Transnational Ecocinema book

Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation

Edited by Tommy Gustafsson & Pietari Kääpä

About the book

Until recently, discussion of Hollywood film has dominated much of the contemporary dialogue on ecocriticism and the cinema. With Transnational Ecocinema, the editors open up the critical debate to look at a larger variety of films from several different countries and cultures. By foregrounding these films with their economic and political contexts, the contributors offer a simultaneously comprehensive and nuanced look at the role of place and nation in ecocinema. The essays also interrogate proposed global solutions to environmental issues by presenting an ecocritical perspective on different film and cultural considerations from around the globe with case studies ranging from China to Europe, from Hollywood to Latin America.

Contents

1. Introduction to transnational ecocinema

Introduction: film culture in an era of ecological transformation

Pietari Kääpä and Tommy Gustafsson

Transnational approaches to ecocinema: Charting an expansive field

Pietari Kääpä

2. Documentary politics and the ecological imagination

Water imagination in Chinese and Taiwanese documentaries

Tam Yee Lok

Paris, Shanxi:  Jia Zhangke’s Useless and transcultural ecodocumentaries

Kiu-wai Chu

Ecocinema and ‘Good Life’ in Latin America

Roberto Forns

A reflection on the filmic contents of Earthlings, by Shaun Monson (2005) and Encounters at the End of the World, by Werner Herzog (2007).

Ilda Teresa de Castro

3. Popular cinemas and ecological awareness

Consumerist and ideological eco-imaginaries in the films of Feng Xiaogang

Neri Corrado

And the Oscar goes to: Eco-heroines, eco-heroes and the development of eco-themes from The China-Syndrome (1979) to GasLand (2010)

Tommy Gustafsson

4. The (in)sustainable footprint of ecocinema

On fear and agency: Public formations through climate change films

Inês Crespo and Ângela Guimarães Pereira

Guerrillas in the Mist: Popularising Ecologicalism and Sustainable Practices in Global Media from an Australian Base

Susan Ward & Rebecca Coyle

Afterword – Towards a transnational understanding of the Anthropocene

Tommy Gustafsson & Pietari Kääpä

About the editors

Tommy Gustafsson teaches Film History at the School of Language and Literature Cultural Sciences. He has previously published on masculinity and gender relations in Swedish film culture in the 1920s, and a number of articles in Swedish and English, on subjects such as the historical media memory of the Rwandan genocide, the function of biopics as mediators of the past (in Film International, also published by Intellect), and on black independent filmmaker Oscar Micheaux (Cinema Journal).

Pietari Kääpä is a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Helsinki. His research is focused on transnational concerns in a range of cultural contexts and thematic frameworks. His previously published work includes The Cinema of Mika Kaurismäki (2011) and the edited collections Directory of World Cinema: Finland (2012) and World Film Locations: Helsinki (2013). The monograph Ecology and Contemporary Nordic Cinema is due out from Continuum in early 2014.

About Intellect

Intellect publishes a diverse range of academic books and journals in the fields of film studies, creative practice and cultural & media studies.

Title info

Full title: Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation

Editors: Tommy Gustafsson, Pietari Kääpä

ISBN: 9781841507293 | Price: £24.95, $40

Published by: Intellect | Publication: May 2013

Binding: Paperback |Dimensions: 230×174 mm

Territory: World| Readership: General/Specialist

Also available as an ebook