Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human

✍ Scribed by Anat Pick (editor); Guinevere Narraway (editor)

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 304
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction. Intersecting Ecology and Film
PART I. ECO-POETICS: FILM, FORM AND THE NATURAL WORLD
1. Three Worlds: Dwelling and Worldhood on Screen
2. Ten Skies, 13 Lakes, 15 Pools – Structure, Immanence and Ecoaesthetics in The Swimmer and James Benning’s Land Films
3. Land as Protagonist – An Interview with James Benning
PART II. ZOE--TROPES: ENVISIONING THE NONHUMAN
4. Anthropomorphism and Its Vicissitudes: Reflections on Homme-sick Cinema
5. Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
6. Was Blind But Now I See: Animal Liberation Documentaries’ Deconstruction of Barriers to Witnessing Injustice
7. Filming the Frozen South: Animals in Early Antarctic Exploration Films
PART III. ECO-POLITICS: ENVIRONMENT, IMAGE, IDEOLOGY
8. Dirty Pictures: Framing Pollution and Desire in ‘new New Queer Cinema’
9. Utopia in the Mud: Nature and Landscape in the Soviet Science Fiction Film
10. Animals, Avatars and the Gendering of Nature
11. Buried Land: Filming the Bosnian Pyramids
PART IV. ECO-PRAXIS: FILM AS ENVIRONMENTAL PRACTICE
12. Strange Seeing: Re-viewing Nature in the Films of Rose Lowder
13. The Art of Self-emptying and Ecological Integration: Bae Yong-kyun’s Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East?
14. An Inconvenient Truth: Science and Argumentation in the Expository Documentary Film
15. Planet in Focus: Environmental Film Festivals
Notes on Contributors
Index