Film in the Anthropocene: Philosophy, Ecology, and Cybernetics

Springer Verlag (2018)
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Abstract

This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of film in the context of the Anthropocene: the new geological era in which human beings have collectively become a force of nature. Daniel White draws on perspectives in philosophy, ecology, and cybernetics to explore human self-understanding through film in the new era. The classical figure of Janus, looking both to the future and the past, serves as a guide throughout the study. Both feature and documentary films are considered.

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9783319930145   9783319930152   3030065693   3319930141

DOI

10.1007/978-3-319-93015-2
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Chapters

Documentary Intertext: André Singer’s and J. Stephen Lansing’s The Goddess and the Computer 1988

The two faces of Janus emerge in this chapter to invoke the perspectives of the arts and the sciences, C. P. Snow’s two cultures, reconnected in a renewed hybrid persona. The “Goddess” is the mythological narrative of Bali that is wedded here to the “Computer” inscribed in the cybernetic analysis of... see more

Janus’s Interspecies Faces: Biomorphic Transformations in the Ecology of Mind in James Cameron’s Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar represents both the optimistic dreams and the postcolonial nightmares rising with digital media in the new era. The film is a technical masterpiece and, on a superficial level, provides a vision of panhuman and interspecies liberation in the context of colonialism and imperial... see more

Documentary Intertext: Trance and Dance in Bali 1951

This chapter argues that so-called “dissociative disorders” in psychology are akin, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson thought, to altered mental states invoked by Balinese dancers in their cultural rituals. The evocation of a “trance” by the hypnotic practices of “dance” yielded a “schizophrenic”... see more

Janus East and West: Multicultural Polyvocality—Trinh Minh-ha’s The Fourth Dimension and The Digital Film Event

This chapter argues that Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, including its concepts of spatiality, temporality, and phenomenal form, intersects with digital media and late modern industrial technologies, especially high-speed rail, to produce a Janus-faced vision of Japan, old and new. The sensibility ev... see more

Documentary Intertext: John Marshall, The Hunters 1957

John Marshall’s The Hunters provides a window to the practices of an age-old hunting-and-gathering economy persisting into the twentieth century. The labors of men and women are detailed in their respective daily tasks. Problems that arise in “authentically” representing the works and days of a Pale... see more

Cinema’s Historical Incarnations: Traveling the Möbius Strip of Biotime in Cloud Atlas

This chapter explores the sense of historicity emergent in the Anthropocene as it is articulated in David Mitchell’s novel and the Wachowskis’ and Tykwer’s film Cloud Atlas. The syntax of historical thinking is examined cross-culturally, and a hybrid idea of temporality is postulated based on the me... see more

Documentary Intertext: Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds 1964

This chapter argues that the rituals of warfare detailed in Robert Gardner’s film study of the Dugum Dani people offer a picture of cyclical human conflict kept in restraint, however chronically painful it might be to the participants, by corrective rituals. It further raises the problems faced by d... see more

Janus’s Celluloid and Digital Faces: The Existential Cyborg—Autopoiēsis in Christopher Nolan’s Memento

This chapter argues that Leonard Shelby, protagonist of Memento, is a model of selfhood in the Anthropocene. His subjectivity is self-reflexive as he, despite impaired memory, shapes his identity and course of action in a recurring cycle of signs. Recording clues by Polaroid camera and tattoos, he b... see more

Introduction: Stepping into the Play Frame—Cinema as Mammalian Communication

The critical perspective on film in the Anthropocene fashioned in the present book is both old and new. It is derived from Aristotle and Plato and from Gregory Bateson and Norbert Wiener , as well as a range of philosophical and literary perspectives in between. Its structural principles include the... see more

Conclusion: Toward a Transdisciplinary Critical Theory of Film

The conclusion argues that film should be critically situated in the era of escalating crisis called the Anthropocene. Multiple commentaries now available on climate change and related environmental problems cry out for responses from across the arts and sciences to address the emerging human condit... see more

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