Abstract
The aim of this paper is to raise questions about how cinema can allow us to rethink our relationship with the environment in the context of what is known today as the Anthropocene. In the discussion, I chart the current debates about the ecological in the humanities, with a particular focus on new materialisms, to argue that cinema can be fruitfully thought of as part of what anthropologist Anna Tsing (2015) calls the “arts of noticing”. I then turn to a consideration of the potential influx of affect theories on ecocriticism and film studies, before sketching out possible approaches to studying film from an affective, new materialist and postanthropocentric perspective. These approaches might have wider implications for rhetorical perspectives on cinema, especially for those investigating emotional appeals.
Highlights
Raising ecological awareness has become one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century
There is more than sufficient empirical data that confirm the correlation between the current state of the planet and the global nature of advanced capitalism, all the more pronounced during the present COVID-19 pandemic: the rapid increase of human population, species commodification, waste accumulation, toxic pollution, plastic contamination in oceans, rapid deforestation and loss of biodiversity, dubbed “the sixth extinction” (Kolbert 2014) due to its breath-taking magnitude, as well as global warming caused by the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, which leads to increasing numbers of refugees and wars fought over depleting resources
The scholarly debates about the socio-economic roots of the environmental crisis have intensified in the last decade, often under the term “Anthropocene”, proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul J
Summary
Raising ecological awareness has become one of the most pressing issues of the twenty-first century. The present article stems from these debates, while taking into consideration the critiques of the discourse on the Anthropocene It aims to reflect on how contemporary cinema can allow us to rethink our relationship with the environment, by framing this question within the recent discussions on the ecological in the humanities, with a special emphasis on the lines of research in environmental humanities, critical posthumanisms, and new materialisms that propose new understandings of the relationship between humans and their nonhuman environment (Alaimo 2010, Barad 2007, Bennett 2010, Braidotti 2013, Haraway 2016, among others)..
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