Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene

(Hardback)

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Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywoods disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory that works toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe. It examines a range of films from distinct regional and industrial contexts: Hollywood, indie movies, different kinds of documentaries from the US and elsewhere, and auteurist-realist cinema from Europe and Asia. Moving across and beyond critical and industrial categories that often inform thinking about cinema, this book contends that different approaches to film style can push us to imagine disaster in distinct ways, with distinct ethical connotations. Framed by contemporary concerns around the global climate crisis and the advent of the Anthropocene, questions about how films can best offer responses to historical exigency guide the books explorations of spectacular 2010s blockbusters like Gravity (2013) and San Andreas (2015), environmental documentaries including the paradigmatic An Inconvenient Truth (2006), post-disaster films by auteurs including Abbas Kiarostami and Lav Diaz, and more. Conceiving of disaster as intersubjective ethics between humans and nonhuman alterity forces of nature, errant technology, monsters, ghosts, and other entities it analyses how formal techniques and narrative strategies render encounters in which human protagonists are confronted with the threat of death and respond in ways that can be instructive for our planets present juncture.

Author Bio

Simon R. Troon is a Research Associate and a Sessional Teaching Associate at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His writing on cinema and the environment has been published in Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and elsewhere.