(Non-)Moving Images: Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens as a Cinema of Natural History

Abstract

This article outlines the ontology of ruins presented in Homo Sapiens, a 2016 film by the Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter, through the lens of “natural history,” an aesthetic and philosophico-historical category developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. In glossing natural history’s concomitant concepts such as “mood,” “aura” and “creaturely life,” the significance of the cinematic medium for the question regarding the nature of the relation between “first” and “second” nature and between the human and the non-human – unfolds. In the second move of the article, the film’s auditory dimension of perception through which “creaturely life” is sensed will be put into constellation with Kafka’s “The Burrow.” The claim is that Homo Sapiens’s particular form of expression, in line with the spatio-temporal dimension of the reality it seeks to capture, demarcates a threshold whereby the realm of the aesthetic and the realms of ethics and politics are mutually imbricated. This point takes its lead from Giorgio Agamben’s meditations – following Benjamin’s “angel of history” – on what he termed the “angel of photography.”