Cinema of/for the Anthropocene: Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship

Cinema of/for the Anthropocene sheds new light on the question of how films can allow us to resituate ourselves within what is known today as the Anthropocene. The authors address this question through a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives, from film and cultural studies, new materialisms, critical posthumanism and animal studies, critical race theory and Indigenous media studies, to gender and sexuality studies, with a primary focus on films produced in the United States and Canada.

The volume moves beyond the mere acknowledgment of the devastating damage inflicted during the Anthropocene to think about new ways of inhabiting the world through concepts such as affect, response-ability, and more-than-human kinship. The writers in this collection respond to its invitation by addressing a range of genres and modes, thus complicating the apocalyptic discourses which have typically been central to the studies on the Anthropocene: in addition to dystopian films, the volume discusses animated films, Hollywood biopics, climate change documentaries, experimental film, comedy, horror sci-fi, as well as disease thriller and survival film. Taken together, the chapters offer cross-disciplinary readings of the cinema of/for the Anthropocene, showing ways in which it can help us re-orient our thinking to make sense of the current age and address the planetary-scale environmental catastrophe.

This volume will appeal to researchers and students in film studies, cultural studies, and the burgeoning field of environmental humanities.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword: “Created to Dream”: The Voices and Visions of Cinema of/for the Anthropocene, Salma Monani

Chapter 1: Thinking Cinema of/for the Anthropocene: An Introduction, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz 

Part I: Affect, Ecology, and Pedagogies of Worldly Reciprocity

Chapter 2: A Film History of Utter Rebellion: Dewesternizing Film Studies for the Chthulucene, William Brown 

Chapter 3: Willful Aesthetics: Pedagogies of Exposure in Animated Short Film, Libe García Zarranz 

Chapter 4: Envisioning Intergenerational Justice: Hope, Despair, and Transformative Action in Climate Change Films, Alexa Weik von Mossner 

Chapter 5: Take Back the Walk: Trekking and Female Empowerment in Wild and Tracks, Virginia Luzón-Aguado 

Chapter 6: Between Manipulation and Catharsis: Living a Life in the Mediated Anthropocene, Ignacio Bergillos 

Part 2: More-Than-Human Kinship, Hybridity, and Monstrous Alliances

Chapter 7: Collaborative Making, Not Taking: Nova Paul Exposes Cinema’s Material Roots, Missy Molloy

Chapter 8: Land Agency and the Animacy of Stories in Danis Goulet’s and Amanda Strong’s Short Films, Andrea Ruthven

Chapter 9: New Animism and Shamanic Cinema: Human-Animal-Machine Interactions, Marta Segarra

Chapter 10: Being (with) Animals: Human-Horse Relations, Gender, and Queer/Trans Embodiment in Barbara Hammer’s A Horse Is Not a Metaphor and Ann Oren’s Passage, Kornelia Boczkowska 

Chapter 11: Biological Imagination, Critical Environmentalism, and Anthropocene in Annihilation, Galyna Maleeva 

Chapter 12: Inhabiting a Viral Culture, Verena Andermatt Conley