- Artist
- Richard Mosse
- Year
- 2018-2022
- Medium
- Film 74" 11'
Broken Spectre presents a portrayal of environmental devastation along the Trans-Amazonian Highway, viewed through a multifaceted lens of scientific, cultural, historical, socio-political, and activist perspectives
This dreamlike, immersive video uses advanced scientific imaging technologies to capture the hidden fronts of deforestation and industrial ecocide in the Amazon Basin. With abrupt shifts in scale and medium, the film exposes the unsustainable processes of extractive violence—illegal logging, mass burning, wildcat gold mining, the theft of Indigenous lands, species extinction, river damming, and the colonisation of the forest.
For decades, scientists have relied on remote sensing photography to track forest degradation, model tipping points, and predict environmental collapse in the Amazon. Broken Spectre is an attempt to dial in on these opaque subjects using similar imaging technologies and aggravated media that carry some agency in the biome’s destruction, as these tools are also employed by mining and agribusiness industries for resource extraction.
The film uses three distinct media, each operating at different scales. An aerial multispectral camera, developed in collaboration with a spectroscopy and machine vision company, captures the burning forest from above. For close-up scenes filmed at night on the cloud forest floor, ultraviolet lights reveal the biome through UV macro timelapse footage, borrowing techniques from UV microscopy. At the human scale, scenes of environmental crimes are shot using S35mm black-and-white infrared film with anamorphic lenses—one of the few instances of infrared film use in cinema, aside from the iconic Soy Cuba (1964). Mosse regards this overlap as a fertile space for a movie about environmental destruction because the camera can measure the extent of forest degradation and dieback.
Between 2021 and 2022, Richard Mosse held a residency at CERN, where he collaborated with scientists and engineers to further his research into scientific imaging technologies.
