Five hundred scholarly citations is not a lot in some fields (Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been cited at least 167,000 times). But it’s exciting to learn that my 2013 book Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature passed the 500 citation mark in Google Scholar, at some point recently. As far as I can tell, that makes it the most cited book in the field of ecocinema studies, though it may depend on how we define that field. I’ll take this occasion to think a bit more about the evolution of “ecocinema studies” and what it might mean for us today, in the era of digital media and AI.
What is “ecocinema studies”?
I believe the first time the term “ecocinema” was used in a work of film criticism (hyphenated as “eco-cinema” in that case) was by Scott MacDonald in 2004. Though it predated his use of the term, MacDonald’s 2001 book The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place was one of the earliest books we can retrospectively call “ecocinema studies.” I recognized some other antecedents in my 2008 ISLE overview of the genre as it was developing then.
To date, Google Scholar cites just under 4,000 results for the search term “ecocinema” (and just over that for “ecomedia,” though the numbers of both seem to vary day to day). That said, the study of the relationship between ecology/environment and cinematic media goes back a lot further and includes fields like environmental communication, film studies more broadly, and the ecologically informed study of specific genres like wildlife documentaries, Hollywood westerns, and others. If we include the wildlife documentary studies genre, at least two books, Greg Mitman’s Reel Nature (1999) and Derek Bousé’s Wildlife Films (2000), are more widely cited.
Pushing outward to include books about media and the environment brings in a whole range of other scholars whose works have certainly been more impactful: I’m thinking of authors like Sean Cubitt, Jussi Parikka, Jennifer Gabrys, Nicole Starosielski, Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell, and Lisa Parks. Then there is the study of cinematic representations of climate change, as carried out by environmental communication scholars like Anthony Leiserowitz, Max Boykoff, and Rachel Howell; of landscapes and environments more generally, as studied by cinema geographers like Stuart Aitken, Chris Lukinbeal, and Martin Lefebvre; and of animals and human-nonhuman relations, by scholars like Anat Pick, Akira Lippit, and Jonathan Burt. The field of environmental communication has also provided key insights for ecocinema scholars, with the work of Robert Cox, Phaedra Pezzullo, Jennifer Burgess, Matthew Nisbet, Alison Anderson, and Anders Hansen being especially relevant. And there’s also the tangentially connected field of cinema perception, which includes work like Joseph Anderson’s that draws on the “ecological psychology” of James J. and Eleanor Gibson.
So what makes “ecocinema studies” its own field, different from the others? It’s both more specific — it studies cinematic (moving-image) media, not media in general — and broader, in that it studies much more than just “representations” of environments in cinema. Ecocinema studies encompasses the study of the relationship between cinema and ecology, which is both a theoretical and empirical study, and which deals not only with representations (things shown in films) but with filmmaking practices and infrastructures, film viewing cultures, and, really, the entire life-cycle of cinema as something that produces visions and worlds for viewers to engage with.
And while some ecocinema studies scholarship focuses on a subset of cinema that might qualify as “ecocinema,” because its themes and/or methods are somehow ecologically informed, most ecocinema studies scholarship does not restrict itself in that way. Rather, it applies ecocritical methods (i.e., ecologically informed cultural critique) to studying any and all cinema. And since ecocriticism these days offers a capacious range of analytical tools, incorporating “social” or “political ecologies” as well as “media ecologies” (or perceptual-infrastructural ecologies) alongside the usual sense of ecology as material and biophysical, that can make the field quite broad.*
Many people have made the field what it is today: a good shout-out list would include some of those already mentioned (Scott MacDonald, Sean Cubitt) alongside David Ingram (whose pathbreaking 2005 book Green Screen might be the current runner-up with over 450 citations), Pat Brereton, Robin Murray and Joe Heumann, Salma Monani, Stephen Rust, Janet Walker, E. Ann Kaplan, Hunter Vaughan, Nicole Seymour, Jennifer Fay, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Pietari Kääpä, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Alenda Chang, Nadia Bozak, Selmin Kara, Sheldon Lu, Anil Narine, Cajetan Iheka, and plenty of others.
For all that, it’s still surprising to me that a volume like mine, of densely theoretical film philosophy mixed with film history and film exegesis, would be as highly cited as it is. I’m guessing that the holistic approach the book takes to cinema — understanding cinema as a worldmaking endeavor that emblematizes something fundamental (sociopolitical, technological, economic, and ecological) about the twentieth century — is what has resonated with readers. My ambition in Ecologies of the Moving Image was to tap into all the above fields, alongside their relevant philosophical sources — phenomenology, Peircian semiotics, process philosophy, and various critical theories, et al. — in order to create a multi-dimensional ecophilosophy (and ecopolitics) of cinema.
Has it peaked?
My worry, however, is that ecocinema studies may have already peaked in its growth — not because people aren’t writing on, about, and with it, but because, with the transition into digitality, cinema itself has peaked. We still watch movies, but they are ever more folded into our experience of digital media, which is ever more interactive, fragmented yet discontinuously connected (as I argue in The New Lives of Images), algorithmicized, gamified, and so on. Perhaps that’s one reason why “ecomedia” has caught up to and overtaken “ecocinema” in the citation race, despite its slightly later start. (To be fair, Sean Cubitt’s book Eco Media introduced that term back in 2005, though it didn’t get taken up as quickly. Given its purview and prescience, that book could be considered one of the first books of both ecomedia studies and ecocinema studies.)
One of the metaphors I worked with in Ecologies of the Moving Image was that of cinema as a “stalker” of the world — Tarkovsky’s film Stalker served as a kind of template for my film-philosophy — but also of cinema viewers as “the stalked,” “haunted by the Zone [of cinema], by its ambiguous allure, its lore, its promise of possibilities for change and newness in the world.” An ecophilosophical cinema, I proposed at the book’s conclusion, would be a cinema “stalked by the Earth and the cosmos.”
With digital media and now AI, I fear we are becoming stalked in a different way — stalked by our digital doppelgänger, whose promise of possibilities will be little more than a regurgitated mush of its training data fed back into itself repeatedly. Those aren’t the only possibilities of “artificial intelligence” — both the Earth and the cosmos remain accessible in the digital era, and there are artists and theorists working to make those connections much more palpable. But it’s the regurgitated images that are being offered to us most eagerly and effectively, in banal but addictively engaging forms, and the offer always comes with the unstated contract that we become more plugged into them, more dependent on them, offloading our cognitive skills to the mysterious workings of machine intelligence.
The task of formulating an ecophilosophy of AI is therefore an urgent one. At this point such an ecophilosophy would primarily be critical, an ecophilosophy against AI, or at least against its currently dominant trajectory. But more importantly it would be an ecophilosophy and ecopolitics for alternative forms of intelligence, some of which are human, many of which are organismic, and most of which are relational and more-than-artificial.
This brings up the question of whether the catchy term “more-than-human,” which some ecocritics apply not only to biological others (which I critiqued here) but also to artificial, machinic others, should be as inclusive as that, or if the mechanical and digital others — chatbots, robots, and the whole networked assemblage of them (up to AGI) — should still be considered less-than-human, since they are artificial creations of humans operating with specific, culturally and historically derived (and limited) understandings of what intelligence is and isn’t.
They remain other-than-human, with potentials we can’t predict. But let’s not blur the line entirely between things created by techno-enthusiasts and things whose evolutionary emergence arises from entirely different lines than our own.
In that sense, I suspect that ecocinema studies will go on as a subset of ecomedia studies, and the latter will be where we take on AI and its machinic derivatives. (But then, given my allegiance to media+environment, I would say that, wouldn’t I?)
Is AI the new Planet Melancholia?
*Note: This article was modified at 11:03 p.m. PST on June 11 by the addition of a paragraph, third last in the first section, to clarify a potential confusion about what constitutes ecocinema studies.