In recent years, environmental and human rights advocates have
suggested that we have entered the first new geological epoch since
the end of the ice age: the Anthropocene. In this new epoch, humans
have come to reshape unwittingly both the climate and natural
world; humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal
species, polluted the oceans, and irreversibly altered the
atmosphere. Ironically, our efforts to make the planet more
hospitable to ourselves seem to be driving us toward our inevitable
extinction. A force of nature, humanity is now decentered as the
agent of history. As Jennifer Fay argues, this new situation is to
geological science what cinema has always been to human culture.
Film, like the Anthropocene, is a product of the industrial
revolution, but arises out of a desire to preserve life and master
time and space. It also calls for the creation of artificial
worlds, unnatural weather, and deadly environments for
entertainment, scientific study, and devising military strategy.
Filmmaking stages, quite literally, the process by which worlds and
weather come into being and meaning, and it mimics the forces that
are driving this new planetary inhospitality. Cinema, in other
words, provides an image of "nature" in the age of its mechanical
reproducability. Fay argues that cinema exemplifies the
philosophical, political, and perhaps even logistical processes by
which we can adapt to these forces and also imagine a world without
humans in it. Whereas standard ecological criticism attends to the
environmental crisis as an unraveling of our natural state, this
book looks to film (from Buster Keaton, to Jia Zhangke, to films of
atomic testing and early polar exploration) to consider how it
reflects upon the creation and destruction of human environments.
What are the implications of ecological inhospitality? What role
might cinema and media theory play in challenging our presumed
right to occupy and populate the world? As an art form, film enjoys
a unique relationship to the material, elemental world it captures
and produces. Through it, we may appreciate the ambitions to design
an unhomely planet that may no longer accommodate us.
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