Now That We Are Sending You to The End

A girl predicts the end of the world. Perhaps the earth will explode or the moon will slowly drift away from the earth. Or else the sun will come so close that the sky will turn orange with ash. Meanwhile, Blake Knecht calmly films a carcass, a dead fish, plumes of smoke, and cracks in the dry earth of the Nevada desert, a landscape hovering between myth and disappearance. These black-and-white images are alternated with hypnotic, blue-tinted, distressed 16mm footage of floods.

The desert landscape has had a direct effect on the film material. Knecht used salt dried from the Great Salt Lake to treat the emulsion of the film negatives. She also buried the film in soil that had just recovered from a wildfire and applied a handmade cyanotype emulsion on film stock that she hand-developed using water.

Water, salt, and earth thus reflect the human imprint on a deteriorating ecosystem, which this girl—the filmmaker’s twelve-year-old sister—sees all around her. She sits in the branches of an ancient tree with her legs dangling. Why have we come to accept as normal what is not normal?