It will be quite an event for Peirce scholars. My proposed paper will be on applications of Peirce to film theory, and in particular the two neo- (quasi-?) Peircian approaches that I present in Ecologies of the Moving Image. The first of these builds on Sean Cubitt’s three-part typology of the image (pixel–cut–vector, which I […]
Archive for the ‘Cinema’ Category
Preparing my Peirce Centennial proposal
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged aesthetics, ethics, logic, Peirce, Peirce Centennial Congress on July 1, 2013 | Leave a Comment »
How a film becomes a subject
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Process-relational thought, tagged Up the Yangtze on May 28, 2013 | 1 Comment »
A key question for a process-relational account of a film is the question of how that film shows objects and subjects in the process of being made — how it shows subjectivation and objectivation arising together. Much of Ecologies of the Moving Image is about this, but what remains more implicit throughout the book is the way […]
Stalking the book…
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged Chernobyl, Stalker, Tarkovsky, Zone on May 22, 2013 | 1 Comment »
Teaching my film course (especially in its current rendition as “Ecology Film Philosophy”) and the book that goes with it (Ecologies of the Moving Image, which will be publicly available in July) — and especially teaching the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, which serves as a sort of template for the book — makes me feel […]
Vik Muniz & his waste pickers
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged art, capitalism, documentary, film, recycling, trash, Vik Muniz on February 25, 2013 | 3 Comments »
Here are my introductory comments to the 2010 documentary Waste Land, delivered yesterday at the Fleming Museum in Burlington and shown in connection with the exhibition High Trash, which runs until May 19.
2 or 3 things about the cinema book
Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Visual culture, tagged ecocinema, Ecologies of the Moving Image on October 22, 2012 | 7 Comments »
Ecologies of the Moving Image is a book of ecophilosophy that happens to be about cinema, and about the 12-decade history of cinema at that. What makes it ecophilosophy? It is philosophy that is deeply informed both by an understanding of ecological science and an interdisciplinary appreciation for today’s ecological crisis. Why cinema?
The wound of eco-trauma
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged Ecologies of the Moving Image on September 18, 2012 | 2 Comments »
My article “The Wound of What Has Not Happened Yet: Cine-Semiotics of Eco-Trauma” appeared in the trilingual (English-German-Czech) arts journal Umelec late last year. (It kicked off the issue, followed by Mark Fisher’s wonderful “Terminator vs. Avatar: Notes on Accelerationism.”) The editors illustrated it with photos from David Cronenberg’s Crash, which I found funny. The […]
Illienko’s poetic cinema
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged film, Illienko, Ukraine, Ukrainian Poetic Cinema on September 5, 2012 | 2 Comments »
The following is an article I originally wrote in 1989, or maybe 1988, after seeing three films by Ukrainian poetic cinema master Yuri Illienko (a.k.a. Iurii/Yurij/Jurij Ilyenko/Ilienko/Illyenko/Il’yenko). Two of the films — A Well for the Thirsty and Eve of Kupalo Night, or St. John’s Eve — had languished unseen under Soviet censorship for some […]
Ukrainian Poetic Cinema series
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged Ukrainian Poetic Cinema on September 5, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
These are some of my favorite films of all time. “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” was groundbreaking and the 3 Illienko films rarely get shown anywhere. (“Eve of Ivan Kupalo” is one of the wildest rides on celluloid.) See them on the big screen — at the Lincoln Center this coming week — if you’re in […]
Toward an ecophilosophical cinema
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Visual culture, tagged film, Malick, Peirce, von Trier on February 17, 2012 | 13 Comments »
My paper for this year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, coming up next month in Boston, will focus on the two films that got a lot of side-by-side attention at last year’s Cannes festival, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Since a few of my favorite bloggers have […]
Last man
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged Angelopoulos, modernism on February 3, 2012 | 3 Comments »
I’m catching up on the news that Theo Angelopoulos died last week. Hit by a motorcycle. Now that the “last of the European modernists” (as he’s often called) is dead, where does that leave us? Like kids searching for a father we never knew? http://youtu.be/EC-AhAYLnOc
Shaviro responds
Posted in Cinema, Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture, tagged affect, Shaviro on September 2, 2011 | 2 Comments »
Steven Shaviro has posted his response to my and three other “curators’ notes” on his Post-Cinematic Affect. The twists and turns of the discussions that have followed each of the daily commentaries have been fascinating. Somehow we’ve gone from a discussion of recent cinema to theorizing about affect and the limitations of recent affect theory […]
Cinemas of the Not-Yet
Posted in Cinema, tagged film, heterotopia, utopia on August 30, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
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: