Traces of Plastic Waste: Slow Violence and Slow Cinema in Chris Jordan’s “Albatross”

Chris Jordan’s Albatross makes slow violence legible through traces—material residues, temporal marks, and perceptual impressions. 

This presentation follows three linked fields of tracing. First, Midway Atoll appears as a landscape marked by Anthropocene intrusions, first military, then plastic trash. Second, albatross bodies emerge as living archives and corporal evidence of consumption-driven economy. Third, the film’s durational aesthetics—long takes, still frames, and lingering gaze—cultivate habits of attention that render traces visible and ethically demanding.

Framed within eco cinema and the environmental humanities, the talk argues that reading traces across place, body, and form reframes plastic not as material debris but as a world-shaping relation, and that slow cinema’s commitment to time, repetition, and embodied detail converts documentation into moral address.

About the speaker:

Shu-chin Tsui (Shuqin Cui) is the Bowdoin Professor of Asian and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Eco-Environmental Turns: (Re)mapping China’s Sociocultural Landscape through Eco-cinema, Gendered Bodies: Toward a Women’s Visual Art in Contemporary China, and Women Through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. 

Her research and teaching span film studies, visual culture, and environmental documentaries. She is also deeply engaged in Chinese language pedagogy and regularly offers advanced seminars. Her recent edited textbook, China Through the Camera Lens, integrates film and video analysis into language teaching.

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