Elemental world cinema : cinematic entanglements of earth, fire, water and air / edited by Tiago de Luca and Matilda Mroz.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

De Luca, Tiago, editor.

Mroz, Matilda, editor.

Series:

Contemporary cinema ; 12.

Literature and Cultural Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2026.

Contemporary cinema ; 12

Literature and Cultural Studies E-Books Online, Collection 2026

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Literature and Cultural Studies.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Other Title:

Cinematic entanglements of earth, fire, water and air

Place of Publication:

Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2025.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

This is the first book-length study on the relationship between cinema and the classical elements. It centres on earth, fire, water and air to offer new perspectives on the intersection of film and the nonhuman in a time of climate emergency. Mobilising a range of analytical frameworks, including early film theory, Indigenous epistemologies and environmental sciences, the essays in this collection trace the complex agencies of the elements as they intersect with the material properties of the cinematic image across fiction, animation, documentary and experimental film. In doing so, the book positions elemental cinema as a multifaceted process and experience that might encompass attempts to think with, alongside or even ‘like’ the elemental, all the while recognising the limitations of our anthropocentric systems of meaning.

Contents:

Introduction: The Cinematic Entanglements of Earth, Fire, Water and Air>

Tiago de Luca and Matilda Mroz

PART 1: Troubling Terrain: Framing the Agencies of Stone and Soil

1 Abbas Kiarostami, Global Art Cinema and the Material Imagination of Earth 29

Graig Uhlin

2 Earth After Death: Posthumous Cinematic Ecologies in Holocaust Documentary Film 48

Matilda Mroz

PART 2: Scorched Earth: Cinemas of Eruption and Combustion

3 Elemental Documentary: Fire, Forensics and Pyro-Epistemologies 73

Patrick Brian Smith

4 Cinema as Volcano: Thinking Cinema Through the Volcano with Malena Szlam, Werner Herzog and Jean Epstein 95

Jessica Mulvogue

5 Tectonic Memories: Film, Geology and Archives in Diana Vidrașcu’s Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (2019) 116

Toby Ashworth

PART 3: Liquid Poetics: Seas, Rivers and Anticolonial Currents

6 Untamed Storms: Cinema’s Oceanic Contingency and Mati Diop’s Atlantics 139

Laurence Kent

7 Imagining the Elements with Gaston Bachelard and Claire Denis: ‘Weighted’ Images, Drift and Diffusion in L’Intrus/The Intruder 157

Saige Walton

8 Animated Waters and the Circulation of Indigenous Instruction 177

Joanna Hearne

PART 4: Clouded Visions: Atmospheric Contingencies

9 Stormy Images: Elemental Kinetics in the Recent Films of Takashi Makino (2018–2021) 203

Kaya Turan

10 Nebulous Cinema 225

Tiago de Luca

11 Geoblocking the Sun: Solar Eclipses in Transnational Artists’ Film 248

Stefan Solomon.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9004735127

9789004735125

OCLC:

1528572183

Publisher Number:

10.1163/9789004735125 DOI