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Archive for the ‘Visual culture’ Category

Anthropocene aesthetics

Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged , , on April 10, 2014 | 1 Comment »

Cross-posting this piece by Emil from A(s)cene. Taylor’s coral reef art is beautiful. See also the discussion of Donna Haraway’s “String Figures” lecture and Bruno Latour’s 11 theses on capitalism.   

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Apocalypstickle?

Posted in Politics, Visual culture on February 21, 2014 | Leave a Comment »

Just as environmental media have a penchant for the spectacle of “disaster porn,” so does political media reveal a strong attraction to what Politico’s Sarah Kendzior, in “The Day We Pretended to Care About Ukraine,” calls the “apocalypstickle.” An ugly word for political observers’ weird fascination with apocalyptic imagery. Brueghel, Bosch . . . and […]

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50 years

Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged , , on November 16, 2013 | 1 Comment »

A. O. Scott’s article on the Abraham Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination captures something of the 50-year transition from the first cinéma vérité president (Kennedy) to a world in which everyone is their own cinéma vérité celebrity — stars and legends in our own minds. The Zapruder film in a sense predates all that — it comes […]

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Documenting the act of killing

Posted in Cinema, Politics, Visual culture, tagged , , , , on October 23, 2013 | 4 Comments »

The following is reblogged, excerpted and modified, from e²mc. How do films deal with historical atrocities? And how might they enable them in the first place? The Act of Killing is Joshua Oppenheimer’s chilling documentary about the perpetrators of the mass murders committed by the Suharto regime’s paramilitary death squads in mid-1960s Indonesia. The filmmakers […]

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First after-thoughts…

Posted in Cinema, Philosophy, Visual culture, tagged on July 30, 2013 | 5 Comments »

It arrived a few days ago. Feels good to grasp in the hand: thick, solid, “capacious” (as Steven Shaviro says in one of the cover blurbs). And Tarkovsky has rarely looked as green as on the cover. But I’ve already found an indefensible oversight:

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Nice or what?

Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged , , on July 17, 2013 | 4 Comments »

The above is (a) beautiful, (b) ugly, (c) neither beautiful nor ugly in itself (nor anything else in particular), or (d) _________ (fill in the blank)? It’s a view (on a particularly hazy day) of the Sheffield wind power project in northeast Vermont, as seen from Crystal Lake State Park beach outside the town of […]

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Vik Muniz & his waste pickers

Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , 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.

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2 or 3 things about the cinema book

Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Visual culture, tagged , 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?

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Illienko’s poetic cinema

Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged , , , 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 […]

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Ukrainian Poetic Cinema series

Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged 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 […]

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Nature & the Popular Imagination keynote

Posted in Eco-culture, Visual culture on June 7, 2012 | Leave a Comment »

Here’s the abstract for the keynote I will be giving at Nature and the Popular Imagination in Malibu this August. It builds on my recent talk at Bucks College, but without the nod to pop-cultural interest in Avatar. THE AGE OF THE WORLD MOTION PICTURE starring the Cinematic Earth, with cameo appearances by Charles Darwin, […]

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Toward an ecophilosophical cinema

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Eco-theory, Visual culture, tagged , , , 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 […]

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