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  • The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources by Nadia Bozak
  • Brian R. Jacobson (bio)
The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. By Nadia Bozak. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+241. $26.95.

Images of the "iron horse"—a surging mass of smoke-spewing metal—electrified early film audiences, mythically sending viewers scrambling for the exits, but more likely transporting them safely into modern movie reveries of moving machines. From the Lumières' L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de la Ciotat (1895) and Edison's Black Diamond Express (1896) to Dziga Vertov's masterpieces of technological celebration, films made emblems not only of trains, but also of the electric lights, factory machines, towering smokestacks, and feats of civil engineering that helped build the modern world. That they did so should come as no surprise. Given its origins in the technologies and materials produced by the first Industrial Revolution and the social and cultural conditions engendered by the second, cinema could not help but become product, producer, and re-producer of industrial modernity.

The corollary of this relationship, rooted in the film industry's longstanding contributions to modern forms of environmental destruction and their implicit visual celebration, has rarely been recognized. Inspired by contemporary eco-criticism, Nadia Bozak's provocative, if at times disappointing, The Cinematic Footprint investigates this darker side of cinema's technological and environmental history. Pairing accounts of film's industrialization and use of natural resources with close readings of film representations of nature and technology and calls to action to environmentally conscious filmmakers, the book makes a compelling case for a more ecologically minded cinema. Yet where it succeeds in posing important and thoughtful questions about the deleterious effects of filmmaking in the early years of the "digital age," the book comes up short in explaining how, why, and where cinema has exploited nature or what, exactly, scholars stand to gain from an ecological turn in our understanding of cinema.

The book's signal strength lies in its insistence that "cinema is intricately [End Page 424] woven into industrial culture and the energy economy that sustains it" (p. 1). Bozak casts a sharp eye on naïve claims about digital technologies' potential for transforming moviemaking into a "green" industry. Building on media scholars' recent attention to the materials and physical infrastructure that subtend what has too often been characterized—and popularly celebrated—as an immaterial "new media" world, she connects digital media's materiality to its attendant waste. Taking its place in a long line of resource-hungry mediating machines, she shows, digital technology contributes no less to the depletion of natural resources and the production of industrial waste and pollution than its analog predecessors. While digital films and distribution methods may eliminate many meters of celluloid and miles per gallon, they also devour electricity in computing cycles and amplify the detritus of consumer excess in generation after new generation of digital devices made to pass from shelves to homes to landfills with appalling rapidity.

And yet, Bozak does not discount the film industry or digital technology's potential to foster reform. Even as film remains "a perpetuator of ecological incursion," she rightly argues, it nonetheless offers a vital "means of making visible what seems an inexhaustible list of environmental causes and causes for concern" (p. 89). In an effort to push beyond the predictable argument that environmentally themed films have the power to make viewers ecologically conscious, Bozak proposes an appealing concept—the "resource image"—to describe filmed images that reveal their relationship to the biophysical world. Although undertheorized, this concept offers a valuable starting point for ecologically focused film criticism attendant to both unwitting (as in the case of the BP "spillcam," a live video feed of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010) and consciously environmentalist forms of film practice.

Bozak seeks progressive models in Soviet theories about revolutionary filmmaking under conditions of scarcity and in the history of avant-garde and experimental cinema. This history curiously leaves out the likes of Stan Brakhage, whose camera-less films and use of natural materials offer a powerful evocation of the kind of low-impact cinema to which...

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