Ecologies of the moving image : cinema, affect, nature / Adrian J Ivakhiv.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ivakhiv, Adrian J., author.

Series:

Environmental humanities

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Motion pictures--Philosophy.

Motion pictures.

Nature in motion pictures.

Ecology in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

xii, 418 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Waterloo, Ontario : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, [2013].

Summary:

Moving images take us on mental and emotional journeys, over the course of which we and our worlds undergo change. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images move viewers in ways that reshape our understanding of ourselves, of life, and of the Earth and universe. This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies-the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies-relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman-found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries to westerns and road movies, and from sci-fi blockbusters, and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage as well as YouTube's expanding audiovisual universe. Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers such as Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Journeys into the Zone of Cinema 1

Two perspectives on the visual

The cinema as cosmomorphic, or world making: geomorphic, biomorphic, and anthropomorphic

Stalker as paradigm: Tracking the cinema, stalking the psyche

The argument

Overview of the chapters

2 Ecology, Morphology, Semiosis: A Process-Relational Account of the Cinema 31

The three ecologies of images: material, social, perceptual

Process-relational ontology

Perceptual ecologies: How we get drawn into the cinematic world

Peircean semiosis: firstness, secondness, and thirdness

Spectacle, narrativity, and signness

Scenes, episodes, and cinematic impact

3 Territory: The Geomorphology of the Visible 69

Geomorphism in life and in image

An initial typology

Picturing "nature": Landscape aesthetics as socio-natural production

Anchoring the filmic world

Staking claims and territorializing identities: Making the West

Dovzhenko's cinematic pantheism

Nature, holism, and the eco-administrative state

Industry, existential landscapes, and the firstness of things

Post-westerns, pantheism, and the ecological sublime

Kinetic landscapes, the exhilaration of movement, and the differentiation of space

Cinematic tourism, object fetishism, and the global landscape

Enframing the world, or expanding perception?

"Burn but his books": Deconstructing the gaze from both ends

4 Encounter: First Contact, Utopia, and the Becoming of Another 141

The ethnographic paradigm

Nanook/Allakariallak and the two-way gaze

King Kong's imperial gaze: From ethnographic to cinematic spectacle

Upriver journeys, hearts of darkness, and contact zones

Beyond first contact

Cinematic holism, auto-ethnography, and visual sovereignty

From the deconstruction of reality to its reflexive reconstruction

Green identities: images of choice, hope, struggle, and community

5 Anima Moralia: Journeys across Frontiers 193

Pointing, seeing, gazing

Animating the image, imaging the animate

Writing, seeing, and faking nature

Making nature: inter-natural co-productions

Animation, plasmaticness, and Disney

Boundary traffic: seeing, being seen, and the horror of crossing over

Animal by analogy: penguins and family values

Individual crossings: Bittner's birds, Treadwell's bears

Sheer becomings: one or several types of packs

Boundary strategies: ethics of the contact zone

6 Terra and Trauma: The Geopolitics of the Real 253

Recapitulation of the argument

Trauma and the imagination of disaster

Strange weather, network narratives, and the traumatic event

The sublime and the Real

The eco-imaginary in post-9/11 culture

Political ecologies in three dimensions and more

Avatar's eco-apocalyptic Zone

Toward a Peircian synthesis: aesthetics, ethics, and ecologies of the image-event

Ecology, time, and the image

Ecophilosophical cinema: moving images on a moving planet.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781554589050

1554589053

9781554589067

1554589061

OCLC:

841673092