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Archive for the ‘Cinema’ Category

I’m part of a roundtable discussion on ecomaterialist theory that’s just been published by the New Review of Film and Television Studies. It’s with film and media studies scholars Seán Cubitt (of Melbourne University), Elena Past (Wayne State University), and Hunter Vaughan (University of Cambridge), and curated by Ludo de Roo (Macquarie University). Among other topics, the roundtable delves […]

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One of the benefits of being a Cinepoetics fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin this year is that I was able to see a lot of films at last month’s Berlin International Film Festival, thanks to my Cinepoetics accreditation. (Another benefit is simply to be in Berlin, which is such a rich place for film, […]

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The work of Jean-Luc Godard, who passed away a couple of weeks ago through euthanasia at the age of 91, has always seemed to me to be about the possibilities of cinema as a form of thinking. Cinema’s combination of sound and image, constrained by the capacities of the medium but also evolving as those […]

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My thinking about the Anthropocenic predicament continues to be informed, even haunted, by Andrei Tarkovsky’s films Solaris and Stalker, along with their literary predecessor novels by (Lviv-born) Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky brothers, respectively. Two keynote talks I’ve been invited to give this October — one for Ukraine’s Congress of Culture, to take place in […]

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To say that Billie Eilish’s “Your Power” video is intended to get under your skin (as many online commenters have suggested) is understating things. First, there the topic of the song itself (which I won’t comment on). Then there’s the interspecies intimacy (which I also won’t comment on, except to say, I can’t imagine doing […]

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My book Ecologies of the Moving Image takes Andrei Tarkovsky’s Zone, so richly depicted in his celebrated 1979 film Stalker, as a kind of master metaphor for how cinema works and, by implication, how art in general works: it beckons its receiver into following it into a zone where, at best, anything can happen. The […]

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This past week has seen a firestorm of reaction among environmentalists and climate and energy scientists to the online release of the film Planet of the Humans. Written, directed, and produced by first-time director Jeff Gibbs, but — much more importantly — executive-produced and actively promoted by Michael Moore, the film is incendiary and intentionally […]

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Media+Environment, the new, open access, online, peer-reviewed journal of transnational and interdisciplinary ecomedia research published by the University of California Press, has launched its first issue and thematic stream, on “The States of Media+Environment.” The introduction can be read here. Articles can be accessed here.

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I’ve written about ethical witnessing before — both in the eco-trauma chapter of Ecologies of the Moving Image and in my reflections on Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. Seeing Serhii Loznitsa‘s latest film, Austerlitz, at Kyiv’s Molodist Film Festival a few days ago, prompted me to think some more about how a seemingly neutral camera, […]

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Post-Cinema

At long last, Shane Denson’s and Julia Leyda’s anthology Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film has come out in Catherine Grant’s Reframe Books open-access series. This mammoth anthology features some of the leading theorists of our cinematic/media moment including Lev Manovich, Steven Shaviro, Richard Grusin, Vivian Sobchack, Francesco Casetti, Patricia Pisters, Mark Hansen, and many others. It includes an […]

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Rice University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (CENHS) has made my Cultures of Energy talk available on their YouTube channel. It’s a longer version of the material I presented at the SCMS “Post-Cinema” panel. Here’s the abstract: This paper thinks through the intersections of three developments: (1) the much debated “end of cinema” […]

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One of the films that gets a lengthy treatment in my book Ecologies of the Moving Image is Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, about the death of Timothy Treadwell at the hands of a brown bear in Alaska. I characterized it there as a complex and nuanced film that provides a series of somewhat contradictory — but cognitively and […]

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