Abstract

Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.

Guinevere Narraway lectures on cinema at the University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia. Her research focus is ecocriticism and moving image culture.

"The writers here make you see the world inside and outside of the cinema anew. Screening Nature contains ideas that are as varied and colourful as birds' feathers. This is an important book that pushes cinema forward."  ·  Apichatpong Weerasethakul, winner of the 2010 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or prize

"From Avatar to Zen, this remarkable collection of essays goes everywhere in the contemporary film environment to discover remarkable things about what that medium can tell us about ecology. It's fully cognizant of philosophical and theoretical developments in the field, generously global in scope and inclusive of the myriad nonhumans who coexist with us and our films."  ·  Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University

Anat Pick lectures in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. Her book Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film was published by Columbia University Press (2011).