Description
In Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man.
The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film.
Reviews
Ably orchestrated by Alexa Weik von Mossner, these essays provide a valuable introduction to studies of the affective and emotional dimensions of those animated, theatrical, and documentary films that focus on nature–human relationships. Placing a premium on theorizing these dimensions especially as such films are received by audiences, the volume can set the stage for future empirically oriented studies of such audience reception. It is well worth consideration for classroom use in environmental and film studies programs.
- Bron Taylor, editor of Avatar and Nature Spirituality (WLU Press, 2013) andauthor of Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and thePlanetary Future (2009), 2008 October