Infrastructure in the Anthropo(s)cene: Fritz Lang's Metropolis as Ecological Archive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the beginning, there was the oil rig. Then came the asphalt streets that sprawl miles and miles through dismal wastelands, always flanked by oil rigs growing wild. Then, for beautification of the surroundings, the palm trees are brought in. The First Chapters Of This Book focused on the status of Heimat discourse as a key locus for the ecological archive of German cinema. Heimat films and related discourse can reveal both the ways in which environments were debated, curated, and deliberately constructed on screen (for example, in the multispecies assemblages of Die Geierwally discussed in chapter 1, or the transformation from rural to industrial landscapes in industrial Heimat films discussed in chapter 2) and how the nonhuman elements of these films carry out both physical actions and signifying potential beyond what the filmmakers can control. This can be seen both in the mutual violence between humans and vultures involved in filming Die Geierwally , despite the purported peaceful interspecies relations in the film, and in the connotation of industrial disaster that Sprengbagger 1010 implies due to the major disasters connected to the companies and industrial landscapes celebrated in the film. The first chapters traced ways in which the words and images of Heimat discourses connect to physical changes in the environment in ways that are often more complex and contradictory than what the creators of the initial discourse might have intended. Now, in part two, the book's focus shifts from the seemingly immaterial discourse of Heimat (which is, of course, connected to material change in complex ways), to the seemingly physical status of infrastructures in and around German environmental films, paying particular attention to films of the Weimar era, a focus justified by the intense expansion of infrastructures in Germany's cities and rural areas in the final decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries. Just as environmental discourses, especially ideas of Heimat , within German films serve as both response to and instigator of physical changes in the nonfilmic world, the portrayal and creation of physical infrastructures on screen sheds new light on environmental thought and discourse. Both parts of this book explore the complex relationships between film as a creative medium and the physical changes to the nonhuman environment.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
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".