Here’s a fragment from Chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image. This chapter covers cinema’s “geomorphism,” by which I mean the part of cinema’s world-making capacity, its becoming-world-ness, that presents us with an objectscape, a territory within which things happen and action occurs. This is in contrast to cinema’s “anthropomorphism” (a subset of “subjectomorphism”), which refers to the cinematic production and distribution of agency, the capacity to act (which is the film-world’s subjectscape). Between these two poles is the “biomorphic field,” the interactive liveliness within which subjectivation and objectivation are distinguished and separated from each other, moment to moment.
Chapter Three is the longest chapter in the book, featuring theoretical discussion as well as analysis of emblematic films by directors including John Ford (The Searchers), Alexander Dovzhenko (Earth), Pare Lorentz (The River), Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider), Michelangelo Antonioni, Stan Brakhage, Jia Zhang-Ke, and Peter Greenaway. The excerpt below comes at the chapter’s end. One of the central conceits of the book is that film constitutes a journey into a film-world, a cinematic Zone, a world defined by the three dimensions mentioned (geomorphism, anthropomorphism, biomorphism), and that the film-experience is a specific viewer’s negotiation of the lures offered by a film to be drawn into that film’s film-world. The two films discussed below provide different variations of that journey into the Zone of cinema.
