Cinema of/for the Anthropocene

“Crossing an impressive range of forms, industries, perspectives and practices, the contributions to this splendid collection are distinguished by a reparative impulse to locate, amid the wreckage signalled by the term ‘Anthropocene,’ the tools we need for constructing a co-habitable future. As these pieces show, cinematic forms can reveal and activate sustaining, Earth-focused forms of pedagogy, relationality, embodiment, perception, affect, spectatorship, ethics, and politics.”

-- Pansy Duncan (Massey University), co-author of Screening the Posthuman (2023)

"Human understanding of the world around us has changed and it's time cinema studies caught up. This outstanding volume rises to that challenge with aplomb!"

-- Stephen Rust (University of Oregon), co-editor of Ecocinema Theory and Practice (2013) and Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2 (2023)

“Cinema of/for the Anthropocene offers a diverse and global group of case studies ranging from art installations and documentaries to shorts and feature films—all rep­resentative of filmmakers from occidental regions as well as Indigenous practitioners and theorists and artists from the Global South. The authors cumulatively scrutinize new theoretical concep­tions of how to think about the Anthropocene. In doing so, they shift away from anthropocentric concepts and argue instead for more-than-human relationality and kinship, the decentering of Western frameworks, and ecocritical perspectives that go beyond sentient life to further include land agency and viral presence. […] This col­lection challenges its readers to renegotiate their (largely European) anthropocentric worldviews, instead embrac­ing concepts and practices that honor (and extend beyond) a singular understanding of humanity.”

-- M. Sellers Johnson, review in Film Quarterly

“Combining a thorough command of previous work on the field—including an awareness of its potential shortcomings—with an interdisciplinary outlook—ranging from decolonial studies to queer ecofeminism, animal studies, affect studies, or critical posthumanism—the twelve contributions to the volume share the goal of exploring new ways of seeing and thinking the Anthropocene from an intersectional perspective; one which is attentive to questions of gender, Blackness, Indigeneity, and animality, among others. [...] the volume’s interdisciplinary outlook and breath of corpus make it a productive read not only for film scholars, but for anyone interested in the ties between ecology and the arts across all disciplines in the humanities—including, of course, researchers in American Studies.”

-- Andrés Buesa, review in Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos