Cinema of/for the Anthropocene: Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship

by Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (Editor), Andrea Ruthven (Editor)

Overview

Cinema of/for the Anthropocene sheds new light on the question of how films can allow us to resituate ourselves within what is known today as the Anthropocene. The authors address this question through a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives, from film and cultural studies, new materialisms, critical posthumanism and animal studies, critical race theory and Indigenous media studies, to gender and sexuality studies, with a primary focus on films produced in the United States and Canada.

The volume moves beyond the mere acknowledgment of the devastating damage inflicted during the Anthropocene to think about new ways of inhabiting the world through concepts such as affect, response-ability, and more-than-human kinship. The writers in this collection respond to its invitation by addressing a range of genres and modes, thus complicating the apocalyptic discourses which have typically been central to the studies on the Anthropocene: in addition to dystopian films, the volume discusses animated films, Hollywood biopics, climate change documentaries, experimental film, comedy, horror sci-fi, as well as disease thriller and survival film. Taken together, the chapters offer cross-disciplinary readings of the cinema of/for the Anthropocene, showing ways in which it can help us re-orient our thinking to make sense of the current age and address the planetary-scale environmental catastrophe.

This volume will appeal to researchers and students in film studies, cultural studies, and the burgeoning field of environmental humanities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032746357
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/31/2025
Series:	Routledge Advances in Film Studies
Pages:	214
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz is an Associate Professor in English and Film Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain. Andrea Ruthven is an Associate Professor in English at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain.

Table of Contents

1. Chapter 1: Thinking Cinema of/for the Anthropocene: An Introduction, 2. Chapter 2: A Film History of Utter Rebellion: Dewesternizing Film Studies for the Chthulucene, 3.Chapter 3: Willful Aesthetics: Pedagogies of Exposure in Animated Short Film, 4. Chapter 4: Envisioning Intergenerational Justice: Hope, Despair, and Transformative Action in Climate Change Films, 5. Chapter 5: Take Back the Walk: Trekking and Female Empowerment in Wild and Tracks, 6. Chapter 6: Between Manipulation and Catharsis: Media Life in the Anthropocene, 7. Chapter 7: Collaborative Making, not Taking: Nova Paul Exposes Cinema’s Material Roots, 8. Chapter 8: Land Agency and the Animacy of Stories in Danis Goulet’s and Amanda Strong’s Short Films, 9. Chapter 9: New Animism and Shamanic Cinema: Human-Animal-Machine Interactions, 10. Chapter 10: Being (with) Animals: Human-Horse Relations, Gender and Queer/Trans Embodiment in Barbara Hammer’s A Horse Is Not a Metaphor and Ann Oren’s Passage, 11. Chapter 11: Biological Imagination, Critical Environmentalism, and Anthropocene in Annihilation, 12. Chapter 12: Inhabiting a Viral Culture

Editorial Reviews

Crossing an impressive range of forms, industries, perspectives and practices, the contributions to this splendid collection are distinguished by a reparative impulse to locate, amid the wreckage signalled by the term ‘Anthropocene,’ the tools we need for constructing a co-habitable future. As these pieces show, cinematic forms can reveal and activate sustaining, Earth-focused forms of pedagogy, relationality, embodiment, perception, affect, spectatorship, ethics, and politics.” - Pansy Duncan (Massey University), co-author of Screening the Posthuman (2023)

"Human understanding of the world around us has changed and it's time cinema studies caught up. This outstanding volume rises to that challenge with aplomb!" - Stephen Rust (University of Oregon), co-editor of Ecocinema Theory and Practice (2013) and Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2 (2023)

From the Publisher