Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic doc... more Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of commercial franchises. This book investigates in particular film’s complex role in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict 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 ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.
Can films that depict urgent social problems challenge viewers to change their views? What is the... more Can films that depict urgent social problems challenge viewers to change their views? What is the boundary between images that can change the world, like the tragic image of the drowned Syrian boy, and images that cause us to turn away in a state of trauma, fatigue or willed ignorance? Does cinema (more than photography) run the risk of “aestheticizing” the suffering of people, ecosystems and other living things? The global environmental crisis, encompassing climate change, dwindling natural resources, decimated rain forests and animal habitats, toxified industrial sites and acidic oceans, is a pressing problem that affects us all. But the majority of empowered citizens in industrialized economies have been slow to realize the extent of the damage done (including our eradication of 50% of many animal species since the 1970s) and apathetic to streamline our lifestyles and consume less. While many citizens have remained poorly informed for decades due to the dominant media system built largely around corporate interests, others have chosen to ignore the mounting crisis. Psychologists call this process of willed ignorance disavowal, which can be a symptom of trauma. Cinematic representations are therefore of interest because they confront us with imagery we may prefer to ignore. Dr. Anil Narine, editor of the book Eco-Trauma Cinema (Routledge 2015), discussed this subgenre of eco-cinema in its three general forms: accounts of people who were traumatized by the natural world, narratives that represented people or social processes which traumatized the environment or its species, and stories that depicted the aftermath of ecological catastrophe. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict 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. In avant-garde, commercial, and documentary cinema, images of ecological trauma confront us. But to what end? Can these images of ecological trauma shock us in ways that activate us as citizens, rather than pacifying us as audiences? Might cinema be the “cognitive map” we need to enable us to rethink our relationship with the imperiled natural world
Human annihilation was on offer at the cinema throughout the summer and fall of 2015. New sequels... more Human annihilation was on offer at the cinema throughout the summer and fall of 2015. New sequels to The Terminator, Mad Max, Jurassic Park and The Avengers have reached massive audiences, each by dramatizing threats to our survival in very different ways. These films capitalize on the drama of humans struggling against a ravaged environment. Alan Taylor’s Terminator: Genisys, the well-received fifth instalment of the time-bending saga that pits a hopeful present against a grim post-apocalyptic future, pays homage to James Cameron’s 1984 hit. As Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) and the familiar T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) struggle to avert a nuclear war, we are offered glimpses of this ruined future where the remaining humans hide amid the rubble of their once-green world. With its politically charged imagery of polygamous oil barons and ecological traumas, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road has generated perhaps the most debate of any major US release this year.
Are we really more connected interpersonally in the age of accelerated globalization? Do global s... more Are we really more connected interpersonally in the age of accelerated globalization? Do global social networks principally empower connected agents, or are ‘‘powerless places’’ further marginalized by ‘‘placeless power’’? In the cinematic network society, empowered agents fail to co-ordinate or even comprehend the networks that surround them. Borrowing from social problem films, economic guilt films, and city films of the past, these network narratives illustrate how networks can link us in unwanted ways. In the 11 films examined here, privileged Westerners are often forced to confront their networked relationships with suffering others.
This article examines how the global traumas of resource-driven conflicts and acts of terrorism ... more This article examines how the global traumas of resource-driven conflicts and acts of terrorism are mapped in 21st-century US and UK narrative cinema, and suggests that guilt, elicited in the implied Western viewer, is displaced in the films onto images of Western women. Revisiting Mulvey’ s influential theory of ‘visual pleasure’ through the ‘male gaze’ , this article analyses the films Traffic (2000), a depiction of US complicity with global drug cartels, Babel (2006), the story of a global media frenzy surrounding American tourists victimized in Morocco, and three films about crises in Africa: Shooting Dogs (2005), a dramatization of Western apathy during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, The Constant Gardener (2005), about pharmaceutical testing in Kenya, and Lord of War (2005), based upon the life of an arms dealer. A theoretical re-engagement with feminist film theory is followed by analyses of the films to illustrate how the guilt elicited by each of the films’ traumatic contexts con joins with the primal psychological experience of lack. Viewers’ and their screen surrogates’ combined sense of helplessness in the face of others’ trauma is displaced ‘hysterically’ onto images of women, exposing a troubling new looking relation in our traumatic age.
Keywords cinematic gaze; feminist theory ; gender; globalization; psychoanalysis; trauma
One of the most dynamic discussions in memory studies concerns memory’s infusion with phantasy, w... more One of the most dynamic discussions in memory studies concerns memory’s infusion with phantasy, which Freud also referred to as fantasy. This article examines how memory and fantasy intermingle in ways analogous to the ambivalent human experience of sound: sounds and musical cues can both trigger memories and be active in repressing them by encoding them into fantasmatic ‘counter memories’. Taking Alan J. Pakula’s film Sophie’s Choice (1982) as a case study, I examine how the three principal characters are traumatized by intruding sounds, but use music to repress or reconfigure the memories these sounds trigger. Sophie’s memories of Auschwitz are signalled by Hamlisch’s flute, which provides the soundscape of her fantasy-infused flashbacks; her companion Nathan’s delusional ‘memories’ of the war are safely repressed when the oboe supplies him with his ego’s anthem; and sounds from the narrator Stingo’s childhood rupture the nostalgic soundtrack of violins accompanying his fantasy-inflected narrative. The relevance of Pakula’s melodrama to the social memory of the Holocaust lies in its challenge to the polarized debate between modernist refusals to represent the past ‘directly’ (as in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah) and realist attempts at ‘total representation’ (Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List). In Sophie’s Choice, acts of individual memory, infused with fantasy soundscapes, are analogous to broader processes of social memory, which are always instilled with our fantasies of what might have been.
Key Words: Alan J. Pakula • American studies • cultural memory • fantasy • film music • film sound • the Holocaust • Marvin Hamlisch • Sophie’s Choice
This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and moderni... more This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and modernity in John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972). It finds that the suburbanites who are victimized in Appalachia do not regress to a primal, premodern state but rely on their modern values to justify killing their assailants. The men's violence allegorizes the institutionalized violence of the power company that is damming the Cahulawassee River to power their suburban technological comforts. Hermeneutic analysis and critical theories of technology are combined to examine how each man reassesses his life, as one of modernity's beneficiaries, after encountering the displaced mountain people – modernity's others.
This paper examines depictions of the ‘‘cyberchild,” and the child at risk in Hollywood films and... more This paper examines depictions of the ‘‘cyberchild,” and the child at risk in Hollywood films and television advertisements portraying children’s digital gaming. We examine fears of digital play and adjoining hopes for its conversion into a ‘‘productive’’ and educational practice. We find evidence of a stiflingly polarized conflict over children’s digital gaming: young gamers are either delinquent and violent, or naturally adept cyberchildren.
Although Blade Runner has been widely read as a postmodernist pastiche of film noir and science f... more Although Blade Runner has been widely read as a postmodernist pastiche of film noir and science fiction genres that questions the distinction between “human and non-human (artificial) intelligence” (Tasker 225), a major element of the narrative has received less scrutiny: namely, the way the colonial subplot allegorizes middle class anxieties about vengeful workers rising up and demanding answers from their superiors, and working class fears about being replaced by ambitious immigrants, whose invasion the borders can no longer prevent.
Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic doc... more Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement, from didactic documentaries to the fantasy pleasures of commercial franchises. This book investigates in particular film’s complex role in representing ecological traumas. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict 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 ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.
Can films that depict urgent social problems challenge viewers to change their views? What is the... more Can films that depict urgent social problems challenge viewers to change their views? What is the boundary between images that can change the world, like the tragic image of the drowned Syrian boy, and images that cause us to turn away in a state of trauma, fatigue or willed ignorance? Does cinema (more than photography) run the risk of “aestheticizing” the suffering of people, ecosystems and other living things? The global environmental crisis, encompassing climate change, dwindling natural resources, decimated rain forests and animal habitats, toxified industrial sites and acidic oceans, is a pressing problem that affects us all. But the majority of empowered citizens in industrialized economies have been slow to realize the extent of the damage done (including our eradication of 50% of many animal species since the 1970s) and apathetic to streamline our lifestyles and consume less. While many citizens have remained poorly informed for decades due to the dominant media system built largely around corporate interests, others have chosen to ignore the mounting crisis. Psychologists call this process of willed ignorance disavowal, which can be a symptom of trauma. Cinematic representations are therefore of interest because they confront us with imagery we may prefer to ignore. Dr. Anil Narine, editor of the book Eco-Trauma Cinema (Routledge 2015), discussed this subgenre of eco-cinema in its three general forms: accounts of people who were traumatized by the natural world, narratives that represented people or social processes which traumatized the environment or its species, and stories that depicted the aftermath of ecological catastrophe. Eco-trauma cinema represents the harm we, as humans, inflict 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. In avant-garde, commercial, and documentary cinema, images of ecological trauma confront us. But to what end? Can these images of ecological trauma shock us in ways that activate us as citizens, rather than pacifying us as audiences? Might cinema be the “cognitive map” we need to enable us to rethink our relationship with the imperiled natural world
Human annihilation was on offer at the cinema throughout the summer and fall of 2015. New sequels... more Human annihilation was on offer at the cinema throughout the summer and fall of 2015. New sequels to The Terminator, Mad Max, Jurassic Park and The Avengers have reached massive audiences, each by dramatizing threats to our survival in very different ways. These films capitalize on the drama of humans struggling against a ravaged environment. Alan Taylor’s Terminator: Genisys, the well-received fifth instalment of the time-bending saga that pits a hopeful present against a grim post-apocalyptic future, pays homage to James Cameron’s 1984 hit. As Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) and the familiar T-101 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) struggle to avert a nuclear war, we are offered glimpses of this ruined future where the remaining humans hide amid the rubble of their once-green world. With its politically charged imagery of polygamous oil barons and ecological traumas, George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road has generated perhaps the most debate of any major US release this year.
Are we really more connected interpersonally in the age of accelerated globalization? Do global s... more Are we really more connected interpersonally in the age of accelerated globalization? Do global social networks principally empower connected agents, or are ‘‘powerless places’’ further marginalized by ‘‘placeless power’’? In the cinematic network society, empowered agents fail to co-ordinate or even comprehend the networks that surround them. Borrowing from social problem films, economic guilt films, and city films of the past, these network narratives illustrate how networks can link us in unwanted ways. In the 11 films examined here, privileged Westerners are often forced to confront their networked relationships with suffering others.
This article examines how the global traumas of resource-driven conflicts and acts of terrorism ... more This article examines how the global traumas of resource-driven conflicts and acts of terrorism are mapped in 21st-century US and UK narrative cinema, and suggests that guilt, elicited in the implied Western viewer, is displaced in the films onto images of Western women. Revisiting Mulvey’ s influential theory of ‘visual pleasure’ through the ‘male gaze’ , this article analyses the films Traffic (2000), a depiction of US complicity with global drug cartels, Babel (2006), the story of a global media frenzy surrounding American tourists victimized in Morocco, and three films about crises in Africa: Shooting Dogs (2005), a dramatization of Western apathy during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, The Constant Gardener (2005), about pharmaceutical testing in Kenya, and Lord of War (2005), based upon the life of an arms dealer. A theoretical re-engagement with feminist film theory is followed by analyses of the films to illustrate how the guilt elicited by each of the films’ traumatic contexts con joins with the primal psychological experience of lack. Viewers’ and their screen surrogates’ combined sense of helplessness in the face of others’ trauma is displaced ‘hysterically’ onto images of women, exposing a troubling new looking relation in our traumatic age.
Keywords cinematic gaze; feminist theory ; gender; globalization; psychoanalysis; trauma
One of the most dynamic discussions in memory studies concerns memory’s infusion with phantasy, w... more One of the most dynamic discussions in memory studies concerns memory’s infusion with phantasy, which Freud also referred to as fantasy. This article examines how memory and fantasy intermingle in ways analogous to the ambivalent human experience of sound: sounds and musical cues can both trigger memories and be active in repressing them by encoding them into fantasmatic ‘counter memories’. Taking Alan J. Pakula’s film Sophie’s Choice (1982) as a case study, I examine how the three principal characters are traumatized by intruding sounds, but use music to repress or reconfigure the memories these sounds trigger. Sophie’s memories of Auschwitz are signalled by Hamlisch’s flute, which provides the soundscape of her fantasy-infused flashbacks; her companion Nathan’s delusional ‘memories’ of the war are safely repressed when the oboe supplies him with his ego’s anthem; and sounds from the narrator Stingo’s childhood rupture the nostalgic soundtrack of violins accompanying his fantasy-inflected narrative. The relevance of Pakula’s melodrama to the social memory of the Holocaust lies in its challenge to the polarized debate between modernist refusals to represent the past ‘directly’ (as in Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 film Shoah) and realist attempts at ‘total representation’ (Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List). In Sophie’s Choice, acts of individual memory, infused with fantasy soundscapes, are analogous to broader processes of social memory, which are always instilled with our fantasies of what might have been.
Key Words: Alan J. Pakula • American studies • cultural memory • fantasy • film music • film sound • the Holocaust • Marvin Hamlisch • Sophie’s Choice
This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and moderni... more This paper hermeneutically examines the relationship between technology, masculinity, and modernity in John Boorman's film Deliverance (1972). It finds that the suburbanites who are victimized in Appalachia do not regress to a primal, premodern state but rely on their modern values to justify killing their assailants. The men's violence allegorizes the institutionalized violence of the power company that is damming the Cahulawassee River to power their suburban technological comforts. Hermeneutic analysis and critical theories of technology are combined to examine how each man reassesses his life, as one of modernity's beneficiaries, after encountering the displaced mountain people – modernity's others.
This paper examines depictions of the ‘‘cyberchild,” and the child at risk in Hollywood films and... more This paper examines depictions of the ‘‘cyberchild,” and the child at risk in Hollywood films and television advertisements portraying children’s digital gaming. We examine fears of digital play and adjoining hopes for its conversion into a ‘‘productive’’ and educational practice. We find evidence of a stiflingly polarized conflict over children’s digital gaming: young gamers are either delinquent and violent, or naturally adept cyberchildren.
Although Blade Runner has been widely read as a postmodernist pastiche of film noir and science f... more Although Blade Runner has been widely read as a postmodernist pastiche of film noir and science fiction genres that questions the distinction between “human and non-human (artificial) intelligence” (Tasker 225), a major element of the narrative has received less scrutiny: namely, the way the colonial subplot allegorizes middle class anxieties about vengeful workers rising up and demanding answers from their superiors, and working class fears about being replaced by ambitious immigrants, whose invasion the borders can no longer prevent.
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Books by Anil Narine
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 ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.
Papers by Anil Narine
Keywords: Network society; Historical trauma; Hollywood cinema; Humanitarian
celebrities; Foucault; multi-plot cinema
Keywords
cinematic gaze; feminist theory ; gender; globalization; psychoanalysis; trauma
Key Words: Alan J. Pakula • American studies • cultural memory • fantasy • film music • film sound • the Holocaust • Marvin Hamlisch • Sophie’s Choice
others.
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 ecological catastrophe. The films they examine represent a central challenge of our age: to overcome our disavowal of environmental crises, to reflect on the unsavoury forces reshaping the planet's ecosystems, and to restructure the mechanisms responsible for the state of the earth.
Keywords: Network society; Historical trauma; Hollywood cinema; Humanitarian
celebrities; Foucault; multi-plot cinema
Keywords
cinematic gaze; feminist theory ; gender; globalization; psychoanalysis; trauma
Key Words: Alan J. Pakula • American studies • cultural memory • fantasy • film music • film sound • the Holocaust • Marvin Hamlisch • Sophie’s Choice
others.