Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature

Acknowledgements

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Parts of this book have been presented at numerous conferences and in teaching and speaking venues, and segments have appeared in books and in journals, but all of these have been modified, some extensively, for this publication. Portions of the first two chapters appeared in “The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema,” Film-Philosophy 15, no. 1 (2011); and in “An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image,” Ecomedia Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2012). Three different segments of Chapter 6 appeared, respectively, in “Stirring the Geopolitical Unconscious: Toward a Jamesonian Ecocriticism?,” New Formations 64 (2008); “The Wound of What Has Not Happened Yet: CineSemiotics of Eco-Trauma,” Umelec 11, no. 2 (2012); and “What Can a Film Do? Assessing Avatar’s Global Affects,” Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, ed. Alexa Weik von Mossner (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, forthcoming). Brief segments from Chapters 1, 3, and 4 made their way into “Cinema of the Not-Yet: The Utopian Promise of Film as Heterotopia,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 5, no. 2 (2011); and smatterings from throughout the book were first presented in print in “Green Film Criticism and Its Futures,” Foreign Literature Studies 29, no. 1 (2007); and in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 15, no. 2 (2008). I am grateful to the publishers of all of these articles and chapters for allowing me to reprint material here, and to their anonymous reviewers for their most useful comments during the development of those pieces. I am particularly grateful to those who read, heard, commented on, and contributed to the development of the materials presented herein. They include students in my course “Ecopolitics and the Cinema,” which I taught four times between 2005 and 2010, including as an open-to-the-public lecture and film series at the Main Street Landing Film House in Burlington, Vermont. They also include many friends and colleagues in the worlds of ecocriticism, ecomedia studies, film and communication studies, philosophy, and cultural and religious studies, whom I have met at conferences, in online conversations (including through my blog Immanence, where many of the theoretical ideas xii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS underpinning this book were first presented), and elsewhere. Of these, my conversations with the following have been particularly meaningful: David Ingram, Alexa Weik von Mossner, Pat Brereton, Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt, Todd McGowan, Wendy Wheeler, Greg Garrard, Steven Shaviro, Michael O’Rourke, Karin Sellberg, Bron Taylor, Robert Mugerauer, Leo Braudy, Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu (kvond), Paul Ennis, Levi Bryant, Chris Vitale, Mark Crosby, Paul Bains, Jeremy Trombley, Michael Pyska, Tim Morton, Shane Denson, Adam Robbert, Leon Niemoczynski, Jason Hills, Dirk Felleman, and Ian Bogost. I am most deeply grateful to David Brahinsky, who read and generously commented on the entire manuscript in its early stages, to Pat Brereton for his detailed and incisive comments on the near-final manuscript, and to two anonymous referees from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. I must also express deep gratitude for a Research Opportunities Grant from the University of Vermont, which greatly facilitated the development of this project, and for a one-year sabbatical from that university during the course of the book’s writing. In addition, speaking invitations and travel grants from the Rachel Carson Center at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, the Arts at Bucks Lecture Series at Bucks College in Pennsylvania, and the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture helped propel the development of these ideas. Finally, I am most grateful to the many talented elves and mages at Wilfrid Laurier University Press, whose interest, patience, perseverance, and general helpfulness made this book possible. They include acquisitions editor Lisa Quinn, who shepherded the project from its inception, managing editor Rob Kohlmeier, copy editor extraordinaire Matthew Kudelka, marketing coordinator Leslie Macredie, publicist Clare Hitchens, and the Environmental Humanities book series team led by Cheryl Lousley. This book is dedicated to Zoryán, who will grow into a world whose cinemorphologies I can barely imagine. ...