Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Media ecology’ Category

the crystal image

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged , on May 20, 2010 | 4 Comments »

A couple of recent posts by Chris Vitale and Tim Morton have rekindled my thinking about Deleuze’s crystal-image. Chris’s interesting post is about the power of crowdsourcing and video detournement in delivering a more democratic form of media politics. Tim’s brief posts share music videos and reflections on dark ecology and the timbral. Chris describes […]

Read Full Post »

May Day reports

Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology on May 1, 2010 | 1 Comment »

Happy May Day and merry Beltane, to those in a mood to celebrate this weekend. I’m traveling and unable to blog much, but the past week’s events warrant at least a quick update on why such a mood might be difficult to sustain with any steadiness. The biggest environmental bad news story was, of course, […]

Read Full Post »

the Event (or, ‘nature at its finest’)

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , on April 18, 2010 | 5 Comments »

Volcanic eruption films aren’t plentiful enough to make their own genre. Most of them fall into the disaster genre or the straight documentary video. Werner Herzog’s 1977 film La Soufrière, about the anticipated eruption in 1976 of an active volcano on the island of Guadeloupe, is different. Like his quasi-science-fictional films — Fata Morgana, Lessons […]

Read Full Post »

theory videos

Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged on April 15, 2010 | 2 Comments »

One can find an increasing number of videotaped lectures online by today’s better known cultural theorists. But lectures are lectures, and the best audio-visual teaching tools remain full-fledged documentaries like Manufacturing Consent, An Examined Life, or Slavoj Zizek’s Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, and these remain all too rare. Somewhere in between the two are small-budget, […]

Read Full Post »

cinema poetry

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged on April 6, 2010 | 1 Comment »

I just discovered the video blog Cinema Poetry, which has collected twenty (so far) of the most remarkable scenes in the history of cinema. The first of the two ride films below, the Lumiere brothers’ rickshaw film from an Indochinese village, is beautiful (watch it in full screen with the sound turned all the way […]

Read Full Post »

in praise of unfaithful thinking

Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged , , on March 28, 2010 | 4 Comments »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovsxauCwOb0&hl=en_US&fs=1& There are two ways of being an academic. One is to burrow ever deeper into the little field one cultivates, to become a master of it, all the while propping up the fenceposts around that field to ensure that one’s terrain is left undisturbed by poachers, wild boars or raccoons, dissonant ideas, and so […]

Read Full Post »

food & desert mansions

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged , on March 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

(great scenes, part 4) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rxpfO90mg8&hl=en_US&fs=1& A propos the previous post… This may be one of Antonioni’s worst, or at least most dated, films, but the climactic scene is certainly memorable, especially if you know Pink Floyd’s “Careful with that axe, Eugene” (though, honestly, once the screaming starts, the music feels pretty dated too). It’s a […]

Read Full Post »

more great scenes

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged on March 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

From Bande a Part. (Thanks to Annette for suggesting it.) Or these two from Blow Up: But I distinctly remember someone else coming along and kicking what was left of Jeff Beck’s guitar neck right after this. Am I misremembering? Did I see something that was never there in the first place, like the David […]

Read Full Post »

spring

Posted in Media ecology on March 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

While it may be the first day of spring, traveling to warm places makes it easy to forget what that means. I’ve been enjoying LA and the SCMS all this week. Besides the three sessions devoted explicitly to ecology and cinema (or ecocriticism and cinema), there have been papers and sessions on animals, water, ecocide […]

Read Full Post »

cinema, ontology, ecology

Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , on March 14, 2010 | 8 Comments »

I’m on my way this week to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in LA, where I’ll be presenting, in miniature, the ecocritical/ecophilosophical model of cinema that I’m developing in my book-in-progress. This “process-relational” model draws on Peirce, Whitehead, Deleuze, Bergson, Heidegger, and others, with inspirational nods to psychoanalysis, cognitive film theory (which, to be honest, is a little less inspirational, but to some extent inevitable), and individual theorists like Sean Cubitt, John Mullarkey, and Daniel Frampton. Its ecophilosophical basis is that it is primarily concerned with the relationship between cinema — as a technical medium, a thing in the world, and a form of human experience — and the ecologies within which humans are implicated and enmeshed. Here’s one articulation of that model. [. . .]

Read Full Post »

Bigelow, Cameron, & the aesthetics of immersion

Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, tagged , on March 11, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Steven Shaviro has a very nice post about Kathryn Bigelow following her Best Picture and Best Director wins at the Oscars. Shaviro celebrates her “poetics of vision” and aesthetics of “sensory immersion.” On her earlier film Point Break, he writes: “everything comes out of, and returns back to, the element of water. Bigelow shows us […]

Read Full Post »

Canada’s big (schmaltzy) sell

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , on March 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

The Olympics are many things. Some of them are obvious: a celebration of sport, physical achievement, and excellence; a way to bring nations together in competitive cooperation (or cooperative competition) rather than in war. Others take a few moments’ reflection to notice: they are a way for local, and sometimes national, coalitions of business interests […]

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Skip to toolbar