Die Epoche des Menschen – Anthropocene

Huge bucket-wheel excavators are drilling into the rock a few kilometers from Lützerath. The driver can only be recognized as a tiny dot, but shortly afterwards he proudly tells us how many thousands of tons a single machine weighs.

In her documentary The Age of Man, Jennifer Baichwal explores how man has shaped and formed the earth in various locations. In impressive images, she tells the story of Lützerath at the coal tip, before the demonstrators were evicted and coal excavators replaced the last houses. In doing so, she takes a different documentary look at the changes that humans inflict on the environment than Godfrey Reggio. For a long time, Alicia Vikander's narrator seems to be observing the events from the outside and not taking a stance. She tells of a new era, the era of man. It is an era in which man seems to have completely subjugated nature, in which monstrous machines beat, hammer and work on it. And Jennifer Baichwal sees the only possible resistance in the era of mankind as being through man himself. We must rise up again for the nature that we have so thoroughly appropriated.