It’s been slow here because I am hard at work on the manuscript of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which I had hoped to finish this summer. The first three chapters are complete or close to it; the last three and final epilogue are in various stages of semi-completion. Until they are complete, blogging may […]
Posts Tagged ‘film’
writing…
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Philosophy, Process-relational thought, tagged film, Peirce on July 6, 2010 | 7 Comments »
two or three scenes…
Posted in Cinema, tagged film, Godard, great scenes, Wenders on March 14, 2010 | 2 Comments »
How à propos: Today’s Guardian’s piece on The Greatest Film Scenes Ever Shot. What are your favorite scenes, your most indelibly etched screen memories, those “tiny pieces of time” as the article quotes James Stewart saying, that have remained with you ever since seeing them? (The comments open things up to a wider range than […]
cinema, ontology, ecology
Posted in Cinema, Eco-theory, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecology, film, Ontology, epistemology, Peirce, Whitehead 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. [. . .]
the decay of images (& of bodies)
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged Bergson, ecology, film, gothic, Harman, image, impermanence, mortality, photography, time on February 19, 2010 | 10 Comments »
Catherine Grant’s wonderful Film Studies for Free has posted a great set of resources on film preservation as part of the Film Preservation Blogathon, which features blog posts, articles, images, videos, tweets, and rallying calls from distinguished cinephiles including Roger Ebert, David Bordwell, and others. The video above (included there) is a Studio 360 piece […]
Avatar’s global affects
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged animism, anthropology, Avatar, Decolonization, ecopolitics, ecopsychology, film, Hollywood, indigenous, paganism, pantheism on February 15, 2010 | 51 Comments »
It’s been fascinating to watch the unfolding public conversation about Avatar (much of which, come to think of it, my early review had anticipated): environmentalist celebrations of how it portrays the Earth rising up against the megamachine of capitalism and patriarchy; critiques of how the film perpetuates the stereotyping of indigenous people and reiterates tropes of their salvation by white male messiah figures; the Vatican’s and religious right’s denunciations of its pantheism; the film’s advance of technological wizardry into the domain of a virtual hyperreality, like The Matrix but replacing that film’s gnosticism with a pantheistic new age science of networks and neural systems; and debates over the balance struck in the film between good spectacle (the high-tech stuff) and bad narrative (poor writing, flat characterization, stereotypes all over), or between bad spectacle (Spielbergian gee-whiz stuff) and good narrative (such as the film’s allegorization of global capitalism’s destruction of indigenous communities). Film Studies for Free has usefully summarized the various allegorical readings of the film proposed so far, many of which get articulated in conversations and comments by viewers in various blogs, op-ed commentaries, and social networking sites. [more]
Invictus & the politics of affect
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture, tagged film, neoliberalism, Politics, South Africa on January 2, 2010 | 14 Comments »
There are many things one can say about Invictus: about Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela, Eastwood’s directorial prowess and editorial conceits (e.g., masculinity and its transformation through individual experience), the film’s characterization of post-Apartheid South Africa, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of its portrayal of the actual story of the South African national rugby team’s, the Springboks’, stunning rise to victory in the 1995 World Cup. What interests me most, though, is its depiction of mass affect and collective emotion, which are portrayed in two of the main variants these take in today’s world: sports and politics. [. . .]
The film’s crystal moments, those affect-carrying plateaus or peak moments embodying its main tensions, are those surrounding the combat on the field and its emanation into the crowd: slowed down crunches of bodies against bodies (unprotected, unlike in American football), sweat leaping between them out of their crushing impact, rapid cuts between on-field plays that occur too quickly to be followed and can only be enjoyed as sheer spectacle, and crowds leaping for joy, singing, applauding, and dancing, their emotions spreading like waves across the stadium, the streets, and the nation. [. . .]
xmas in red & blue
Posted in Cinema, tagged film, imagination, Jung on December 28, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Best gift received: Carl Jung’s Red Book. Very beautiful, with nice overviews and interpretations by Sonu Shamdasani. If this doesn’t revive an interest in Jung, I don’t know what can (though, as I’ve argued, we’re overdue for a new, more integrated theory of imagination). Stupidest film to show on an airplane that’s just spent two […]
Avatar: Panthea v. the Capitalist War Machine
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged ecocriticism, ecopolitics, film, Hollywood, ideology, paganism, pantheism on December 21, 2009 | 42 Comments »
New York Times op-ed columnist Ross Douthat has it partly right: with its tree/Goddess-worshipping, tribal-shamanic-indigenous-hunter-gatherer-Daoist-pagan New-Age all-is-One-ism, Avatar is an expression of the longstanding American tradition of pantheist nature spirituality. Douthat thinks that that’s mainstream and that Hollywood is fully behind it, but it’s really still the insurgent religion to muscular Christianity and militarist nationalism. This is one of the rare films in which the Goddess (Mother Nature & the Natives) takes on the Capitalist War Machine and… well, you’ll have to see who wins.
But behind it all is the Spielberg factor, i.e., that the overt message (‘Man vs. Nature’, or rather high-modernist techno-capitalism vs. Body-Shop-nature-tech) is undercut by the implicit message that it is science, technology, and Hollywood magic — the Image Industry, the Spectacle — that enchants us and brings us what we really want. And they bring us new life, maybe eternal life […]
Where the Wild Things Are
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged ecopsychology, film, psychoanalysis on October 28, 2009 | 9 Comments »
I loved Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, so I’ve compiled a list of some useful online resources about the film, book, and author (mostly for my own sake, so I can easily access them if and when I might get around to writing more about it). Just to summarize what I like most […]
walking history’s ruins w/ Chris Marker & Arvo Pärt
Posted in Cinema, Visual culture, tagged art, film, history on October 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Michael Moore may be American cinema’s best known film essayist (or propagandist, if you like), but the leader of the genre is still alive and kicking, at age 88, living quietly in Paris (no doubt with one or several cats). Chris Marker’s Pictures at an Exhibition is a walk through a gallery of his photoshopped […]
Mars attacks Sydney!
Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, Visual culture, tagged ecoapocalypse, ecocinema, film on September 23, 2009 | 7 Comments »
The photos are a bit too beautiful to resist sharing. And the stories taken from the archive of the already screened: “like scenes from Mad Max,” “like waking up on Mars,” “like a nuclear winter morning”. . . White urban Australia’s dreamtime apocalypse of being taken over by the Outback, the uncanny aboriginal sacred that […]
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