ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a theory of ecocritical spectatorship called polytemporality and illustrates its two theoretical dimensions—aesthetics on the one hand and alterity on the other hand—by reading Mga Anak ng Unos, Unang Aklat (Storm Children, Book One, 2014), an observational documentary by Lav Diaz. Storm Children evokes climate destruction in the Anthropocene and simulates an installation where the nation space is re-worlded into a trauma field. This chapter describes how radical aesthetics such as the extreme long take and the single camera technique construct a cinematic experience where the spectator is captured and co-textualized and suggests that the act of screening films like Diaz’s opens the same possibilities that installation art can offer in terms of reflexivity and criticality as they place the spectator’s body and consciousness in an ethical and critical encounter with alterity.
