Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature

Moving images take us on mental and emotional journeys, over the course of which we and our worlds undergo change. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images move viewers in ways that reshape our understanding of ourselves, of life, and of the Earth and universe.

This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries to westerns and road movies, and from sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage as well as YouTube’s expanding audiovisual universe.

Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers such as Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media.

1

Introduction: Journeys into the Zone of Cinema

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

This chapter introduces the general concerns of the book along with the notion that cinema is "cosmomorphic" or "world-making," presents an extended analysis of one paradigmatic film, Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, and previews the chapters to follow.

2

Ecology, Morphology, Semiosis: A Process-Relational Account of Cinema

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

The main theoretical foundations are presented in this chapter. These include a summary of the process-relational approach and an account of how and why it is useful to think in threes – with three ecologies enveloping cinema (the material, the social, and the perceptual), three dimensions of the cinematic world (the geomorphic, anthropomorphic, and biomorphic), and three elements in the viewer's experience of cinema (spectacle, narrative, and "signness" or "exoreferentiality"). Each of these triads is presented and developed through examples.

3

Territory: The Geomorphology of the Visible

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

This chapter introduces the dimension of cinema's "geomorphism," that is, its creation of a background- or object-world against which action is carried out. It contextualizes cinema within western pictorial representations of nature, and proceeds to assess a range of styles of cinematic landscape depiction, from westerns, road movies, and documentaries celebrating or critiquing the "control of nature" to the cinematic pantheism of Dovzhenko and Malick, to the deconstruction of the gaze in experimental and art films such as Prospero's Books.

4

Encounter: First Contact, Utopia, and the Becoming of Another

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

This chapter deepens the analysis of cinematic depictions of "us: and "them" by probing the ethnographic impulse in all cinema, particularly that which contrasts cultural groups in their positioning with respect to nature. The cinema of "first contact," which depicts the western discovery of other people "primitives," "aliens," and "others" represents this impulse at its purest. Films discussed extend from proto-ethnographic films such as Nanook of the North to big-budget spectacles like King Kong, to more recent ethnographies, mockumentaries, postmodern and postcolonial revisionings of encounters between Europeans and Natives, and indigenous productions like Atanarjuat.

5

Anima Moralia: Journeys Across Frontiers

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

The ethnographic metaphor is extended in this chapter to the perceived boundary between humanity and the animal or wild, a boundary that can be rendered fixed and stable, or dynamic and malleable, and that can be imbued with positive, negative, or ambiguous valence. Films examined here include popular nature documentaries, fiction and animation features, and films focusing on boundary-crossing individuals such as Timothy Treadwell (Grizzly Man) and Mark Bittner (Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill).

6

Terra and Trauma: The Geopolitics of the Real

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

This chapter synthesizes threads from previous chapters to focus on the psychodynamics of the ecological crisis. It examines films that deal with the perception or recognition of eco-trauma directly (The Day After Tomorrow,, Children of Men, and Avatar) and indirectly (Short Cuts, The Ice Storm, Magnolia). It discusses the ecological sublime, Fredric Jameson's notion of the geopolitical, Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian notion of "the Real," the archetypal psychology of James Hillman, and the eco-ethics and aesthetics suggested by the architectonic of C. S. Peirce; and concludes by making the case for an ecophilosophical film viewing practice, with reference to two recent films, The Tree of Life and Melancholia.

Afterword

Digital Life in a Biosemiotic World

Adrian J. Ivakhiv

This brief chapter examines arguments about whether or not we are reaching the "end of cinema," and summarizes the book's main arguments in light of the digital revolution.