Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene

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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.

Reviews

In Cinematic Encounters with Disaster Simon R. Troon brings poststructuralist and post-anthropocentric theory to bear on the significance of disaster imagery and apocalyptic cinema in relation to the 'increasingly disastrous flavour' of our contemporary climate crisis. This ranging study of a timely sub-genre and troubling paradigm for the collective imaginary adds to growing scholarly insistence that 'ethical thinking about responsibility in the Anthropocene has much to offer analysis of films' - and furthermore that in going beyond its historical foundations and conventions film theory still has relevance in today's discursive intersections between screen media and the environment. * Hunter Vaughan, Senior Research Associate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge, UK *
Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene offers a world atlas of cinematic imaginations of disasterfrom the spectacular to the almost imperceptiblethat explores what it might mean, as Haythan El-Wardany wondered, to look disaster in the eye. Across a bravura set of close readings of films, Simon Troon develops the inquisitive gaze of pluriform cinematic realisms and the ethical attunements of post-levinasian theory to help us think expansively about the fantasies, challenges, and local and geopolitical stakes of life facing disaster. A provocative and timely contribution from an exciting new voice in the field. * James Leo Cahill, Associate Professor, Cinema Studies and French, University of Toronto, Canada *

Author Bio

Simon R. Troon is a Sessional Teaching Associate and Research Assistant 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.