In the Nick of Time: On Cli-Fi and Ecocinema Film and Moving Image Studies

Well, it's been a while... Something or other must have happened in the meantime... 🤔

Film Studies For Free is nonetheless very happy to be back, still fighting the good fight for high-quality, openly-accessible, film and moving image studies resources. 

With no further ado, FSFF is thrilled to bring its readers and audio-viewers a brilliant new video essay (embedded above) entitled “Climate Fictions, Dystopias, and Human Futures” by Julia Leyda and Kathleen Loock. Thanks so much to them for sharing with us their wonderful study of the evolution of climate fiction cinema, with its powerful videographic plea for greater diversity and complexity in the Cli-Fi audiovisual imaginary.

Below the informative text about their video that they have supplied (scroll down), FSFF has curated a list of links to further great and openly accessible film and moving image studies research and resources on these essential topics, some of which are drawn from Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda's marvellous 2017 critical bibliography 'Cli-Fi in American Studies: A Research Bibliography', published in American Studies Journal (DOI 10.18422/62-08).

Don’t Look Up (2021), a comedy about a comet on a collision course with Earth, is one of Netflix’s most-watched English-language films of all time. It sparked discussions around climate change and created a climate action platform that outlines what individuals can do against climate change. Netflix has also launched its Sustainability Collection in April 2022, with more than 170 films and series aimed at raising environmental awareness. “Entertain to Sustain” is the slogan behind the production and curation of this content and it goes hand in hand with Netflix’s Net Zero + Nature plan. But the question of what can be done, and what a movie or television series can achieve, has also led to criticism of Netflix’s greenwashing, emphasizing individual action and piecemeal corporate PR-heavy policies over politics. In our video essay “Climate Fictions, Dystopias, and Human Futures,” we take Don’t Look Up as a starting point to look back at the evolution of the concept of “cli-fi” (climate fiction) over more than a decade, reflect on shifting storytelling strategies of cli-fi films past, present, and future, and probe their possible impact -- from precursors such as Planet of the Apes (1968) and Soylent Green (1973) to the “classic” The Day after Tomorrow (2004) to recent variations on the cli-fi formula that break out of the white patriarchal mode like Fast Color (2018) and that incorporate lighter affects like Downsizing (2017). If cli-fi has a role to play in helping contemporary audiences imagine possible futures, part of its task will be to employ more diverse stories, characters, and settings. [JL and KL]

The below list will be updated when further good links surface, or come to mind. So, do please let FSFF know if you have any resources to add! Thank you!

Links

Morgan Adamson, 'Anthropocene Realism' New Inquiry 30 Nov. 2015

Andrea Avidad, 'Deadly Barks: Acousmaticity and Post-Animality in Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga', Film-Philosophy, Volume 24 Issue 2, 2020

Natalie D. Baker, 'Zombie Experts and Anarchy Imaginaries: Fantasies of 'Crises to Be' in Climate Change Futures', Journal of Strategic Security, ol. 13, No. 4, 2020

Giovanni Bettini, 'About Time! The Abyss of the Future and End(s) of Subjectivity in (Climate) Dystopias', e-cadernos CES [Online], 32 | 2019

Graiwoot Chulphongsathorn and Philippa Lovatt, 'Tracing the Anthropocene in Southeast Asian film and artists’ moving image: Introduction', Screen, 62.4, Winter 2021

Tom Cohen, ed. Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change. Vol. 1. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012

Sara L. Crosby, Andrew Hageman, Shannon Davies Mancus, Daniel Platt, and Alison Sperling,  Annihilation: A Roundtable Review. Gothic Nature. 1, 2019 PDF

Sean Cubitt, 'Ecocritique as Transnational Commons'. Transnational Screens, 10(1), pp. 1-11, 2019. PDF

Shane Denson, 'Post-Cinema After Extinction', medieninitiative, 21 May 2015

Shane Denson, 'Post-Cinema After Extinction [expanded version]', Media Fields Journal, 2018

Simon Estok, 2016). Ecomedia and ecophobia. Neohelicon (Budapest), 43(1), 2016

Michael Fuchs and Christy Tidwell, 'The Anthropocene, Nature, and the Gothic: An Interview with Christy Tidwell',  REDEN. Revista Española De Estudios Norteamericanos, 3(2), 100-112. PDF

Angel Galdón Rodríguez, 'Starting to Hate the State: The Beginning of the Character’s Dissidence in Dystopian Literature and Films', Altre Modernità, no. 3, Università degli Studi di Milano, 2010, pp. 166–73 PDF

GOTHIC NATURE JOURNAL: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic, Issue 1, 2019 and Issue 2, 2020

• ‘Introduction’, Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland
• ‘Gothic Nature Revisited: Reflections on the Gothic of Ecocriticism’, Tom J. Hillard 
• ‘Theorising the EcoGothic’, Simon C. Estok
• ‘“Don’t be a Zombie”: Deep Ecology and Zombie Misanthropy’, Kevin Corstorphine
• ‘Children of the Quorn: The Vegetarian, Raw, and the Horrors of Vegetarianism’, Jimmy Packham
• ‘A Stern, a Sad, a Darkly Meditative, a Distrustful, if not a Desperate Man, Did He Become, from the Night of that Fearful Dream’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Nocturnal Gothic’, Sarah Cullen 
• ‘”On the Border Territory Between the Animal and the Vegetable Kingdoms”: Plant-Animal Hybridity and the Late Victorian Imagination’, Marc Ricard
• ‘EcoGothic, Ecohorror and Apocalyptic Entanglement in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Tales of the Black Freighter’, James L. Smith and Colin Yeo
• ‘The Value(s) of Landscape: The Sublime, the Picturesque, and Ann Radcliff’, Garland D. Beasley
• ‘”Monkey-Advice and Monkey-Help”: Isak Dinesen’s EcoGothic’, Peter Mortensen
• We Live in EcoGothic Times: Gothic Nature in the Current Climate, Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland
• Dislodged Anthropocentrism and Ecological Critique in Folk Horror: From ‘Children of the Corn’ and The Wicker Man to ‘In the Tall Grass’ and Children of the Stones, Dawn Keetley
• The Wicked Witch in the Woods: Puritan Maternalism, Ecofeminism, and Folk Horror in Robert Eggers’ The VVitch: A New-England Folktale, Alexandra Hauke
• Soundtrack to Settler-Colonialism: Tanya Tagaq’s Music as Creative Nonfiction Horror, Kateryna Barnes
• The Ecohorror of Omission: Haunted Suburbs and the Forgotten Trees of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Christy Tidwell
• All You Need Is Love?: Making the Selfish Choice in The Cabin at the End of the World and The Migration, Rebecca Gibson
• The Haunted Seas of British Television: Nation, Environment and Horror, Mark Fryers
• Tentacles from the Depths: The Nautical Horror of D. T. Neal’s Relict, Antonio Alcalá González
• Real Mermaid vs. Nuclear Power Plant: Ecofeminist Vengeance and AmaDivers in Japanese Horror, Timo Thelen

Rodney Harrison. and Colin Sterling, eds, Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of and after the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2020)

Johan Höglund, 'Militarizing the Anthropocene: Hollywood, Climate Fiction and Security in Future Americas', EAAS presentation, 2021 PDF

Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann, 'Digital and Interactive Media Projects that Think Through the Environment', St. Andrews University's Centre for Screen Studies' Themed Playlist, 2020

Adrian Ivakhiv, Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum Books, 2018)

Erin James and Eric Morel, eds, Environment and Narrative: New Essays in Econarratology (Ohio State University Press, 2020)

Selmin Kara, 'Anthropocenema: Cinema in the Age of Mass Extinctions'. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Ed. Shane Denson and Julia Leyda. Falmer: Reframe, 2016

Caroline Kjærulff, 'The Ambiguous Portrayal of Nature in Annihilation', Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English, (7), 2021 

Angelos Koutsourakis, 'Visualizing the Anthropocene Dialectically: Jessica Woodworth and Peter Brosens’ Eco-Crisis Trilogy', Film-Philosophy, Volume 21 Issue 3, Page 299-325, 2017

Trine Mærsk Kragsbjerg, 'The Malthusian Alternative and Overpopulation in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame', Leviathan: Interdisciplinary Journal in English, No. 7, 2021

Julia Leyda, 'Enough Said? Beasts of the Southern Wild, Sharknado, and Extreme Weather', Antenna: Responses to Media and Culture 26 July 2013 

Julia Leyda, Kathleen Loock, Alexander Starre, Thiago Pinto Barbosa, and Manuel Rivera, 'The Dystopian Impulse of Contemporary Cli-Fi: Lessons and Questions from a Joint Workshop of the IASS and the JFKI (FU Berlin)', Working Paper of the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam (Dec. 2016) PDF

Martin Löschnigg and Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż, eds, The Enemy in Contemporary Film, Volume 12, (De Gruyter, 2018)

Philippa Lovatt, 'Foraging in the ruins: Nguyễn Trinh Thi’s mycological moving-image practice', Screen, 62.4, Winter 2021 

Tiago de Luca, Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth (Amsterdam University. Press, 2021)

Jeff Vance Martin and Gretchen Sneegas, 'Critical Worldbuilding: Toward a Geographical Engagement with Imagined Worlds', Literary Geographies, Vol 6, No 1 (2020) 

• Does Wall•E Dream of Electric Kale? The California Dream as Post-Scarcity Nightmare Alexander Robert Tarr 
• Geographies of Science Fiction, Peace, and Cosmopolitanism: Conceptualizing Critical Worldbuilding through a Lens of Doctor Who Hannah Carilyn Gunderman 
• Expanding Climate Science: Using Science Fiction’s Worldbuilding to Imagine a Climate Changed Southwestern U.S. Dylan M. Harris

David Martin-Jones, 'Trolls, Tigers and Transmodern Ecological Encounters: Enrique Dussel and a Cine-ethics for the Anthropocene', Film-Philosophy, Volume 20 Issue 1, 2016

Laura Mattson, 'Elemental Climate Disaster Texts and Queer Ecological Temporality', MA Thesis, College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida, 2020 PDF

Emily Munro, 'Living. Proof: Exploring the Climate Crisis through Archive Footage', Journal of Film Preservation, 4, 2022

Adam O'Brien, Transactions with the World: Ecocriticism and the Environmental Sensibility of New Hollywood (Berghahn Books, 2016)

Katarzyna Paszkiewicz, 'Cinema and Environment: The Arts of Noticing in the Anthropocene', "Res Rhetorica" 8 (2):2-21

Matthew Rimmer, 'The Culture Wars of Climate Change', SSRN, 2015

Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 'Introduction: Ecologies of Media', 
In Rust, Monani, and Cubitt. eds. Ecomedia: Key Issues. Routledge Earthscan series, 1-14, 2015 PDF

Michael Svoboda, 'Interstellar: Looking for the Future in All the Wrong Spaces'. Yale Climate Connections 12 Nov. 2014.

Michael Svoboda, '(What) Do We Learn from Cli-Fi Film? Hollywood Still Stuck in the Holocene'. Yale Climate Connections 19 Nov. 2014

Thomas Waugh, The Conscience of Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2016)

New Issue of JUMP CUT!

Frame grab from The Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939). See the Jump Cut dossier on Ford's film, Spielberg's version of the Lincoln story, and the classic Cahiers du Cinéma debate on the earlier film. Also see  Film Studies For Free's earlier entry on On the art (and ideology) of John Ford's films

Film Studies For Free has been away, gadding about and gabbling at a wonderful conference in Frankfurt on The Audiovisual Essay (organised by Adrian Martin and Cristina Álvarez López, with Vinzenz Hediger, for Deutsches Filminstitut and Goethe University), about which you will hear a great deal in the coming weeks and months.

Next, tomorrow, it departs for yet another exciting public event - a panel discussion on 'The Future of Film Criticism" at King's College, London, speaking alongside Jean-Michel Frodon (Editor of Cahiers du Cinéma and film critic for Le Monde) and Nick James (Editor of Sight & Sound).

In between these two magnificent events, it had to bring you news of a huge new issue of the online journal Jump Cut, which is absolutely full of incredibly interesting looking contents - FSFF particularly liked the dossier on Lincoln and ideology, but there's so much more to enjoy here. Thank you, Jump Cut!

Back soon.


Current issue, No. 55, fall 2013: INSTITUTIONS, TECHNOLOGIES, and LABOR

• Digital dreams in a material world: the rise of Netflix and its impact on changing distribution and exhibition patterns by Kevin P. McDonald
• “From, by, for”: Nairobi’s Slum Film Festival, film festival studies, and the practices of development by Lindiwe Dovey, Joshua McNamara, and Federico Olivier
• The normativity of 3D: cinematic journeys, “imperial visuality” and unchained cameras by Bruce Bennett
• Native images: the otherness and affectivity of the digital body by Adam Davis
• Sounds of Hong Kong cinema: Johnnie To, Milkyway Image, and the sound track by Gary Bettinson
• To work or not to work: the dilemma of Hong Kong film labor in the age of mainlandization by Mirana M. Szeto and Yun-chung Chen

THIRD CINEMA/INTERNATIONAL

• Jai Bhim Comrade: tales of oppression and songs of resistance by Catherine Bernier
• “The revolutionary founding moments of a contra-Grierson tradition” by Brian Winston (a review of Joshua Malitsky, Post-Revolution Nonfiction Film: Building the Soviet and Cuban Nations)
• Thauk gya paw hee thwi deh thwi /Blood’s Oath to Beautiful Flower —Blood’s Oath, drama of insurgency in a Burmese Pwo Karen Film by Violet Cho
• Amnesiac memory: Hiroshima/Nagasaki in Japanese film by Inez Hedges
• Body memories, body cinema: the politics of multi-sensual counter-memory in György Pálfi’s Hukkle by György Kalmár
• We lost our way: the time and space of alienation in Wong Kar-wai’s Happy Together by Caroline Guo
• Hong Kong’s liminal spaces: unveiling nature and identity in Tsang Tsui-shan’s Big Blue Lake by Winnie L. M. Yee
• Capitalist childhood in film: modes of critique by Susan Ferguson
• National identity, cultural institutions, and filmmaking in “Paradise” —the Puerto Rican successes of Talento de barrio and Broche de oro by Naida García-Crespo
• “Behind her laughter…is fear!” Domestic abuse and transnational feminism in Bollywood remakes by Gohar Siddiqui

GENDER

• New queer cinema by Roxanne Samer
• Feminist porn by Erica Rand (a review of The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young)
• The gay-for-pay gaze in gay male pornography by Kevin John Bozelka
• Dire straights: the indeterminacy of sexual identity in gay-for-pay pornography by John Paul Stadler
• Sartorial signifiers, masculinity, and the global recession in HBO's Hung by Chris Vanderwees
• The multivalent feminism of The Notorious Bettie Page by Steven S. Kapica
• Descent: “Everything’s okay now”—race, vengeance, and watching the modern rape-revenge narrative by Jenny Lapekas
• Bringing out Baby Jane —camp, sympathy, and the horror-woman’s film of the 1960s by David Greven
• Doing his homework by David Greven (a review of David Halperin’s How to be Gay)

IN AND AGAINST THE MAINSTREAM

• Skyfall: a mother and her twin boys by Robert Alpert
• “Propane is for pussies” —Bellflower’s bromance of retro technology and hip masculinity by David Church
• Take Shelter; Meek’s Cutoff; The Turin Horse — the end of everything by Timothy Kreider
• Workers' confessions and the reality TV series Undercover Boss by Lyell Davies
• From Hoover to Bush Jr. — home and crisis scripts in U.S. social cinema by Antonio Sánchez-Escalonilla
• Ecocinema by Joe Heumann and Robin Murray (a review of Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt
• The earth bites back: vampires and the ecological roots of home by Robin Murray and Joe Heumann
• Broomhilda Unchained: Tarantino’s Wagner by Adrian Daub and Elisabeth Bronfen

EXPERIMENTAL/INDEPENDENT

• Movies in miniature by Midi Onodera
• Amateurization of the entire media universe by Patricia R. Zimmermann (a review of Amateur Media: Social, Cultural and Legal Perspectives, ed. Dan Hunter, Ramon Lobato, Megan Richardson and Julian Thomas)
• Varient cinematic artistic expression by Greg DeCuir (a review of Pavle Levi, Cinema by other means)

LINCOLN & IDEOLOGY FORUM

• Introduction by Chuck Kleinhans
• Young Mr. Lincoln and ideological analysis: a reconsideration (with many asides) by Chuck Kleinhans
• Lincoln in contemporary U.S. culture and politics by Douglas Kellner
• Equality before the law in Spielberg’s Lincoln by Gary Bettinson and Richard Rushton
• Symptomatic reading in Althusser, Cahiers du cinéma, and Zizek by Warren Buckland
• Lincoln: shared myths in a revisionist age by Frederick Wasser
• The hysteric, the mother, the natural gal:
• male fantasies and male theories in films about Lincoln by Deborah Tudor
• The significance of Steven Spielberg's Old Mr. Lincoln:
• political emotions and intertextual knowledge by Janet Staiger
• Mr. Spielberg's Mr. Lincoln by Chuck Kleinhans

HIV/AIDS ACTIVIST MEDIA

• Introduction: Ghost stories by David Oscar Harvey, Marty Fink, Alexandra Juhasz, Bishnu Gosh
• Ghosts caught in our throat —
• of the lack of contemporary representations of gay/bisexual men and HIV by David Oscar Harvey
• Two ghost stories: disability activism and HIV/AIDS by Marty Fink
• Acts of signification-survival by Alexandra Juhasz
• What time is it here? by Bishnupriya Ghosh

CLASSICS FROM THE PAST
S/Z and Rules of the Game by Julia Lesage
 
THE LAST WORD The war on/in higher education by the Editors

Woo, To, Wong Kar-wai, Asian Horror, Anime and More: Twelve Open-Access Film Studies Books from Hong Kong University Press and OAPEN!!

A little interchange on Twitter, this morning, with the fabulous open access book library OAPEN has revealed to Film Studies For Free that TWELVE film studies books published by Hong Kong University Press in the last ten years have recently been made freely accessible via the OAPEN website! The keyword search link to access all OA HKUP books with a film connection is here. Below FSFF has listed links to the twelve e-tomes with the most substantial film studies content. When you arrive at the linked-to page for each item click on the PDF icon there to download the books.

All of these will now be added to FSFF's permanent listing of links to open access film and media studies e-books! Thank you to all the below authors, to Hong Kong University Press and, especially, to OAPEN!

• Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema by Choi, Jinhee & Wada-Marciano, Mitsuyo (2009)
• Wong Kar-wai's Ashes of Time by Dissanayake, Wimal (2003)
• Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together by Tambling, Jeremy (2003)
• Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge by Lu, Sheldon H. & Mi, Jiayan (2009)
• John Woo's A Better Tomorrow by Fang, Karen (2004)
• John Woo's The Killer by Hall, Kenneth E. (2009)
• Johnnie To Kei-Fung's PTU by Ingham, Michael (2009)
• Fruit Chan's Durian Durian by Gan, Wendy (2005)
• Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong by Cheung, Esther M.K. (2009)
• Frames of Anime: Culture and Image-Building by Hu, Tze-Yue G. (2010)
• Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image by Kam, Louie (2010)
• The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity by Khoo, Olivia (2007)