Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis

Motivated by the exigency of climate change, 'Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis' takes cinema to be an audiovisual form whose creation and meaning are deeply connected to more-than-human worlds. As part of the third wave of ecocinema studies, this collection gathers contributions on multiple cinema forms from an international group of scholars and artists who offer diverse, critical perspectives that respond to the question: How does cinema help or hinder us in coming to know the more-than-human world?

The collection homes in on the concept of the ecosystem as a biological and technological system that comprises a network of inter-relational living and their inanimate elemental affordances to explore encounters with cinema as a material object and practice, a spectatorial experience, and a representational text. The chapters cover environmental topics that span five continents and multiple histories. This book will be of special interest to film studies scholars and artists interested in cinema and climate change, environmental justice, and posthumanism.

List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction to Cinematic Ecosystems
Mary Hegedus
York University
Jessica Mulvogue
University of St Andrews

Part I. Histories of Cinematic Ecosystems: Materials, Elements, Substances
Chapter 1 ‘Please reseed.’ Camphor, Turpentine, and the Agrogeographies of Celluloid Cinema
Marek Jancovic
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Chapter 2 Liquid Photogénie: Lotic Imaginings in La glace à trois faces
Samantha R. Sharp
Binghamton University
Chapter 3 Toward a Situated Expanded Cinema: From Utopian Ecology to the Land-Based Practice of Lindsay McIntyre
Elio Della Noce
Toulouse Jean-Jaurès University
Chapter 4 Hallucinating Nature: Cinema, Psychedelics, Ecosystems
Graig Uhlin
Oklahoma State University

Part II. More-than-Human Sounds and Sights
Chapter 5 Sonic Ecologies: Affective Ecocritique in Ana Vaz’s Image-Sound Relations
Emily Collins
York University
Chapter 6 What We Come to See and Hear in Joshua Bonnetta’s The Two Sights (2020)
Christopher Pavsek
Simon Fraser University
Chapter 7 All Things Breathing: Animation, Ecology, and Resistance in the Music Videos of Tanya Tagaq
Scott Birdwise
OCAD University
Chapter 8 Ending Soon: Planet Z - Crafting Climate Perception
Mary Hegedus
York University

Part III. Giving Back the Land
Chapter 9 The Tiniest Place: Memory, Transcorporeality and Ecological Reclaiming in Tatiana Huezo’s El lugar más pequeño (2011)
Aarón Lacayo
Gettysburg College
Chapter 10 Alien Invasion and Multispecies Justice: Representations of Circumpolar Ecosystems in Contemporary Inuit Sci-Fi Horror Cinema
Jennifer Schell
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Chapter 11 Flooded Spaces of Displacement: Dams and Memories of Ecological Emergency in Spanish Documentaries
Ariadna Cordal
Pompeu Fabra University
Chapter 12 Fallow Land: Representing Rural Life in Spain Through Documentary Films
McKew Devitt
University of Vermont

Part IV. Rethinking Ecological Relations in Practice and Spectatorship
Chapter 13 Leafing the Movie Theater
Zeke Saber
Binghamton University
Chapter 14 Encountering Flying Foxes: Audience Response and Reckoning with Ecosystem Disruption in Australia
Melanie Ashe
Monash University
Simon R. Troon
Monash University
Belinda Smaill
Monash University
Chapter 15 Breaking the Species Divide: Entangled Empathy and Environmental Hope in The Olive Tree and My Octopus Teacher
Virginia Luzón-Aguado
University of Zaragoza
Chapter 16 New Canadian Experimental Ecocinema: Placemaking, Immersiveness and Alternate Ecologies of Relationality in vulture, Phil Hoffman (2019); Geographies of Solitude, Jacquelyn Mills (2022); and Lichen, Lisa Jackson (2019)
Brenda Longfellow
York University

Appendix 1: Cinematic Ecosystems: Suggested Film Programs
Author Biographies
Index

Mary Hegedus is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. After a career as an IT Consultant, she moved to academia to pursue degrees in anthropology and film. She completed both her undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, where her research focused on fungi and post-apocalyptic film. She has presented papers at conferences both nationally and internationally, examining works with themes of climate change. Her current research explores the transhistorical theme of decomposition as an aesthetic in early cinematic film and as a material and aesthetic practice in contemporary Ecomedia filmmakers’ work.

Jessica Mulvogue is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She is a researcher of ecocinema and environmental catastrophe, immersive and interactive cinemas, and experimental and documentary film and has published articles and chapters in these areas in 'Studies in World Cinema', 'Transformations Journal', 'The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema', and 'The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change'. She is the co-editor (with Michael Brendan Baker) of 'The Interactive Documentary in Canada' (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024), and she is currently working on her first monograph, 'Catastrophe Aesthetics: Immersive Media and Climate Change' (Amsterdam University Press).

Media and the environment; environmental humanities; screen studies; ecology; global warming; nonhumans; posthumanism; materialism; spectatorship; animals on screen; Indigenous media; documentary film; experimental film; fiction film; film history