“A Wide-Angle View of Fragile Earth”: Capitalist Aesthetics in The Work of Yann Arthus-Bertrand
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".