Elemental Alchemy in Experimental Cinema

This cross-disciplinary research explores how experimental and documentary films engage with elemental media, expanding our understanding of cinemas relationship to nature, deep time, and transformation. Building on my doctoral work on eco-trauma and the cinematic representation of human-nature entanglements, this project investigates how film enables audiences to experience temporalities, spaces, and materialities beyond traditional representation. This research proposes an expanded notion of cinematic materiality, reframing film not merely as a representational medium but as an elemental process. Drawing on elemental media philosophy, new materialism, and posthuman phenomenology, this study examines how experimental films engage with the elementsearth, air, fire, and waternot only as themes but as active participants in the filmmaking process and agents of mediation. Furthermore, the research incorporates alchemical perspectives on media and explores how the elements function as transformative cinematic forces that reshape our perception. By analyzing a range of works from contemporary experimental filmmakers that highlight various aspects of elemental alchemy, this research argues that these cinematic works foster a way of thinking that could be termed elemental thinking. Two groups are distinguished among the cinematic works examined here based on the role of the elements. The first group addresses the elements as pro-filmic events at the level of imagery and sound. For example, Luis Macass series The Sixth Sun (Mexico/Spain 2019 ) invokes the planetary as the sum of an interrelated, living system where different timelines and planes of existence collapse into one another. The second group of films treats the elements as active agents in the creative process. For instance, Eva Kolczes Badlands (Canada 2013) explores the Canadian Cheltenham Badlands, an exposed geological formation sculpted by the water that once flowed over it. It was shot in HD and Super Eight, but the film also features celluloid decayed in soil and water. Films like this, I argue, foreground planes of existence that may allow us to experience something of deep (geological, cosmic) time and our entangled relationship with the geological and the celestial. In German experimental filmmaker-alchemist Jürgen Rebles oeuvre, questions of cinema and alchemy are also explicitly present. His film performances, such as Alchemie (1992), Tabula Smaragdina (1997), or Materia Obscura (2009), and films like Rumpelstilzchen (1989), Instabile Materie (1995), or Arktis (2004), serve as testaments to an alchemical inquiry into the exploration of matter, the elements, natural formations, and the cosmos. These works promote elemental thinking by emphasizing the alchemical processes involved in film production. This research proposes that they bridge a gap between matter and metaphor, anchoring metaphorical properties in the physicality of matter.