differential rights" (Stoler 2008: 193). Such deep imperial forces continue to exist in camouflage, hidden in the ruins and debris, material and immaterial. Stoler’s theory suggests that the actual disengagement from colonial fabrics requires much more time than the formal dismantling of the imperial regimes. Consequently, the dispersed imperial remains continue to shape sensibilities, social structures, and modes of life contaminating them with slow and deferred violence (Nixon 2011). Because these forces are indirect, manifesting in micro-events of destruction, I propose that the realm of aesthetics is the appropriate sphere in which to address their persistence in daily life. Ultimately, Invisible Sea works through a specific type of violence that is dispersed, processual, ghostly, but still material. When the film focuses on interactions between humans and their damaged milieu, it observes what Stoler calls the "connective tissue" (2008: 193) – the force that binds people and the environment into the structures of dominance and inequality. Beyond the literal depiction of industrial waste, the film’s aesthetics are contaminated with the slow processes of ruination, highlighting the persistence of Soviet and Russian imperial formations. The gradual environmental destruction is indicated by the details: the low lighting preventing the view, wandering close-ups that are not fixed on any specific figures, and close-ups with canted angles. Such ‘incorrect’ shots allow focusing on the matter of objects rather than their form. Analogously, the narrative structure is fragmentary: it is structured around the motif of the cyclical time, but these cycles consist of fragments of daily actions that do not develop a narrative.

The damaged landscape of The Invisible Sea and the ruined lives of its characters are the carriers of the historical wounds that keep invading the present. As Edward Said has written, imperialism and colonialism endanger “habitation” because colonisers think in terms of geography and control over the territory, and, thus, damage the material places of dwelling (1994: 7). Said labels this form of violence as “geographical”, highlighting its impact on the physical surface of the Earth (Said 1994: 225). The ruination of the cinematic image that we see through the depicted details refers to the dispersed ruination of the environment that happens on the molecular level. It indicates the longevity of the material, social, and individual damage that turns an empire into a “haunting structure” (del Pilar Blanco and Peeren 2013): its material, geographical, epistemic, and aesthetic violence keeps returning while acting “in camouflage” and manifesting in the aesthetic acts of micro-ruination of the image. Therefore, after the fall of the empire, the inherited damage to the habitation returns in the form of environmental disasters that unfold slowly across large expanses. The disaster expresses the enduring consequences of the past colonial ambitions of possessing the land, extracting its resources, altering it, and contaminating it with the waste of failed scientific dreams. However, disasters are not exactly imperial debris, since they do not express the powers of the empire. They emerge as the reaction to the geographic violence and disclose the forces of the Earth, contaminated and damaged by the violence of the enduring imperial formations. As a result, the Aral Sea disaster is simultaneously the carrier of the imperial remains and the denunciation of their inadequacy.

The persistence of imperial formations means that debris is not the dead remnants or mere legacy – these two terms locate the imperial ruins in a historical past which is no longer present. Instead, Stoler claims that imperial debris belongs to the present: they impact and transform it. In this regard, the temporal structure of Ismailova and Casas’ film correlates with its subject matter: Invisible Sea is grounded in the present without referencing extensively the pre-history of the disaster and its current political, economic, and environmental implications. Nevertheless, the film is not devoid of politics and history: the banality of everyday life hides the power structures embedded in the contemporary landscape. The film approaches the Aral Sea material milieu from the position of the local people existing in interaction with the environment. This demonstrates that the source of human suffering and natural destruction is common. The human lives followed by the camera are informed and shaped by the sea desiccation because now they have to deal with what remains of the fishing industry that previously supported the existence of the locals.

To further understand the peculiar temporality of the Aral Sea as a ghostly image, I will juxtapose Stoler's understanding of ruins with Jacques Derrida's notions of ghosts and hauntology. A ghost is a spectral figure that is simultaneously here and not here. In Derrida’s theory (2006), it refers to the return of the past, but the mechanics of this return are not linear or straightforward. Although a ghost is tightly connected to the notion of heritage and history, it speaks to us not only about the past but also of what is not yet here – what is to come, which is the future. In Derrida's words, a ghost marks the "non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present" (2006: xviii). For him, the present never equals itself, it is "out of joint". Such a moment of ‘now’ is constantly invaded and impacted by the ghosts of the past. Later in the article, I will elaborate in more detail on how the depiction of ruination captures aesthetically the ghosts of the Aral colonial histories. Crucially, the notion of a ghost does not presuppose a co-existence of different temporal layers, because Derrida’s philosophy entails that ghosts are specific forms of being-in-absence. Thus, while there are present persistent imperial formations seen through the Aral image, there are also past imperial histories that are simultaneously present and absent.

Moreover, a ghost is embodied and not, visible and invisible, living and dead. In other words, it cannot be defined by anything other than its ambiguity. Its materiality is also ephemeral, it is a "becoming-body", but not yet a body (Derrida 2006: 5). In Stoler’s understanding, ruins embody the ghost; however, the latter doesn’t (always) possess a physical body. Thus, a ruin itself is not a ghost, but it represents and gives space for the latter. Such ambiguous embodiment creates the special allure of ruins: while they are the objects in front of us, they signify the ghosts that are not already present (or haven’t arrived yet), but whose presence-in-absence is captured in the act of ruination. In regards to The Invisible Sea, this would mean that to read waste and ruins as carriers of former Soviet imperialism entails looking into their provenance – the histories that brought them to life. These histories are not merely from the past, but rather they are still transformative forces for the area. They are kept in the metal from the ships, in the nets that barely bring any fish, in the toxic winds that obscure the sounds and the view. As a result, the ghosts belonging to the environmental ruins of the Aral Sea manifest materially. Because the disaster is a physical phenomenon, the toxic molecules constituting the environment are not only material entities but also carriers of the ghostly presence of the enduring past.

Derrida's political project entails the need to learn to live with ghosts. Following Derrida, we should ask: what does it mean to live with the ghosts of socialist industrial dreams? Ghosts equally belong to past, present, and future, but these are not abstract temporal coordinates, they are specific to the particular location and its history where they manifest. Consequently, the ghostly nature of the Aral landscape results in a particular type of temporality that is affected by the historical forward-looking socialist project.

Post-Socialist Ghosts in a Karakalpak Village

The ghosts evoked in the film Invisible Sea connect to the colonial histories of the place. They express “gradated forms of the sovereignty” (Stoler 2008: 193), specific to the particularities of colonialism in Central Asia. The film is set in Karakalpakstan, a region named after its native Karakalpak people, an ethnic minority in Uzbekistan. Being marked by a double colonial difference, the place is impacted by multiple colonisations and absorbs the multiplicity of influences, mainly from Russia and the Muslim world. This makes the region a “paradigmatically border space” that, as Madina Tlostanova has noted, produces a particular type of nomadic rootless sensibility, whose main qualities are non-recognition of a single authority and free wandering between different discourses and cultural narratives (Tlostanova and Mignolo: 87, 116). This sensibility is shaped in defiance of the suppressing forces of the empire(s) and is characterised by the perpetual thwarting of the rules. Paradoxically, The Invisible Sea seemingly debunks Tlostanova’s argument by investigating exactly the opposite – the rootedness of the family in the no longer liveable place. However, this rootedness is of a different nature and it reflects the transculturality of the place itself and the diversity of ghosts haunting it. The result is close to what Édouard Glissant calls a “rooted errantry” (2010: 20), which characterises the processual mode of belonging, the identity-in-relation. Such identity defines itself through travelling and the net of relations that it forms. The Invisible Sea clarifies Tlostanova’s concept, demonstrating that nomadic sensibility does not require literal nomadism, but rather it can manifest in the movement between discourses and their ghost; thus, instead of movement in space, there is a movement between temporal and discursive layers.

Conceptually and aesthetically, the central category of Casas and Ismailova’s film is that of time: it stresses acts of waiting in the present, recollecting the past, and hoping for the future. Belonging to the observational mode of documentary (Nichols 2017), the film mobilises a meticulous and attentive look that requires a longer duration. This allows the film to capture the time of labour and daily routine that constitute the lives of the three main characters, belonging to three different generations. The film reflects on the inevitable shift from the older to the younger generation, emphasising the cyclical nature of life. Set in a remote village, The Invisible Sea investigates a space marked by its traditionalism, which is reinforced by the motif of cyclical time: it is expressed in the continuity of generations and supported by the material objects that accompany generational cycles.

A woman weaves a traditional textile, while kitschy pop music emanates from her grandson’s radio. At the same instant, the TV broadcasts a boxing match – a scene interrupted by a contemplative view of the village and the young boy’s recollections of the stories of the sea told by his parents and grandparents. Elements on the screen – women weaving, traditional textiles, the TV set, and symbols of pop culture of the late 1990s and early 2000s – point towards different epochs and create a chaotic space in which all these objects can co-exist. These objects are woven together with memories, hopes, and dreams that people share while the camera’s patient observation connects the ruined lives with the ruined environment. In these stories, the sea appears as a living character, and the family has to reckon with its will. The slow observational gaze that notices the smallest aspects of movements merges with the stories heard in the background. The film is often split spatially and temporally: the camera is simultaneously in the private space of home listening to the personal stories and, outside, observing the micro-movements of the material environment. If every "landscape is entangled with stories that shape it" (Tsing et al 2017: 10), the intangible stories and material objects form a single tapestry. It also means that each singular object has a history. These singular histories keep transforming the whole of the landscape. This idea counteracts the ground-figure dichotomy, common for a western representational canon, and offers a way of looking at and sensing the world as an entangled whole, where natural forces communicate and live with humans on equal terms.

One of the stories that appears in Casas and Ismailova’s film is a local belief that the world changes every forty years hoping that after this period passes, the sea will return again. This oral story is based on the actual fact that the sea has historically always been coming and going because of its natural cycles; until being disrupted by new channels which stole the water from the area for the sake of the production of cotton, named ‘white gold’ in Central Asia. This myth drives the film and gives hope to the characters, whose belief system is outside the irreversible progressive movement of modernity. Walter Mignolo (2020) identifies such cyclicity of time with pre-modernity, which remains outside of the linear temporality of progress. According to Mignolo, when a community is called “traditional”, it is defined by the sense of pastness – it is seen as a “remnant of the past”, as a representation of what the past of Europe (and now also North America) was (Mignolo 2020: 73). Mignolo argues that western modernity created a specific situation of inequality between western (‘developed’) and non-western (‘underdeveloped’) communities, where the geographical position of a certain culture was translated into the chronology of civilisational development. In other words, travelling to ‘non-western’ places was equated to travelling in time to the past stages of human progress. Many transnational films dwell on this “pastness”, portraying the remote communities thrown to the margins of the global capitalist system. The challenge of such cinema is to address the imposed sense of belatedness without actual relegation of the communities on screen to the status of mere examples of the previous stages of human development.

The material objects comprising the setting of The Invisible Sea testify that in Central Asia, the temporal and spatial hierarchy is more complex. It is impacted, firstly, by the double colonial difference and, secondly, by the failed state socialism that used to proclaim itself as the next developmental stage after liberal capitalism. In the film, the traditional space is flooded with industrial waste which symbolises both global capital that transforms the local lives into waste and failed socialism whose poor infrastructures brought about the environmental disaster. Since the two come together in the image of Aralkum, the temporality of post-socialism appears as a multi-layered temporality.

Reflecting on the particularity of the post-socialist time, Boris Groys notes that socialist ideology pushed the western idea of progress to the limits and created an obsession with the future. Thus, a post-socialist subject has to move "against the flow of time": after the end of the Cold War, they go from the imagined socialist future to the actual neoliberal present (Groys 2018: 201). This idea emphasises imagination and utopian visions; they mix with the material reality constructing the socialist worldview. Nevertheless, when it comes to the rural peoples of Central Asia, Groys’ statement is not completely accurate, as they have been marked by their ‘traditionalism’ throughout the history of the Soviet Union. They were never fully modern for the socialist state, and after its collapse, they became even less modern in the face of what is considered ‘more developed’ regions of the planet. As Tlostanova demonstrates, socialist modernity itself was proclaimed to be “wrong”, which relegated places and people affected by it to an even lower place in the global hierarchy, because they have been following the “wrong” path all this time (Tlostanova 2017: 4). This is what the double colonial difference entails: Karakalpaks, the people in focus in Ismailova and Casas’ film were colonised by the “wrong master”, by the collapsed ‘second-tier’ empire that itself was trapped in the catching-up logic in comparison to the ‘first-tier’ empires – former British and French empires (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2012). As a result, the fishermen in The Invisible Sea were forced to be at the lowest stratum in the Global hierarchy; still, they are granted the memory of the imagined socialist utopia of collective multicultural prosperity that never came but which left its future-oriented symbols on the Central Asian land. Such a contradiction between utopia and hierarchy situates the film’s subjects in the liminal space, in the space in-between, which does not fit both socialist and liberal modernities. Potentially, such liminality can give space for the reinvention of a communal life outside of both frameworks.

To depict the predicament of socialist colonialism, which used to promote a never-achieved cosmopolitan and anti-colonial promise, audiovisual works like Almagul Menlibayeva’s Transoxiana Dreams create peculiar landscapes in which Soviet symbols of progress (such as scientific buildings and cosmic structures) appear within ‘traditional’ steppe surroundings inhabited by nomadic people, yurts, traditional textile, horses, and camels. Such audiovisual works play with the mis-correspondence of the images but also dwell on the so-called post-socialist nostalgia that is often mentioned in scholarship concerning the historical memory and legacy of the Soviet Union (Boele et al. 2019). The remnants of Soviet times also appear in The Invisible Sea: among them, the portrait of Lenin, industrial waste, metal and the tools used to work with it, the remains of the navy and the vestiges of the scientific experiments that caused the current disaster. However, rather than showing the mis-correspondence, the film underscores the affinity between the symbols of ‘tradition’ and those of the socialist past: all of them appear as waste. This allows for creating a space where tradition and (failed) progress can co-exist on the same layer.

These elements are looped in the circular movement of time when the older fisherman recalls the cyclicity of the political changes: the region moved from feudalism to capitalism and then, to socialism; afterwards, the opposite movement started and led from socialism back to capitalism. To conclude, the character warns that the logic of time may bring their society back to feudalism. Such cyclicity of history reinterprets the temporal world order and affirms these cycles as more powerful than human attempts to conquer time. In the film, history appears only through the words of the locals, which assert their active position in it. The temporal cycles described by the fisherman belong to the larger scale of history; however, the film also works through the cyclicity of time in micro-events by observing the time of the routine and repetitive labour performed by the characters. The routine is informed by ghosts of socialism and Russian colonialism because, through daily labour, the film’s characters have to confront and live with the disaster and other imperial damage as they unfold. This is why the time of labour is repetitive but also material: by emphasising the close-ups of actions and engagements with the material objects, the observational gaze reinforces the material qualities of the cinematic image. As film theorist Selmin Kara (2017) notes, this aesthetic method of the non-involvement of the filmmaker is not just a trick to produce a sense of documentary authenticity, but also a historical means of bringing forward the materialist qualities of the image because it shifts attention toward inhuman entities, actions, and forces. It is therefore through attention to labour that the main theme emerges – the relationship between humans and a more-than-human milieu.

Analysing the relationship between slow time and the material address in cinema, Tiago de Luca argues that the durational shot exhausts the meaning and presents pre-reflexive reality as if before it was assigned meaning; as a result, this type of aesthetics shifts attention to the sensible aspects of the filmic reality allowing viewers’ eyes to explore the physical space (2013: 199f.). The Invisible Sea mobilises this capability of the long shot when it focuses on the material texture of the surfaces and builds the film around the character's interactions with the physical environment. For instance, when we see the scene of a character picking up brushwood, we see this action in every material detail: close-ups capture the details and aspects of labouring. After a few such instances, a detail is connected to the whole, when the camera shifts to the long shot of a man against the Aral landscape. The film’s hapticity is reinforced by the quality of the digital image: even on a theatrical screen, the image is pixelated, which adds even greater emphasis on its materiality and tactility. Gertrud Koch reinterprets Kracauer’s classic film theory by proposing that the materialist film that redeems reality would create “liminal encounters between first and second nature because what film creates is the shared material space that we collectively inhabit” (2020: 154). In this sense, The Invisible Sea would be a proper materialist film: a material depiction of the interactions between people and the environment stresses their mutual dependency, revealing that the damaged land is a visible symptom of the deeper and less tangible fabrics of dispersed violence that still wounds people and nature. The inclusion of the material into the social and vice versa adds a new dimension to the histories impacting the place. History becomes material and alive in the present.

According to Tiago De Luca (2013), such a material image would create a de-temporalised temporality – a pure present devoid of the sense of history. The Invisible Sea proves this wrong: although the film aesthetically analyses the present structures of ruined lives embedded in the ruined landscape, the motive of disaster introduces temporalities other than the present, as it induces thinking about their provenance and future changes. The present-ness of the observational image rather indicates the present address of the imperial formations – they influence and inform the present; however, this present is “out-of-joint” because the film suggests that the observed present moment is shaped and informed by haunting colonial histories. Most importantly, such temporality means that the ghosts are not disregarded as the leftovers of the past, which are done away with, but they find their place in the fabric of the family’s daily routine.

The temporality of environmental ruin

Beyond images of waste, the Aral area's invisible toxicity is captured in The Invisible Sea's sound design. It consists predominantly of ambient sounds, among which the dominant one is the sound of the strong wind. It follows labouring characters and makes their work a perpetual struggle against more-than-human forces. What is at stake is not a traditional human-nature dichotomy, but a more complex relation. The severity of nature connects the film with a not-yet-processed inheritance of the Soviet audio-visual canon. As Alec Brookes’ (2020) analysis demonstrates, the dominant Soviet film aesthetics supported the alienation between workers and land. He shows that classic films such as Turksib (Viktor Turin, 1929, Soviet Union) depict a struggle of a man against nature – a narrative that socialist mythology shares with the liberal discourse. Contrary to this, The Invisible Sea proposes that the local people and natural environment exist in symbiosis, while both are impacted by violent colonial histories. Nevertheless, the unbalanced system of organisation of nature, land, and its dwellers can not harmonise immediately after the dismantling of the imperial legal structures; as a consequence, the symbiotic relationships between the characters and the material environment are based on the impossibility of such relationships and, thus, conflict. The environment is still marked by alienation, which manifests aesthetically in the defamiliarisation of the ruined landscape – it appears alien, belonging to the realm of the extraterrestrial, which is why Wark (2020: xiii) calls it a “Martian landscape”. As a result, the figure of the Aral Sea disaster encourages audiences to reconsider the relationship between human beings and history, human beings and nature. The disaster represented in the film is a continuous process of ruination, characterised by its independent agency and unpredictability. The attention to material forces discloses the dispersed violence of the empire through the details that create the disaster: nature, no longer able to maintain homeostasis, unleashes violence on human societies that have previously inflicted harm upon it. The dominating ambient sound together with the haptic visuality of the film brings forth the more-than-human forces of the damaged landscape which becomes an independent agent acting upon the lives depicted. If ruin is a sight or object that condenses the persistent and dispersed imperial powers, environmental ruin is where these imperial forces meet forces of the natural environment.

Cinematic landscapes are not neutral, they carry socio-political meanings; as Catherine Elwes (2022) demonstrates, the representations of landscapes are socially constructed for they are associated with such notions as nation, identity, and ownership. Thus the way landscapes are depicted reflects the central motives that are dominant in a given community at a given moment. The time of environmental destruction requires a special type of landscape aesthetic adequate to it: Elvia Wilk (2022) suggests that what is needed is a shift in the dominant narratives – instead of narratives centred around human-like agents who act, we need stories and artworks that undo the ground-figure dichotomy and grant landscapes centrality and agency. This could provide a solution to the alienation of humans from nature, as previously constructed through Soviet cinema. While classic Soviet propaganda films “flattened” the indigenous landscapes of Central Asia, eliminating the variety and nuance (Brookes 2020: 41), Invisible Sea returns the landscape to its damaged depth by tediously capturing wind, waste, and other material details. The film responds to environmental urgency aesthetically by creating means to decenter human vision and pluralise narratives related to the entangled human and natural histories.

The image of the Aral Sea thus becomes the image of the radical shift of the positions: nature invades what was previously considered purely human history. The Aral ruin is not like any other conventional symbol referring to the Soviet utopian projects, but an environmental object which proves Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2012) argument that today, natural history can no longer be seen as separate from human history. The figure of the toxic sandscape forces us to look beyond the post-Soviet and shift attention towards the planet as a common habitat. By doing so, this image also necessitates discussing the Soviet and post-Soviet histories together with the global system of capitalism and colonialism. The uncontrollability of a disaster creates visions of the planet as an entity belonging to the order of ungraspable; as Spivak puts it, “the planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan” (2015: 291). The “planetary” appears in the toxicity, the waste and damage depicted in The Invisible Sea: Does the ruined Soviet car that the protagonists use belong to the ruins of socialism or the ruins of global capitalism? Among the film’s natural elements, the wind represents an ultimately transnational agent which carries toxic particles, spreading them over long distances beyond the Aral Sea area. This “planetary address” is what differentiates the environmental ruin from the romanticised architectural ruin carrying the post-Soviet nostalgia: disaster cancels the nostalgia.

Consequently, for contemporary films from former Soviet territories, the investigation of the damage which the empire caused to the natural environment could facilitate the “exodus from the post-Soviet condition” (Kuchanskyi 2022). The exodus is needed to untangle the region from the repressive epistemic debris of the failed empire. Environmental ruin enables us to transform the way former Soviet countries are imagined by transgressing the nostalgia embedded in the post-socialist ruins. In the aesthetics of disaster, the familiar pointers towards science as the core of the failed ideology do not carry nostalgia for the never-achieved socialist future, but the need for a renewed geo-political relationship between human beings and between humans and nature. Moreover, the inclusion of the planetary time of disaster means not only the relevance of the globality to the Karakalpak village but also the relevance of Karakalpak histories for the global. In line with this, meditating on the importance of Ukraine, Volodymyr Ishchenko stresses that many of the tendencies that are only emerging in the ‘western’ states have already developed in the most dramatic fashion in the post-socialist countries (2022). This is relevant not only to the situation of war; the slower forms of violence, such as environmental degradation, could shed light on the processes that are still to emerge in more economically ‘successful’ regions. The ideology of rapid “progress” only accelerated the approach of the consequences of such politics. For example, by 2008, Susan Buck-Morss argued that the post-socialist condition is common to us all. Proposing that the Soviet project was an inherent part of western modernity, Buck-Morss finds their commonality in the "quasi-religious faith that both Cold War enemies had in history as the time of human progress, and the elimination of scarcity through heavy-industrial development that was to deliver happiness to the masses" (2008: 25). The failure of the ideology of accelerated progress means the accelerated arrival of a future that is still to come in the other parts of the world. The Aral Sea shows that the failure of socialist modernity was just a precursor of the failure of its liberal counterpart because they do not differ in the discourses around natural resources, progress, science, and technology.

If, as Buck-Morss proposes, environmental collapse reveals the need for the recognition of shared time, this means that environmental ruination cancels modernity's hierarchies. The presence of the disaster encourages us to transform our understanding of the cyclicity of time: it is no longer a sign of traditionalism, but rather a mode of living in the attunement to environmental changes. Expanding on Buck-Moss’s argument, I propose that together with the shared time, the haunting environmental degradation also necessitates shared physical space, a common habitat. Nevertheless, the recognition of the shared time and space does not equal unity. If Soviet film promoted technological progress as the foundation of the happy socialist community inhabiting a heterogeneous spatial unity of the Soviet land (Sarkisova 2017), films about natural disasters stress the ruptures on the surface of this territory and reveal the inadequacy of the ideological foundations upon which such unity was founded. The shared planetarity entails the irreducible alterity that Spivak insisted on.

Ultimately, environmental ghosts as the remains of imperial violence require us to reconsider the relational structures between humans and the physical planet. The question is how to mobilise ghosts for the creation of new potentialities and renewed political projects that, as Stoler hopes, they could give. Esther Pereen and María del Pilar Blanco call such politics “spectropolitics”: for them, the latter should become "the site of potential change, where ghosts, and especially the ability to haunt and the willingness to be haunted, to live with ghosts, can work" (2013: 93). This means recognising the ghosts’ generative connection to the future – they transform what is not yet here. In the case of the Aral Sea disaster, the potential for newness is born out of the liminal status of the place and its image – it does not fit the normative stories of modernity that only cause further deterioration and ruination of human lives and their physical habitat. This locality preserves the multiple histories and temporalities which shape it, recognising the time of the material Earth as the condition for all the other times. Ultimately, learning how to live with the ghost, for the film, may mean overcoming the progressive time of modernity which turns ghosts into mere artefacts of the past, into its mere ‘legacy’.

Kseniia Bespalova
University of Groningen
k.bespalova@rug.nl

Bio

Kseniia Bespalova is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen. Her PhD research investigates the aesthetics of environmental disasters in contemporary films from the colonised spaces of the former Soviet Union. In 2023, as part of the inaugural edition of the talent-development scheme "Programmers of the Future" at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, Bespalova curated a film programme and an exhibition titled “Not a Map, But a Trace” that ties together the cinematic representation of post-Soviet landscapes, cinematic geography, and the historical trauma of colonialism. She holds a Research Master’s degree in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam.

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Suggested Citation

Bespalova, Kseniia. 2023. “On Ruins, Debris, and Ghosts: The Temporality of Disaster in the Film Aral, Fishing in the Invisible Sea”. Decolonising the (Post-)Soviet Screen I (ed. by Heleen Gerritsen). Special issue of Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 17. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2023.00017.334.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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