Laid in Flood

"Over the last twenty-five years, as the actor’s physical body has gradually disappeared from the cinematic screen, the bodily dimension of the film experience has increased. In a scenario in which cinema has spread to a myriad of monitors and displays and the film experience seems to lose its integrity, the spectator is still seeking a strong and involving experience, still demanding stories made up of images and sounds that can still arouse the senses. My hypothesis is that contemporary cinema is facing this mutation by developing a number of specific and recurrent “experiential figures”. These figures are cases of strong and effective bodily tension, in which spectators’ motor, perceptual, emotional and mental activities are embodied into a “sensible substance”. Such a substance extends its features from the screen to the psychological space of the experience and transforms it into a unique “sensible environment”. One of these figure is the body in the water. Since its beginnings, cinema has recognized that water can visually give matter and meaning to human desires, dreams and secrets, eliciting suspense and fear. Using different aesthetical and technical strategies, contemporary cinema shows immersed and drowning bodies to represent and express intimacy and protection, suspense and fear, obsession and depression, state of shock, past or infancy trauma, hallucinations and nightmares, etc. The case of “water-embodiment” (or enwaterment) is significant because of its relevance to the point where psychoanalysis and philosophy meet. In this provisional paper, presented at the International Film Studies Conference “Emergent Encounters in Film Theory. Intersections Between Psychoanalysis and Philosophy”, held at King’s College of London on March 21st 2009, I attempt to investigate what is actually meant today by making a bodily and sensible experience of film by analyzing the substance of water and the figures of the drowning and immersed body. Cinema embodies aquatic modalities of perception and expression, pulling the viewer into a liquid environment that is the confluence between the film-body and the filmgoer-body."

Critical Survery of Graphic Novels, 2012

An entry on Eric Drooker's graphic novel Flood! A Novel in Pictures written for the Critical Survey of Graphic Novels: Independents and Underground Classics, Volume 1 (Salem Press 2012)

Journal of Narrative and Language Studies, 2023

As two of the few socialist countries in the Global South today that share a deep root of Confucianism and have had intense contact with capitalism in the last two decades, Vietnam and China have many cultural, ideological, and political similarities. Significantly, China and Vietnam have a similarly long tradition of water control and pride in managing the power of rivers and water, as evidenced in mythological, fairy tales, and historical books. The Yangtze and the Mekong are the two largest rivers that profoundly influence and impact their respective cultural, spiritual, economic, and social lives. Since the 1990s, with the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and industrial plants next to the Yangtze and the mangrove deforestation next to the Mekong, in the context of Post-socialism, these two river deltas have faced unprecedented severe environmental challenges. On the other hand, the images of the two rivers and two river deltas appearing in official state-funded and commercial films are isolated from the actual situations mentioned. By examining two typical independent movies from China and Vietnam about the Great Flood, Taking Father Home (2005, Ying Liang) and 2030 (2014, Nguyen Vo Nghiem Minh), this essay highlights the eco-awareness of those affected, especially the sense of eco-trauma, related to the natural disasters in the Yangtze and Mekong deltas. This essay will in particular analyze how the globalization process in these two socialist countries causes multilevel harm in localities, both culturally and environmentally. Moreover, drawing from the concepts of indigenous cinema, we will highlight the aesthetic ability of independent films to question the limitations of commercial and state-sponsored movies, which always romanticize native natural landscapes on-screen and produce eco-ambiguity among the public.

Sea Narratives: Cultural Responses to the Sea, 1600–Present . Edited By Charlotte Mathieson

Indian filmmaker Aparna Sen’s 1995 film Yugant offers a surprisingly prescient reading of what is now understood as signs of the arrival of the Anthropocene. One of the earliest films from the Global South to have invoked the marauding ecological effects of globalisation, Yugant resists easy categorisation as feminist, national or leftist cinema. Primarily a sea narrative in complex, understated ways, the film is about an urbane and estranged couple despondently attempting and failing reconciliation while on vacation on an Indian east coast beach. The film reads their climactic and catastrophic dénouement as symptomatic of the violence against the planet and the sea as both a contrarian participant and spectacular casualty of it. Interrogating the film from the distance of 20 years, the chapter also foregrounds how the film manages to raise a range of questions that humanities can bring to the climate change debate.

Acta Universitatis Sapientiae – Film and Media Studies

Since its beginnings, cinema has recognised that water can visually give matter and meaning to human desires, dreams and secrets, eliciting suspense and fear. Using different aesthetical and technical strategies, contemporary cinema shows immersed and drowning bodies to represent and express intimacy and protection, suspense and fear, obsession and depression, state of shock, past or infancy trauma, hallucinations and nightmares, etc. The case of enwaterment (i.e. “waterembodiment”) is significant because of its relevance to the point where psychoanalysis and philosophy meet. In this essay, I attempt to investigate what is actually meant today by making a bodily and sensible experience of film by analysing the substance of water and the figures of the drowning and immersed body. Cinema embodies aquatic modalities of perception and expression, pulling the viewer into a liquid environment that is the confluence between the film-body and the filmgoer-body.

Asian Cinema, 2019

Commercial films today often reduce representations of natural catastrophes to commodified spectacles that de-contextualize the subject matter. To contemporary film viewers, the 'psychic numbing' effect is apparent, and it does not apply merely to our perception of numbers, statistics, the big data. It can also be seen when we are bombarded with similar kinds of images over and over again; in this case, the large-scale tsunami, the hurricanes, the earthquake and all the exaggerated destruction scenes in recent disaster movies have become clichés no matter how realistic and intense the shots are made. By focusing on a range of eco-disaster films, this article highlights the importance of cultural sensitivity in the study of eco-disaster films, by exploring several questions: how are eco-disasters culturally shaped and defined, via cinematic means? How are human responses to disasters, as reflected in cinematic representations, shaped by specific sociopolitical, cultural or economic conditions? How does cinema as a media form represent ecological concepts that are shared globally or universally, while at the same time reflecting specific cultural characteris-tics? Juxtaposing examples from China, Thailand and the Phillippines, particularly with three films: Wonderful Town (Thailand, 2007), Aftershock (China, 2010) and Taklub (Phillippines, 2015), this article demonstrates how Asian eco-disaster films in the Anthropocene epoch reflect specific cultural imaginations of nation and identity rebuilding, which in turn provide a ground to reposition, redefine and reinvent KEYWORDS eco-disaster film post-disaster Anthropocene nation rebuilding catastrophic condition Taklub Aftershock Wonderful Town

Fusion Journal, 2016

THE RIVER PROJECT A Poetics of Eco-Critical Film-Making There is a body of film that falls under the categories of eco-cinema, environmental cinema and landscape cinema. These films take the natural environment, place or landscape as their subject matter As we try to make meaning of the connections of our lives and world through film, Rust and Monani (2013) note that, 'cinema is a form of negotiation, a mediation that is itself ecologically placed as it consumes the entangled world around it, and in turn, is itself consumed.' This influence is evident in complex, poetic ways, and appears to revolve around the manner in which the films listen to the landscape, rather than seeking to impose themselves upon it-exhibiting a certain kind of humility. As a child I was attracted to flowing water. In my early teens I experienced the fear and awe of canoeing down Australia's wild Snowy River. As an adult I find myself drawn to cross, swim, walk along, look into and film rivers. Not to narrate, or even describe the river, but to use film to find a nonfiction form that acknowledges the river, writes the river. I'm making a series of films around the Snowy River that investigates the poetics of rivers. The first in that series, A View from the Bank, is a 40-minute experimental, structuralist film that documents parts of the Snowy from its source to its mouth. I will examine how this film does not seek to interpret the world as much as listen and bear witness to it. This is realised aesthetically by its use of stillness, long takes and unadulterated audio which has created a form that appears and is experienced as a counter to the deliberate rhetoric common to much documentary. I will show how my methods of production were guided by the river and the landscape around it. Further, in the Anthropocene, how can this film be an agent for environmental awareness without resorting to dogmatic imposition?

The 2004 Tsunami devastated large swaths of Asia. Harmattan Theater was formed in response to rising ocean impact on coastal ecologies. This paper elaborates the philosophical, theoretical underpinnings of slow walk as an ecological practice of engagement with landscapes. How can coastal communities interact with their fragile realities. Slow movement as philosophical immersion is a powerful way to mark, remember, evoke, commemorate, mourn and educate ourselves about maritime pasts, and the catastrophic implications of climate change.

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.

2023

This study aims to explore the portrayal of the Fountain of Youth and the myth of the Flood in movies. Firstly, the meaning of the water myth is explained. Then, the focus shifts to how the myth of the Fountain of Youth and the Flood are depicted in different mythologies. The study utilizes qualitative method and thematic content analysis, selecting six films through purposive sampling. The analysis incorporates Joseph Campbell's Monomyth theory and Klaus Koch's work on the eight features of the apocalypse. The study reveals how these myths are reproduced through sub-themes identified within the main themes of the Fountain of Youth and the Flood. The results indicate that films present the myth of the Fountain of Youth in various forms. Heroes have different motivations for seeking the Fountain of Youth and encounter various obstacles. Characters who reach the Fountain of Youth undergo significant positive transformations. In flood narratives depicted in movies, the cause of the flood and the awareness of it differ from film to film. Furthermore, other movie findings illustrate who boarded the ship or vehicle to escape the flood and who faced punishment.