Eco-nostalgia in Popular Turkish Cinema

Book Summary: Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment. [From the publisher

Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner

Ted Geier reviews Completely Affecting: The Cinematics of Environmental Concern and Real Change, edited by Alexa Weik von Mossner

ImagineNATIVE 2012: Ecocinema and The Indigenous Film Festival

Much scholarship points to how ecological concerns are never far from Indigenous struggles for political sovereignty and public participation. In this paper we turn to the Indigenous film festival as a relatively understudied yet rich site to explore such ecological concerns. Specifically, we highlight the ImagineNATIVE 2012 film festival based in Toronto, Canada

Editorial

The editorial frames a special issue that introduces Scandinavian cinema and media scholars to ecomedia studies and its potentials

Ecomedia: Key Issues

Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1084/thumbnail.jp

In God’s Land: Cinematic Affect, Animation and the Perceptual Dilemmas of Slow Violence

In this paper, I argue that Indian independent filmmaker Pankaj Rishi Kumar\u27s documentary In God’s Land (2012) blends animation and live-action to illuminate the destructive nuances of postcolonial literary scholar, Rob Nixon\u27s notion of slow violence. In turning to cinema, I also suggest that In God’s Land’s “aesthetic strategies” further eco-film scholarship’s recent interests in animation, which have tended to highlight the mode\u27s feel good affect. I draw attention to In God\u27s Land\u27s hybrid of dark, discordant animation spectacle interspliced in the documentary live-action to articulate the potential of eco-animation outside of this affect. Ultimately, the film not only draws attention to animation’s non-playful affect—its potentials and dilemmas, but I also suggest that reading such a film adds postcolonial understandings of cinema beyond the Western/Japanese center on with eco-animation scholars have so far focused

Indigenous Film Festivals as Eco-Testimonial Encounter: The 2011 Native Film + Video Festival

In struggles for political and cultural recognition many Indigenous groups employ visual media to make their concerns heard. Amongst these various channels for media activism are Indigenous film festivals which, in the words of festival coordinator Amalia Cόrdova, work to convey ‘a sense of solidarity with Indigenous struggles’. Cόrdova’s essay on Indigenous film festivals appears in the collection Film Festivals and Activism (2012). In the introduction to the collection co-editor Leshu Torchin writes about activist festivals as testimonial encounters or fields of witnessing where the films offer testimony and the audiences serve as witnessing publics, ‘viewers [who] take responsibility for what they have seen and become ready to respond’. To better understand how Indigenous film festivals embody these activist imperatives as eco-activism I consider the case of the 2011 Native American Film and Video Festival (NAFVF) with its special eco-themed focus Mother Earth in Crisis. In my analysis of NAFVF I consider both the testimonies of the films and the festival context in which they are placed; by doing so I add to the growing scholarship in ecocinema studies which within the last ten years has become a legitimate and crucial aspect of ecocriticism’s purview – though surprisingly, with little attention devoted to film festivals. Through this analysis, by articulating what I term the oblique testimony, I argue that Indigenous film festivals are often strongly reflective of the environmental concerns and hopes of Native peoples and suggest ecological engagements that place them in the terrain of environmental film festivals. [excerpt

The Cosmological Liveliness of Terril Calder\u27s The Lodge: Animating Our Relations and Unsettling Our Cinematic Spaces

I first saw Métis artist Terril Calder\u27s 2014 stop-frame feature, The Lodge, an independently made, relatively small- budget film, at its premiere at the ImagineNative Film + Media Arts festival, held annually in Toronto, Canada. The feature-length animation played to a full house at the Light-box Theater downtown. Many were there to attend the five-day festival, which is dedicated to Indigenous media made by and for Indigenous people. Others were there because as members of Toronto\u27s general public they wanted to catch a movie during a night out in the city. Since then The Lodge has shown at various other independent venues. It isn\u27t what you might think of as commercial fare. Its audiences are not huge. However, for those who do view The Lodge, the film presents a creative space to rethink our sense of boundaries in a number of ways: boundaries between human/nonhuman, white/Indigenous, male/female, spectator/film-object. In this essay, I argue that the film is thus an invitation to question the naturalness of hegemonic identity assumptions that demarcate such boundaries. I interviewed Calder (via Skype and subsequent email correspondence) soon after I saw the film, and I situate a close textual analysis of the film within the context of her intent and the burgeoning scholarly dialogue between Indigenous studies and ecocritical studies. The scholarly dialogue, as Joni Adamson and I write in the introduction to our recent anthology, Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (2016), argues for clear sighted understandings of multi-faceted human/more-than-human relationships that exist outside of binaries imposed by Western notions of progress . Similarly, Steven Loft, coeditor of Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art, writes of an Indigenous media cosmology that is replete with life and spirit, inclusive of beings, thought, prophecy, and the underlying connectedness of all things and that is not predicated on Western foundations of thought (xvi). Calder extends such Indigenous worldviews of connectedness to cinema and animation in particular

Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves – Defining and Situating Ecocinema Studies

This is the abstract for the entire book: Ecocinema Theory and Practice is the first collection of its kind—an anthology that offers a comprehensive introduction to the rapidly growing field of eco-film criticism, a branch of critical scholarship that investigates cinema’s intersections with environmental understandings. It references seminal readings through cutting edge research and is designed as an introduction to the field as well as a sourcebook. It defines ecocinema studies, sketches its development over the past twenty years, provides theoretical frameworks for moving forward, and presents eloquent examples of the practice of eco-film criticism through essays written by the field’s leading and emerging scholars. From explicitly environmental films such as Werner Herzong\u27s Grizzly Man and Roland Emmerich\u27s The Day After Tomorrow to less obvious examples like Errol Morris\u27s Fast, Cheap & Out of Control and Christopher Nolan\u27s Inception, the pieces in this collection comprehensively interrogate the breadth of ecocinema. Ecocinema Theory and Practice also directs readers to further study through lists of recommended readings, professional organizations, and relevant periodicals