key experimental ecocinema books/texts

books on nature cinema/media – from literary, film, culture studies & media theory

‘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.

News: 31 August 2012 – just published!

Edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt

Published August 25th 2012 by Routledge – 344 pages

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There is a very comprehensive book/ article list and filmography at ecomediastudies.org that covers the relatively small field of theoretical enquiry of nature in mainstream media

Books that reference just cinema and nature are: (* books that examine experimental cinema)

Cover of Wildlife Films

Blewitt, John (2010) Media, ecology & conservation – using the media to protect the world’s wildlife and ecosystems. Schumacher Institute, Green Books.

Bousé, Derek. Wildlife Films. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Review of Mitman_Bouse_Ingram.doc

Brereton, Pat. Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema. Portland, OR: Intellect Ltd., 2005.

Cubitt, Sean. Eco Media. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005.

Dobrin, Sidney, I., and Morey, Sean (2009) Ecosee – image, rhetoric, nature, SUNY.

Ingram, David. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000.

Ivakhiv, Adrian: Green Film Criticism and Its Futures (2008) paper, and his website Immanence

Lindahl-Elliot, Nils Mediating Nature (2006) Mediating Nature provides a history of the present nature of mass mediation. It examines the ways in which a number of discourses, technologies and institutions have historically shaped the current ways of imagining nature in the mass media from a Culture Studies perspective, Routledge. See www.cmcee.org

*MacDonald, Scott Towards an ecocinema (from the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studes of Literature and Environment (ISLE) 2004, p. 107-32).

*MacDonald, Scott Adventures of Perception (2009). In particular the chapter on Upclose and Political – three short ruminations on nature film.

* MacDonald, Scott ‘The Garden in the Machine (2001) – a survey of mostly US experimental filmmakers who concentrate on novel cinematic forms relating to place/landscape
Mitman, Gregg. Reel Nature: : America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Review of Mitman_Bouse_Ingram.doc

*Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. An edited collection of essays on film, nature, and environmental justice. University of Virginia Press, August 2011. : in particular the chapter Shifting Paradigms from Environmentalis films to Ecocinema: from Anthropocentrism to Eoccentrism Part 1 also, her previous paper Through the Glass, clearly RelasePrint Journal, Nov/December, 2005. Release Print: The Magazine of the Film Arts Foundation (www.filmarts.org)

Tobias, Ronald, B. (2011) Film and the American moral vision of nature: Theodore roosevelt to Walt Disney. Michigan State Uni Press.

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Eco-Cinema Seminar Bristol 2005

This seminar was organised by the former UK RSA Art & Ecology Programme (now discontinued but the site is still available); Andrej Zdravič, a leading experimental soundvison filmmaker led some of the discussions and showed some of his work. rk

Cinema and Climate Change 2009 Programme UCL 2009 This was organised for the UN Copenhagen Climate Summit Dec 2009

Related posts:

Ecocinema theory and practice 2012

What is ecocinema? key terms: biocentric, ecocentric and anthropocentric