Another remixed outtake/spinoff from my Ecologies of the Moving Image book project has come out, this time in the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture, in a special theme issue on “Imagining Ecotopia.”
My piece is called “Cinema of the Not-Yet: The Utopian Promise of Film as Heterotopia.” Here’s the abstract:
Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s writings on utopia, Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, I argue that cinema is by its nature heterotopic: it creates worlds that are other than the ‘real world’ but that relate to that world in multiple and contradictory ways. The landscapes and people portrayed in film are affectively charged in ways that alter viewers’ relationship to the real objects denoted or signified by them. But it is the larger context of social and cultural movements that mobilizes or fails to mobilize this affective charge to draw out its critical utopian potentials. I examine four films from the 1970s—Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Stalker—as examples of richly heterotopic films that elicited utopian as well as dystopian affects in their audiences, and I discuss some ways in which American environmentalists, British Pagans, Europe’s ‘generation of ’68’, and Soviet citizens worked with these affects to imagine change in their respective societies.
The article is on the journal’s web site.
I should mention that since submitting that piece, I’ve become one of three Associate Editors of that journal, so if you have any ideas for special issues related to its titular trinity of topics, please don’t hesitate to write me about them. We generally try to publish thematic issues in alternation with more generic collections of articles.
