For those of you who were unable to attend the recent ASLE conference, I wanted to let you know what we accomplished at our first Ecomedia Interest Group meeting. If you would like to join the new email listserve we are creating to continue our conversation please email srust@uoregon.edu. Please provide your full name, affiliation and rank, email address, research/teaching interests, list of related organization of which you are a member, and any ideas you have for growing the field in your email.
Given the outpouring of interest in ecomedia studies over the past few years, including a significant number of panels and papers at this year’s ASLE conference, at this first meeting of the ecomedia interest group we set out to explore such questions as:Â How do we negotiate between our interest in ecocriticism and our primary disciplines? How do we make resources in the field available to newcomers? What questions at issue within the field have yet to be addressed? Who are our audiences and how do we find them? Ecomedia studies (https://www.facebook.com/groups/ecomediagroup/) encompasses a wide range of subject areas, including film, photography, new media, digital humanities, video games, data visualization, music and sound studies, comics, and other forms of visual and audio art and rhetoric that intersect with environmental understandings.
We had a remarkable turn out as more than thirty scholars gathered at the group meeting and several more expressed interest but were unable to attend. We passed around a sign-up sheet to begin the process of building an email list to continue the conversation outside of ASLE. After introducing ourselves and sharing our interest in ecomedia, Don Fredrickson usefully suggested that the best use of our time would be to identify and discuss action items. To that end we discussed the following four action items:
1) The group would like to see an ASLE plenary speaker whose work speaks directly to our interests.
Several people noted that while several of this year’s plenary speakers – including Rob Nixon and Stacy Alaimo – made significant use of visual imagery in their presentations that none of the speakers focused their talks on the role of visual and/or audio texts as such. There was unanimous consent that ASLE should make an extra effort for a plenary speaker whose work intersects more directly with ecomedia studies for the next ASLE conference in 2015.
2) The group expressed interest in creating a Facebook page and developing a more visible web presence and online community to share ideas and resouces.
Thanks to Nicole Seymour we now have an Ecomedia group Facebook page:Â https://www.facebook.com/groups/ecomediagroup/. Many people expressed interest in creating a space either linked to or directly embedded within the ASLE website for folks to share syllabi, bibliographic references, information on films, film festivals and other visual texts. Stephen Rust and Salma Monani pointed folks to Ecomediastudies.org – a blog designed to address these very issues, and Robin Murray and Joe Heumann invited submissions to their blog Eco-Cinema and Film Genre (http://www.ecocinema.blogspot.com/). Folks are invited to submit syllabi, references, and other helpful information to the Facebook page or either of the blogs.
3) There is significant interest in organizing an off-year ASLE symposium focused on ecomedia studies.
While several meetings of events have been held in Europe no such meeting suited to the interests of ASLE-based media scholars has been held in the US. To this end there is considerable interest in holding an off-year ASLE symposium focused on ecomedia. Literary scholars would be encouraged to attend but the primary focus of the conference would be media. Nothing concrete has been planned as of yet but folks at a couple institutions have made initial inquiries as to the feasibility of hosting such a symposium.
4) We must continue to build bridges between ASLE and other organizations.
This year, ASLE sponsored a panel at the International Environmental Communications Association conference held in Uppsala, Sweden June 6-10. However, as Salma Monani explained, the IECA did not sponsor a panel at ASLE though the offer was made. The group also expressed interest in the need to make a more concerted effort to organize an environmental interest group within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and to continue to reach out to the IECA and other organizations. Stephen Rust has agreed to to look into what steps would need to be taken to start such an interest group within SCMS – the first step is that 25 members are required to maintain interest group status. Others are encouraged to look into this process for similar organizations as well.
The complete list of those who attended the meeting or have expressed interest in remaining part of the conversation appears below.
Yours,
Steve
Check out NYU Assistant Professor Nicole Starosielski’s new digital mapping project Surfacing. The project is current in progress. An extended paper version based on a presentation at Sub-Optic is available at http://www.academia.edu/3492742/Surfacing_A_Digital_Mapping_of_Submarine_Systems.
This interactive digital media project visualizes cultural geographies of submarine communications networks. These networks currently support almost all of our transoceanic internet traffic. Using video and photography of landing points and cable stations across the Pacific Rim, Surfacing maps the cultural processes that have come to shape the development of transnational internet infrastructure.
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
I’ve spent the last three days attending the International Environmental Communication Association’s COCE conference hosted for the first time outside the US. Hosted by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala, the conference has been a treat. Small, relative to other conferences like ASLE, and with a smorgasbord of panel options that capture the breadth of work IECA encapsulates, from practitioners at the frontlines of journalism and community conflict management to social science researchers interested in content and discourse analysis to scholars of rhetoric and cultural studies, COCE made room for some interesting ecomedia research.
I was delighted to see the full room at the panel I was on with five other ecocinema scholars. Pietaari Kaapa chaired, and presented on audience studies, comparing the cultural heterogeneity across Chinese national and class boundaries. Pat Brereton and his PhD student Chao Ping Hong both presented on audience studies too. While Pat framed their project’s intention to bring clarity to many of our current humanitist scholarly assumptions on what we think audiences think, Chao Ping’s work dove into the Q method of analysis familiar to social science researchers to suggest ways of getting at some of this audience complexity. Both used Irish audiences as their case studies. Helen Hughes moved us from audiences to thinking about documentaries as part of an audio-visual forum for environmental debate, using Josh Fox’s Gasland and the subsequent documentary and YouTube responses (e.g., Truthland) and counter-responses (Gasland 2). I presented on Miranda Brady and my work on the ImagineNative film festival, and Steve Rust “jabbered” in to discuss the need for ecomedia scholars to engage with media ecology scholars and vice versa. Presentations were 10 minutes each, leaving lots of room for Q&A including thoughts on television as a site for productive analysis.
The panel discussion served as a nice way to segway to an interesting panel I attended the next day on Transmedia organized by Jennifer Good, which also featured Richard Doherty, Kevin DeLuca, Geo Takah, and one of the blog’s regular contributors, Joe Clark. As a whole the presenters gave us much to think about regarding the functions and purposes of transmediated forums, from Joe’s thought on the potentials of multi-user platforms (such as Second Life) to resist control of property rights and to educate about the environment to Richard’s call for a queering of transmedia platforms as a mode of resistance, to Jennifer’s exploration of the uses and gratifications of transmedia by hegemonic and counter-hegemonic affiliated groups (e.g., corporations and activists). Kevin’s argument for looking towards China as a model to explore transmedia negotiations as the West becomes less a Democracy (with a capital D) and more a site of regulated and restricted freedoms was thought-provoking, as was Geo’s creative film and extended media project to engage the Alberta Tar sands. I came away thinking about how the trans in transmedia can be used to productively push on the dichomoties of nature and technology that some of the discussions in various IECA panels still lingered on.
This morning I hopped between presentations, which further expanded media into the realm of performance (Jenny Alexander’s semiotic analysis of the Olympics opening and closing ceremonies; she also looked at Greenpeace protests) and Earth observation data (Chris Russill’s fascinating examination of GEOSS through a look at ozone discourse: how do we mediate immediately intangible phenomena such as UV indexes?).
All in all, IECA is rich with ecomedia scholarship that demonstrates communication scholars’ attempts to make sense of the many, many ways human, machine, and natural phenomena interact. It’s been a thought provoking few days made all the more memorable by collectively singing Mamma Mia at the IECA banquet hosted by our more than gracious and generous hosts here in Sweden, who also seem to have figured out that bikes are one of the best ways to solidly ground us in a human-machine relationship that makes it hard to render invisible the natural phenomena around us.
Necsus European Journal of Media Studies has a special issue on ecocriticism (with some familiar names). I’ve only read Barbara Creed’s piece so far and it is excellent. The journal is open access
http://www.necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/3-spring-2013-the-green-issue/
Nenette: Film theory, animals, and boredom by Barbara Creed
Greening media studies: An interview with Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller by Jaap Kooijman
‘Global warming is not a crisis!’: Studying climate change skepticism on the web by Sabine Niederer
Painting the town green: From urban teleology to urban ecology in New York cinema, 1960-present by Brady Fletcher and Cortland Rankin
A filmic exploration by means of botanical imagery: Notes on Rose Lowder by Enrico Camporesi
Dialectical modes of nature in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line by Tyson Wils
Her green materials: Mourning, Melancholia, and not-so-vital materialisms by Catherine Lord
Disharmonious designs: Colour contrast and curiosity in Jane Campion’s In the Cut by Liz Watkins
Greenface: Exploring green skin in contemporary Hollywood cinema by Brady Hammond
Scalar entanglement in digital media ecologies by Sy Taffel
and two review pieces
From Chernobyl to Fukushima: The Uranium Film Festival review by Courtney Sheehan
Indigenous film festival as eco-testimonial encounter: The 2011 Native Film + Video Festival review by Salma Monani
Jeff Orlowski’s compelling documentary Chasing Ice (2012), about James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) project, seemed to be a film many folks had already seen and were buzzing about at the ASLE 2013 Biennial Conference just passed. This visually stunning film is extremely worthwhile viewing for anyone interested in photographic and cinematic representation of climate change, environmental justice issues, and/or the role mass media plays in raising ecological awareness on a broad scale.
Chasing Ice (2012) Official Trailer
Does Chasing Ice get a little hero-worshippy in its attitude toward Balog, using pathos-laden interviews with his daughter, wife, and coworkers to frame him as a world-saving hero? Surely. Does the film thereby evince that disquieting Hollywood tendency to reduce systemic ecological concerns to an overly individualistic, possibly too  romantic, human scale? Probably so, at least in some small measure. But is Chasing Ice also an impactful, affecting documentary about the urgent need to accept and address the realities of global climate change? Absolutely.
What most interests me as a scholar and fan of visual media is Balog’s (and the film’s) insistence that images, photography, and cinema play a crucial role in swaying public opinion on matters of global concern that still provoke resistance and denial in many segments of our society. Â Orlowski’s film both documents and exemplifies the role potent visuals can play in making ecological arguments to wide audiences.
The 10th biennial Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference takes place next week in Lawrence, Kansas on the University of Kansas campus. This year’s program reflects the continued growth of ecomedia studies, with multiple panels and individual papers scheduled on topics as diverse as digital data, cinematic ethics, and eco-horror. A complete program is available at the conference website (http://asle.ku.edu/) and panel and paper summaries will be posted to the blog next week.
Additionally, for the first time we’ve organized an interest group meeting for Thursday, May 30 from 5:30-6:30pm to give those interested in ecomedia studies a chance to meet, share contact information, and have an open-ended discussion about the future of this unique area of scholarship – which has roots in environmental communication, film and media studies, literary theory, music and sound, comics, artistic production, and more. If you have topics or questions you’d like to see addressed at the interest group meeting please add a comment to this post or email Stephen Rust at srust@uoregon.edu.
Writer/director Nick Agiashvili’s independent film A Green Story opens this weekend in specialty (aka arthouse) theaters. From the trailer it’s obvious that the film is part inspirational biopic and part extended commercial for Earth Friendly Products, which makes Ecos laundry detergent and other green-friendly cleaning supplies. It’s a story that works on multiple levels; the subject, Earth Friendly founder Van Vlahakis, is an immigrant who works his way from rags to riches while battling corporate baddies and cancer to make a better life for his family, community, and planet. Let the ecocritical unpacking begin.
Trailer:
“Van Vlahakis left Greece five decades ago with 22 dollars in his pocket. He arrived in the US hoping for a better future for him and his family. Eftichios – as is his Greek name- not only managed to live the American dream for himself, but also created Earth Friendly Products, a US giant for environmentally friendly cleaning products. His story is not only about transforming his life but also the lives of the ones around him as the owner and CEO of Earth Friendly Products.
“The story centers on the modern day Vlahakis (played by Ed O’Ross), who is diagnosed with cancer and given only few months to live. During this time, he reflects on his early life as an immigrant (played by George Finn) during the 1950’s and ultimately decides to push himself to the limit by closing one final business deal that will concretize his company’s success, even if it means taking on a large corporation that is trying to take over his company.“
Here’s an excerpt from Deadline Hollywood’s coverage of the film:
“After seeing the film we realized how timely the topic was – a film about a pioneer and visionary in green living and how it relates to everyone as Climate Change and Green Living become front and center in the world going forward,†said Randolph Kret from Indican. “The core audience for the film ranges from Greeks who will relate to the themes of community, family and the immigrants dream and to anyone who is learning or becoming a part of the Green Community and how to live a better, safer life in these exciting times of technological invention as we (the world) figure out how to reverse and fix the problems our planet has created through fossil fuels and short cuts.â€