“A Wide-Angle View of Fragile Earth”: Capitalist Aesthetics in The Work of Yann Arthus-Bertrand
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Taking the widely viewed media work of French filmmaker and environmentalist Yann Arthus- Bertrand’s as its subject, this essay posits that despite the filmmaker’s stated ecological and humanist position, the formalist strategies he employs-particularly the fly-over and the database-bring with them a set of historical conventions that paradoxically import capitalist and imperialist ideologies and phenomenologies. In particular, the article considers the films Home (2009) and Human (2015) and the database project 7 Billion Others (2003-ongoing) as documentaries that deploy techniques of technologically-virtuosic seeing that end up obscuring the very possibility of cognitive mapping that would allow viewers to situate their contents in legible political economic frameworks. Closely related to the concept of the Anthropocene, which holds all people equally accountable for the current environmental crisis, Arthus- Bertrand’s work tends to obscure the causes and therefore meaningful solutions for the current situation. The article concludes by postulating that the model of cognitive mapping itself requires more attention to the ways in which particular aesthetic forms mobilize affective dimensions of viewer experience.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it