Short voyages to the land of gregarious animals: On political aesthesia in Sto Lyko and Sweetgrass

The paper discusses contemporary documentary cinema with respect to its specific modes of interlacing aesthetic and political components. It examines Christina Koutsospyrou and Aran Hughes’s "Sto Lyko" (To the Wolf, 2013), an experimental documentary that follows the daily life of goatherds and their families in Greece’s rural Nafpaktia region. Whereas critical approaches have labeled the film as “ethno-fiction” and mainly assessed it as an allegorical tale illustrating the socio-economic decline of Greece or southern Europe, a close reading of the movie’s formal dominants may reveal more productive aspects, e.g. regarding its sequential composition: the disintegration of the characters’ social agency seems to infect the narrative structure of "Sto Lyko," creating a breakup of sensory-motor schemata which appears as a transfer of politics to cinematic form (and adds a distinctly topical element to the Deleuzian time-image). However, beyond such evident instances of political aesthetics, our paper focuses on the film’s complex differentiation between the ‘atmospheric’ and ‘sensitive’ constituents of images. It analyzes their visual, acoustic, tactile qualities which, instead of producing readable ‘meaning,’ relocate the image in the realm of sensory perception. Thus, the respective motif (human face, animal, landscape …), form (lighting, sound, focus …), and mediality (format, resolution …) no longer contribute to a merely symbolical impression, but create what can be called a ‘critical affectation.’ In order not only to understand such ‘sensitizing strategies,’ but to delineate their latent affinity with socio-political concepts, to explore possible interconnections between neural ‘affectation’ and contemporary capitalism, between the economy of the senses and the sense of economy in cinema, our paper takes a comparative approach: it correlates "Sto Lyko" to the US-American documentary "Sweetgrass" (Ilisa Barbash / Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2009) about the last trail of sheepherders in Montana’s Absaroka-Beartooth mountains. Apart from numerous similarities regarding the two films’ topic, political footing, production method, etc., "Sweetgrass"’s background with Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) promises deeper insight into the general relations between the aesthesia of moving images and the social as well as bodily praxis and affective fabric of human (and animal) existence. Opposing the journalistic and discursive traditions of documentary and visual anthropology, SEL’s emphasis on the sensory mediation of the “natural and unnatural world” provides a framework for the analysis of filmic experience and/as political concept: in the original sense of “aesthesis,” both "Sto Lyko" and "Sweetgrass" may present us with a non-symbolic critical aesthetics.