Inhospitable World

Abstract

Inhospitable World explores the connection between cinema and artificial weather, climates, and even planets in or on which hospitality and survival are at stake. Cinema’s dominant mode of aesthetic world-making is often at odds with the very real human world it is meant to simulate. The chapters in this book take the reader to a scene—the mise-en-scène—where human world-making is undone by the force of human activity, whether it is explicitly for the sake of making a film, or for practicing war and nuclear science, or for the purpose of addressing climate change in ways that exacerbate its already inhospitable effects. The episodes in this book emphasize our always unnatural and unwelcoming environment as a matter of production, a willed and wanted milieu, however harmful, that is inseparable from but also made perceivable through film. While no one film or set of films adds up to a totalizing explanation of climate change, cinema enables us to glimpse anthropogenic environments as both an accidental effect of human activity and a matter of design. Chapters on Buster Keaton, American atomic test films, film noir, the art of China’s Three Gorges Dam, and films of early Antarctic exploration trace parallel histories of film and location design that spell out the ambitions, sensations, and narratives of the Anthropocene, especially as it consolidates into the Great Acceleration starting in 1945.

Facing Apocalypse: Climate Mobilities and the Cinematic Child

“…While the links between cinema and the environment have increasingly gained prominence in film studies (see Fay, 2018;Kääpä and Gustafsson, 2013;Paszkiewicz, 2021;Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010), mobility concerns remain largely overlooked in the discussion. The few existing approaches to mobility as a consequence of climate disruption deal with non-fictional work, in particular, Pacific climate change documentaries.…”

“…This article draws on the insights afforded by a climate mobilities perspective—the multiplicity and relationality of mobility, its uneven distribution, its embeddedness in power structures, its link to aspirations—to explore how contemporary apocalyptic films construct the links between mobility and the environment via the child figure. While the links between cinema and the environment have increasingly gained prominence in film studies (see Fay, 2018; Kääpä and Gustafsson, 2013; Paszkiewicz, 2021; Willoquet‐Maricondi, 2010), mobility concerns remain largely overlooked in the discussion. The few existing approaches to mobility as a consequence of climate disruption deal with non‐fictional work, in particular, Pacific climate change documentaries.…”

Media and extraction: A brief research manifesto

“…Thinking through the past and present of media's links to human and planetary resource-harvesting calls for learning from pioneering work in multiple fields (such as Bozak 2011;Cubitt 2005;Cubitt 2017;Fay 2018;Grieveson and McCabe 2011;Maxwell and Miller 2012;Maxwell, Raundalen and Vestberg 2015;Peters 2015;Parikka 2015;Shiva 2015;Szeman and Boyer 2017;Wolfe 1999;Wynter 2015). It reminds us that traditional disciplinary configurations separating the humanities from the natural or social sciences break down when we try to understand how the technological rationalization of life has exacerbated environmental destruction (See, for example, Alaimo and Starosielsi Elements book series with Duke University Press; Chakrabarty 2021;Huhtamo and Parikka 2011;Malm 2016;Mitchell 2011;Moore 2016;Shulman 2015).…”

Ecocritique

“…To make history requires ambition. Pioneering work in textual analysis led toward more recent analyses of less obviously ecologically themed works (Mirzoeff 2014;Fay 2018), implicitly but increasingly vocally asserting that nothing is understood when the ecological implications of media are elided. Pioneering work on infrastructures leads toward deeper understanding of how content and form articulate with the machinery of production and its colonial roots (Vaughan 2019;Iheka 2018).…”