Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature By Adrian J. Ivakhiv Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013

Abstract

ECOLOGIES OF THE MOVING IMAGE: CINEMA, AFFECT, NATURE By Adrian J. Ivakhiv Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013,435 pp.REVIEWED BY CHRISTIE MILLIKENAdrian Ivakhiv s Ecologies of Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature is a landmark contribution to expanding field of film ecocriticism that has proliferated alongside cultivation of environmental studies programs across North America over past two decades. Part of an Environmental Humanities series launched by Wilfred Laurier University Press, this book ambitiously sets out to forge an ecophilosophy of cinema, offering a cluster of theoretical templates for assessing ecological implications of moving images across a range of motion picture practices, including mainstream Hollywood, animation, documentary, global art cinema and avant-garde. Ivakhiv applies a process-relational view of moving images by creating a framework that combines ideas from such disparate thinkers as Charles Saunders Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze, among others. A process-relational framework, in his words, move us toward a perception of world in which sociality (or anthropomorphic), materiality (or geomorphic), and interperceptual realm from which two emerge are richer, in our perception, than when we started. This argument presupposes that moving images-despite their indisputable and fundamental basis in industrial modernity-have capacity to be part of world's ecological solution, not just part of problem, as is so frequently argued.The introduction to book's conceptual models seems confusing and somewhat overwhelming in first chapters, where there is mention of many diverse theorists and philosophers from whom his ideas are being extracted. However, by pressing on (and making use of concise appendix at end of book), clarity begins to emerge. One of strengths of this processrelational model is that it moves beyond a longstanding tradition of Cartesian, binaristic thinking that, in Ivakhiv's view, becomes over-burdened by focusing so exclusively on negotiation of two fixed, pre-given dualisms. Ivakhiv s goal, repeated throughout book, is to take into account some measure of how moving images move us: how they invite us to better understand film's potential, to revivify our relationship to world by enabling us to, in his words, find and articulate new and innovative socio-ecological meanings and capacities. One of productive aspects of this evolving, dynamic structure of ecologies is Ivakhiv's steadfast conviction in the life, affect, of moving images. As he eloquently argues: ...a film is what a film does. And what it does is not just what occurs as one watches it. It is also what transpires as viewers mull it over afterwards and as film reverberates across space between film world and real world, seeping into conversation and dreams, tinting world and making it vibrate in particular ways, injecting thought-images, sensations, motivations, heightened attunements to one thing or another, into larger social and ecological fields within which film's signs, meanings and affects resound. To this end, Ivakhiv considers ways film can expand our perception of ecological ontology. This, by necessity, includes ways we understand non-human or more than merely human worlds.After introduction and first chapter that establish his theoretical modeling, next three chapters deal with specific ecologies. Chapter 3, for example, summarizes key contributions to understanding history of modern visuality from capture of nature's appearance as framed, perspectival view from Renaissance onward. He rehearses widely discussed impact of photography in fostering development of nation-building agendas, which-alongside development of railway-bring masses to nature and later-via automobile-render almost everything as potential scenery. …