Eco-Trauma Cinema

272 Pages·2014·1.75 MB·English

by  Anil Narine

Eco-Trauma Cinema
Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental
movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of com-
mercial franchises. This book investigates in particular fi lm’s complex role
in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm
we, as humans, infl ict upon our natural surroundings, or the injuries we
sustain from nature in its unforgiving iterations. The term encompasses
both circumstances because these seemingly distinct instances of ecological
harm are often related and even symbiotic: The traumas we perpetuate in
an ecosystem through pollution and unsustainable resource management
inevitably return to harm us.
Contributors to this volume engage with eco-trauma cinema in its three
general forms: accounts of people who are traumatized by the natural
world, narratives that represent people or social processes which traumatize
the environment or its species and stories that depict the aftermath of eco-
logical catastrophe. The fi lms they examine represent a central challenge of
our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to refl ect on
the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet’s ecosystems and to restructure
the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.
Anil Narine is a junior faculty member in the Department of Visual Studies
and the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology
at the University of Toronto. He completed graduate studies in the School
of Communication at Simon Fraser University, and in 2011–2012 he was
a Postdoctoral Fellow in Film at Columbia University. His research exam-
ines network theory and trauma theory in the context of globalization and
thickening global connections. His publications appear in C ommunication ,
Culture & Critique, C ritical Studies in Media Communication, the J ournal
of American Studies , Americana , Memory Studies and Theory, Culture &
Society.
Routledge Advances in Film Studies
1 Nation and Identity in the New 9 Neoliberalism and Global
German Cinema Cinema
Homeless at Home Capital, Culture, and Marxist
Inga Scharf Critique
Edited by Jyotsna Kapur and
2 Lesbianism, Cinema, Space Keith B. Wagner
The Sexual Life of Apartments
Lee Wallace 10 Korea’s Occupied Cinemas,
1893–1948
3 Post-War Italian Cinema The Untold History of the Film
American Intervention, Vatican Industry
Interests Brian Yecies with Ae-Gyung Shim
Daniela Treveri Gennari
11 Transnational Asian Identities
4 Latsploitation, Exploitation in Pan-Pacifi c Cinemas
Cinemas, and Latin America The Reel Asian Exchange
Edited by Victoria Ruétalo and Edited by Philippa Gates &
Dolores Tierney Lisa Funnell
5 Cinematic Emotion in Horror 12 Narratives of Gendered Dissent
Films and Thrillers in South Asian Cinemas
The Aesthetic Paradox of Alka Kurian
Pleasurable Fear
Julian Hanich 13 Hollywood Melodrama and
the New Deal
6 Cinema, Memory, Modernity Public Daydreams
The Representation of Memory Anna Siomopoulos
from the Art Film to Transnational
Cinema 14 Theorizing Film Acting
Russell J.A. Kilbourn Edited by Aaron Taylor
7 Distributing Silent Film Serials 15 Stardom and the Aesthetics
Local Practices, Changing Forms, of Neorealism
Cultural Transformation Ingrid Bergman in
Rudmer Canjels Rossellini’s Italy
Ora Gelley
8 The Politics of Loss and Trauma
in Contemporary Israeli 16 Postwar Renoir
Cinema Film and the Memory of Violence
Raz Yosef Colin Davis
17 Cinema and Inter-American 26 Spanish Cinema in the
Relations Global Context
Tracking Transnational Affect Film on Film
Adrián Pérez Melgosa Samuel Amago
18 European Civil War Films 27 Japanese Horror Films and
Memory, Confl ict, and Nostalgia Their American Remakes
Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou Translating Fear, Adapting
Culture
19 The Aesthetics of Antifascism Valerie Wee
Radical Projection
Jennifer Lynde Barker 28 Postfeminism and Paternity in
Contemporary US Film
20 The Politics of Age and Framing Fatherhood
Disability in Contemporary Hannah Hamad
Spanish Film
Plus Ultra Pluralism 29 Cine-Ethics
Matthew J. Marr Ethical Dimensions of
Film Theory, Practice, and
21 Cinema and Language Loss Spectatorship
Displacement, Visuality and the Edited by Jinhee Choi and
Filmic Image Mattias Frey
Tijana Mamula
30 Postcolonial Film: History,
22 Cinema as Weather Empire, Resistance
Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Edited by Rebecca Weaver-
Change Hightower and Peter Hulme
Kristi McKim
31 The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
23 Landscape and Memory in Gender, Narrative, and History
Post-Fascist Italian Film Alison L. McKee
Cinema Year Zero
Giuliana Minghelli 32 Iranian Cinema in a
Global Context
24 Masculinity in the Policy, Politics, and Form
Contemporary Romantic Edited by Peter Decherney and
Comedy Blake Atwood
Gender as Genre
John Alberti 33 Eco-Trauma Cinema
Edited by Anil Narine
25 Crossover Cinema
Cross-cultural Film from
Production to Reception
Edited by Sukhmani Khorana
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Eco-Trauma Cinema
Edited by Anil Narine
First published 2015
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eco-trauma cinema / edited by Anil Narine.
pages cm — (Routledge advances in fi lm studies ; 33)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Nature in motion pictures. 2. Ecology in motion
pictures. 3. Environmental protection and motion pictures. I. Narine,
Anil, editor.
PN1995.9.N38E26 2014
791.43'66—dc23
2014016191
ISBN: 978-1-138-79139-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-76281-4 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex Covantage, LLC
To my parents, for showing me so many countries and
so many movies.
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Contents

List of Figures xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction: Eco-Trauma Cinema 1
ANIL NARINE
1 Evolution, Extinction and the Eco-Trauma Film: D arwin’s
Nightmare (2004) and A Zed & Two Naughts (1985) 25
BARBARA CREED
2 Trauma, Truth and the Environmental Documentary 46
C HARLES MUSSER
3 Great Southern Wounds: The Trauma of Australian Cinema 72
MARK STEVEN
4 Into the Wilde? Art, Technologically Mediated Kinship,
and the Lethal Indifference of Nature in Werner Herzog’s
Grizzly Man 88
ALF SEEGERT
5 The Dangers of Biosecurity: T he Host (2006) and the
Geopolitics of Outbreak 113
HSUAN L. HSU
6 Biting Back: America, Nature, and Feminism in Teeth 134
R OLAND FINGER
7 The Spirits of Globalization: Masochistic Ecologies
in Fabrice Du Welz’s Vinyan 146
G EORGIANA BANITA