Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
Moving images take us on mental and emotional journeys, over the course of which we and our worlds undergo change. This is the premise of Ecologies of the Moving Image, which accounts for the ways cinematic moving images move viewers in ways that reshape our understanding of ourselves, of life, and of the Earth and universe.
This book presents an ecophilosophy of the cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to its lived ecologies—the material, social, and perceptual relations within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. Cinema, Adrian Ivakhiv argues, lures us into its worlds, but those worlds are grounded in a material and communicative Earth that supports them, even if that supporting materiality withdraws from visibility. Ivakhiv examines the geographies, visualities, and anthropologies—relations of here and there, seer and seen, us and them, human and inhuman—found across a range of styles and genres, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries to westerns and road movies, and from sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Greenaway, Malick, Dash, and Brakhage as well as YouTube’s expanding audiovisual universe.
Through its process-relational account of cinema, drawn from philosophers such as Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze, the book boldly enriches our understanding of film and visual media.
Table of Contents for Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, by Adrian J. Ivakhiv
Preface
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Journeys into the Zone of Cinema
Two perspectives on the visual | The cinema as cosmomorphic, or world making: geomorphic, biomorphic, and anthropomorphic | Stalker as paradigm: Tracking the cinema, stalking the psyche | The argument | Overview of the chapters
2. Ecology, Morphology, Semiosis: A Process-Relational Account of Cinema
The three ecologies of images: material, social, perceptual | Process-relational ontology | Perceptual ecologies: How we get drawn into the cinematic world | Peircean semiosis: firstness, secondness, and thirdness | Spectacle, narrativity, and signness | Scenes, episodes, and cinematic impact
3. Territory: The Geomorphology of the Visible
Geomorphism in life and in image | An initial typology | Picturing "nature": Landscape aesthetics as socio-natural production | Anchoring the filmic world | Staking claims and territorializing identities: Making the West | Dovzhenko's cinematic pantheism | Nature, holism, and the eco-administrative state | Industry, existential landscapes, and the firstness of things | Post-westerns, pantheism, and the ecological sublime | Kinetic landscapes, the exhilaration of movement, and the differentiation of space | Cinematic tourism, object fetishism, and the global landscape | Enframing the world, or expanding perception? | "Burn but his books": Deconstructing the gaze from both ends
4. Encounter: First Contact, Utopia, and the Becoming of Another
The ethnographic paradigm | Nanook/Allakariallak and the two-way gaze | King Kong's imperial gaze: From ethnographic to cinematic spectacle | Upriver journeys, hearts of darkness, and contact zones | Beyond first contact | Cinematic holism, auto-ethnography, and visual sovereignty | From the deconstruction of reality to its reflexive reconstruction | Green identities: images of choice, hope, struggle, and community
5. Anima Moralia: Journeys Across Frontiers
Pointing, seeing, gazing | Animating the image, imaging the animate | Writing, seeing, and faking nature | Making nature: inter-natural coproductions | Animation, plasmaticness, and Disney | Boundary traffic: seeing, being seen, and the horror of crossing over | Animal by analogy: penguins and family values | Individual crossings: Bittner's birds, Treadwell's bears | Sheer becomings: one or several types of packs | Boundary strategies: ethics of the contact zone
6. Terra and Trauma: The Geopolitics of the Real
Recapitulation of the argument | Trauma and the imagination of disaster | Strange weather, network narratives, and the traumatic event | The sublime and the Real | The eco-imaginary in post-9/11 culture | Political ecologies in three dimensions and more | Avatar's eco-apocalyptic Zone | Toward a Peircian synthesis: aesthetics, ethics, and ecologics of the image-event | Ecology, time, and the image | Ecophilosophical cinema: moving images on a moving planet
Afterword: Digital Futures in a Biosemiotic World
Appendix: Doing Process-Relational Media Analysis
Notes
Index