Moving Environments: Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film

by Alexa Weik von Mossner

In Moving Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film, international scholars investigate how films portray human emotional relationships with the more-than-human world and how such films act upon their viewers’ emotions. Emotion and affect are the basic mechanisms that connect us to our environment, shape our knowledge, and motivate our actions. Contributors explore how film represents and shapes human emotion in relation to different environments and what role time, place, and genre play in these affective processes. Individual essays resituate well-researched environmental films such as An Inconvenient Truth and March of the Penguins by paying close attention to their emotionalizing strategies, and bring to our attention the affective qualities of films that have so far received little attention from ecocritics, such as Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man.

The collection opens a new discursive space at the disciplinary intersection of film studies, affect studies, and a growing body of ecocritical scholarship. It will be of interest not only to scholars and students working in the field of ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, but for everyone with an interest in our emotional responses to film.

299 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 15, 2014

About the author

Alexa Weik von Mossner is associate professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. Her research explores contemporary environmental culture. Her academic books include Cosmopolitan Minds, Affective Ecologies, and Growing Hope, and she has published over 100 articles and chapters. On the fiction side, she has penned 160 episodes of the German TV series FABRIXX as well as a few stories and a novel, Fragile.