This book presents an ecophilosophy of cinema: an account of the moving image in relation to the lived ecologies - material, social, and perceptual relations - within which movies are produced, consumed, and incorporated into cultural life. If cinema takes us on mental and emotional journeys, the author argues that those journeys that have reshaped our understanding of ourselves, life, and the Earth and universe. A range of styles are examined, from ethnographic and wildlife documentaries, westerns and road movies, sci-fi blockbusters and eco-disaster films to the experimental and art films of Tarkovsky, Herzog, Malick, and Brakhage, to YouTube's expanding audio-visual universe.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents for Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature, by Adrian J. Ivakhiv Preface Acknowledgements 1. Introduction: Journeys into the Zone of Cinema Two perspectives on the visual The cinema as cosmomorphic, or world making: geomorphic, biomorphic, and anthropomorphic Stalker as paradigm: Tracking the cinema, stalking the psyche The argument Overview of the chapters 2. Ecology, Morphology, Semiosis: A Process-Relational Account of Cinema The three ecologies of images: material, social, perceptual Process-relational ontology Perceptual ecologies: How we get drawn into the cinematic world Peircean semiosis: firstness, secondness, and thirdness Spectacle, narrativity, and signness Scenes, episodes, and cinematic impact 3. Territory: The Geomorphology of the Visible Geomorphism in life and in image An initial typology Picturing ""nature"": Landscape aesthetics as socio-natural production Anchoring the filmic world Staking claims and territorializing identities: Making the West Dovzhenko's cinematic pantheism Nature, holism, and the eco-administrative state Industry, existential landscapes, and the firstness of things Post-westerns, pantheism, and the ecological sublime Kinetic landscapes, the exhilaration of movement, and the differentiation of space Cinematic tourism, object fetishism, and the global landscape Enframing the world, or expanding perception? ""Burn but his books"": Deconstructing the gaze from both ends 4. Encounter: First Contact, Utopia, and the Becoming of Another The ethnographic paradigm Nanook/Allakariallak and the two-way gaze King Kong's imperial gaze: From ethnographic to cinematic spectacle Upriver journeys, hearts of darkness, and contact zones Beyond first contact Cinematic holism, auto-ethnography, and visual sovereignty From the deconstruction of reality to its reflexive reconstruction Green identities: images of choice, hope, struggle, and community 5. Anima Moralia: Journeys Across Frontiers Pointing, seeing, gazing Animating the image, imaging the animate Writing, seeing, and faking nature Making nature: inter-natural coproductions Animation, plasmaticness, and Disney Boundary traffic: seeing, being seen, and the horror of crossing over Animal by analogy: penguins and family values Individual crossings: Bittner's birds, Treadwell's bears Sheer becomings: one or several types of packs Boundary strategies: ethics of the contact zone 6. Terra and Trauma: The Geopolitics of the Real Recapitulation of the argument Trauma and the imagination of disaster Strange weather, network narratives, and the traumatic event The sublime and the Real The eco-imaginary in post-9/11 culture Political ecologies in three dimensions and more Avatar's eco-apocalyptic Zone Toward a Peircian synthesis: aesthetics, ethics, and ecologics of the image-event Ecology, time, and the image Ecophilosophical cinema: moving images on a moving planet Afterword: Digital Futures in a Biosemiotic World Appendix: Doing Process-Relational Media Analysis Notes Index