experimental artists cinema & theory and works by cathy fitzgerald. Thesis working title – 'The ecocidal eye: beyond the anthropocentric gaze to a relational gaze in cinema'
‘Most academic film studies professionals don’t take nature film seriously, either historically or theoretically. Indeed, there are few better indications of the educationally counterproductive gap between the humanities and the sciences’, Scott Macdonald, Adventures of Perception (2009) p. 156.
A new academic book, published by Routledge is due out in a couple of months and will add to the small field in which I’m working.
Two of the author/editors, Stephen Rust and Salma Monani are part of the US led ecomediastudies.org site which I’ve recently been asked to contribute. This upcoming title will join Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s 2010 book Framing the World: explorations in ecocriticism and film, probably the most comprehensive book to date on the area, although Scott MacDonald, a film theorist with a literary background, had signalled attention needed to be paid to nature films in several articles in mid 2000s; he also coined the word ‘ecocinema’ in 2004. My own area, investigating experimental cinema that reference ecological perspectives, is a subset again of this new field. I expect most of the texts in the new book will be looking at feature length documentary or mainstream films. Nevertheless, its encouraging that more work is been done in this area. Key ideas of ecocriticism are coming from literary theory and only recently have been taken up by other cultural disciplines such as cinema. (more…)
'The Environmental Humanities'(2012) via filmmaker/video artist Peter Norrman and collaborators
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I’ve been delighted to have been recently asked to be a contributor on the US/international ecomediastudies.org website. The website has a excellent resource page of key academic books and references and really useful, it has a page dedicated to journal calls for papers, conferences.
‘The Ecomedia Studies community seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary and innovative approaches to the study of non-print media as it applies to environmental discourse and action’.
On the site recently was the above video which I found really useful, particularly as a means to put faces to some of the people whose books I’ve read. For those interested, (note the video is 40 min. long), the people interviewed in the video discuss the relatively recent intersection of the environment and the humanities. It is quite an engaging documentary as amongst the interviews it includes virtual video and photo essay installations. (more…)
The Ecological Humanities is an Australian journal/resource info website inspired by the work of the late Val Plumwood, a leader in ecofeminist thought. They had a special issue of Writing in the Anthropocene here in 2009,
Introduction: Writing in the Anthropocene
This issue of Ecological Humanities was dedicated to a topic inspired by Val Plumwood:
‘Thinking about writing for the Anthropocene’
In the last article she wrote before her death, Plumwood spoke passionately about the role of writers in our current time of crisis. She called for poets and other writers to join in a rethinking that
‘has the courage to question our most basic cultural narratives’. In particular, she called for writing that is ‘open to experiences of nature as powerful, agentic and creative, making space in our culture for an animating sensibility and vocabulary’.
This, she says, is a major task facing the humanities today (‘Nature in the Active Voice’, Australian Humanities Review 46).
The articles in the 2009 issue of Ecological Humanities explore the role and dimensions of writing in this time of environmental change. They sought out the kinds of writing capable of shaking up our culture, and awakening us to new and more enlivened understandings of the world, our place in it, and the situated connectivities that bind us into multi-species communities.
The ‘Ecological Humanities’ is situated within Australia’s oldest and most prestigious on-line humanities journal: the Australian Humanities Review. It was launched in 2004 to provide a publication dedicated to the ecological humanities. More information and advice to contributors is available here.
I wish I’d seen this before writing my last article The Anthropocene: 10 000 years of ecocide.
