FSS Ecologies:听Ecologies and Documentary Moving Images
Course Convenor: Dr Laura McMahon (lcm31@cam.ac.uk), Centre for Film and听Screen and Section of French
How does contemporary documentary cinema address questions of ecologies and human-nonhuman relationality? And how are these works shaped by the pressures of environmental crisis and related concerns about scarcity, precarity and forms of life 鈥榖eyond the human鈥�? The primary focus of this module is not the recent 鈥榞reen wave鈥� of eco-docs and activist documentary (examined by John H. Duvall and others) but rather an international corpus of experimental documentaries emerging in this area, including work by James Benning, Rose Lowder, Agn猫s Varda, John Akomfrah, Wang Bing, and Lucien Castaing-Taylor and V茅r茅na Paravel. These works complicate the historically habitual relation between ecologies and the documentary moving image, refusing to render nature as spectacle while also problematising ways of knowing the beings and environments that they frame. Drawing on theorisations of the ecological, the biopolitical and the energy economies of cinema, as well as recent re-readings of classical film theory via an ecological perspective, the module examines issues of capital, resource and vulnerability as they intersect with formal questions of space/landscape, temporality and materiality. While tracing connections between these works and ecologically-oriented debates that are shaping contemporary film theory and the humanities more broadly (e.g. ecocriticism, posthumanism, critical animal studies), we will ask what the documentary moving image 鈥� and its particular claims on the real 鈥� contributes to these debates.
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Preliminary Reading
Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times听(University of Minnesota Press, 2016)
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke UP, 2010)
Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (Rutgers UP, 2012)
Dipesh Chakrabarty, 鈥楾he Climate of History: Four Theses鈥�, Critical Inquiry, 35 (Winter 2009), 197-222
Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke UP, 2012)
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (University of听Minnesota Press, 1997)
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet听(Fordham UP, 2008)
Jennifer Fay, Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (New York: Oxford UP,听2018)
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Coll猫ge de France, 1975鈥�76, trans. D.听Macey, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana (Picador, 2003)
Alexandra Juhasz and Alice Lebow (eds), A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film (Wiley听Blackwell, 2015)
Scott MacDonald, 鈥楾oward an Eco-Cinema鈥�, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and听Environment, 11:2 (2004), 107鈥�132.
Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell听(Fordham UP, 2015)
Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (eds), Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (Berghahn,听2013)
Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia UP, 2011)
Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (eds), Ecocinema Theory and Practice (Routledge,听2012)
Nicole Seymour, Strange Natures: Future, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination听(University of Illinois Press, 2013)
Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (University of Minnesota Press,听2009)
Belinda Smaill, Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (SUNY Press, 2016)听
