The latest issue of the open-access Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, an issue devoted to “Gilles Deleuze and Moving Images,” includes a review by Niall Flynn of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image. Another recent review of EMI can be found in the The Journal of Ecocriticism. And I’ve mentioned the Environmental Humanities Book Chat devoted to the book, and Harlan Morehouse’s Society & Space interview with me about the book. I’ve been sent two other forthcoming reviews, to appear in the journals Aether (which, judging by its web site, seems to have gone into some hiatus) and JSRNC.
All the reviews I’ve seen so far are fairly detailed, for which I’m grateful, and I think that all appreciate the ambition, complexity, and nuance intended by the film’s theoretical model (which more than one reviewer calls “compelling”) and by the recursive method of its delivery. It appears from these readings that my strategy for overcoming binaries — through a layered, interactive, and dynamic “triadism” — seems to work, even if it takes patience to figure out and remains difficult to summarize.
The 40-minute EH Book Chat goes into the greatest depth at critiquing the book, and I’ll address one of the recurrent points raised in that video presentation here.
Hannes Bergthaller, Seth Peabody, and Anna Åberg identify as a “difficulty” of the book the gap between its theoretical grasp and the actual readings of individual films. This is, as Peabody (I think) points out, inevitable in a book that both presents a complex new theoretical framework and uses that framework as a method to read films across the history of cinema. Åberg in particular notes my tendency to emphasize the meanings of films at the expense of the materialities involved in film production, despite the place that questions of materiality have in my theoretical model.
To this balance-of-emphasis question, I plead guilty, though it’s a guilt motivated by the model itself. Let me explain how.
Film, like anything, is multi-dimensional and multi-leveled: it is material, social, and perceptual, and each of these layers (or ecologies, as I call them in the book) interacts with each other dynamically over time. The “firstness” of a film’s world — the thing it presents to audiences by virtue of what it is “in itself” — is part of that perceptual layer, since it refers to what the film is that is viewed by a viewer. And it is not first in any chronological sense, since it is produced out of material, social, and mental-perceptual elements — filmmakers’ intentions and desires, cultural expectations, political-economic systems, ecological possibilities, and so on — that precede and condition both its making and its reception.
“Firstness” here refers only to a structural feature of its reality: to the extent that there is something called a film — by which I mean an individual film, or rather the film-world presented by that film, and not a filmic apparatus, a film industry, a cultural system, or anything else larger (or smaller) than that — its firstness is what it is in itself irrespective of what made it; its secondness is its immediate interaction with another (a viewer, a society, an insect in the path of its audio-visual projection, etc.); and its thirdness is the patterned relationality that emerges from any secondness involving that film.
And because film is the sort of thing that it is — a cultural object intended to be viewed immersively by human viewers over a limited period of time, and then thought (and felt) about, discussed, and responded to in particular ways — it makes sense to identify its greatest potency in the socio-semiotics of that set of relational encounters. Thus the bias toward meaning (a form of thirdness) and to the perceptual ecologies (as opposed to the social or material ecologies) in my readings of individual films — but also, simultaneously, the demand that meaning, and the perception of a film more generally, be connected to materiality and sociality.
These are biases that we might think of as arising from a kind of curvature of space surrounding the object that is a film. A similar curvature of space might apply to any artwork, book, or object intended to be culturally consumed and interpreted. Any such object, however, is never fully reducible to its meanings.
So it is entirely fair to discuss the massive carbon budgets of blockbuster films, or the racist and colonial infrastructures of Hollywood film across much of film history — and I do discuss both of these — while making less of those things than I make of the meanings unleashed and generated by exemplary films in the course of film history. It may sometimes be important to discuss the former things more than the latter, if only because of the powerful legacy we have of ignoring the former altogether. But my model does not assume that these are all equal in their generative capacity, and that’s okay. Or so I argue. If a film is what a film does, then we ought to focus — not exclusively, but at least partially and seriously — on what it does most. A different book, more focused on the film industry than on films themselves, would focus on other kinds of things, and that would be perfectly alright, too.
The book is really two books in one: the first presents a theoretical model, while the second applies it. I had thought of writing a parallel book, which would apply the model more fully to a small set of ecocritically exemplary films. (I may still do that, especially if a prospective co-author came along — hint, hint.)
As Peabody helpfully points out (in the freeze-frame captured in the YouTube link here), the model is probably best summarized in the book’s appendix on “Doing Process-Relational Media Analysis.” But I never fully and thoroughly apply that model to any single film, since doing that would require a book in itself for every film. My selection of things to focus on, for any given film, comes from the demands of the chapter in which the given film presents its most compelling qualities, or at least those qualities most important for the argument of the chapter.
So, Hollywood westerns figure into the chapter on geomorphism, colonial/postcolonial thematics into the chapter on anthropomorphism, wildlife films into the chapter on biomorphism, and so on — even though any one of these films could be read through each of these lenses and the other six (or more; see the quote below on these) if I gave equal time to each of the three triads. Doing that would have made an already long book far too long, but doing any less — for instance, by not giving the geomorphism-anthropomorphism-biomorphism triad the kind of in-depth treatment I gave them — would have made the model incomprehensible.
Seth Peabody and Niall Flynn both identify the book’s utopian impulse as found in the search for film’s “cinematic materialism” (Žižek’s term), that is, in the possibility of presenting a cinematic materiality in and through the film-world — as I (and Žižek) argue that films like Stalker do. This differs from the material materialism of, say, minimizing carbon and resource expenditures, or the social materialism of socialist-feminist or anarcho-communitarian relations of production. While I wouldn’t reduce my own utopianism to that form of (cinematic-perceptual) materialism alone, that’s an important part of what I argue for.
To get a sense of the difference between these, the following quote, taken from pages 41-42 of the book, is helpful. Note that what’s referred to here is not the primary “triad of triads” framing the book, a triad that is derived more directly from Peirce’s categories. It is a triad derived from a single triad — that of materiality, sociality, and perceptuality, which are terms that I take from Guattari (though he would have used “mentality” for “perceptuality”). But it articulates the differences well.
As I re-read it, it helps me realize that the kind of cinematic materialism I would advocate has less to do with meanings that are made of films and more to do with meanings that can be made, especially once the subjectivity of each of the three “layers” — matter, perception, and sociality — is recognized as fully and unmistakably real. Maybe that makes me something like a “subject-oriented” cinematic ontologist, where subjectivity is recognized to arise in subject-object relations amidst all things.
“These three ecologies [the material, the social, and the perceptual] are ultimately overlapping; at the same time, each has its own material, social, and perceptual aspects. At the risk of multiplying our triads to the point of absurdity, we could delineate three materialities, three perceptualities, and three socialities.
“Regarding materialities, there is, first, the materiality of matter: the physical ecologies and actual material relations (chemical, industrial) making up the production of film, from mining and manufacturing through to waste disposal. Second, there is the materiality of perception: the perceptual apparatus, which is technological (cameras, animation and graphics software, projection and viewing equipment), social-situational (viewing contexts such as a movie house, multiplex, living room, or portable video player), and bodily (eyes, ears, a certain bodily orientation). And third, there is the materiality of the social: the relations of cinematic production, distribution, and reproduction, and the rituals and rhythms of moviegoing, home movie viewing, review searching, blogging, and so on.
“Regarding perceptualities, there are those of matter, of perception itself, and of the social; these are, respectively, cinema’s geomorphism, its bio- or animamorphism, and its anthropomorphism (see Chapter 1).” [Note: These are the three that are the focus of the film’s three long central chapters.]
“And regarding socialities, there are those of matter, of perception, and of the social. The first of these is the subjectivity of matter itself: film’s real potential for vitalizing the object-world. Cinema embodies a certain sociality of the material world, with certain things—landscapes, animals, objects—typically, but not always, denied social recognition and others granted greater or lesser degrees of it. The sociality of perception is the subjectivity of the vital, interperceptual world; it is the way in which the interperceptivity of cinema embodies a sociality, an ethics, and a biopolitics of relations between us and the vital world of living things. (More on that in Chapter 5.) And the sociality of the social refers to the subjectivity of social relations and the ways in which the sociality of cinema—cinema-viewing as a collective process—embodies, conveys, and facilitates the processes of subjectivation of persons, selves, possibilities, as well as new relations between them.”
