Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene

by Jennifer Fay

In recent years, environmental and human rights advocates have suggested that we have entered the first new geological epoch since the end of the ice the Anthropocene. In this new epoch, humans have come to reshape unwittingly both the climate and natural world; humankind has caused mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans, and irreversibly altered the atmosphere. Ironically, our efforts to make the planet more hospitable to ourselves seem to be driving us toward our inevitable extinction. A force of nature, humanity is now decentered as the agent of history. As Jennifer Fay argues, this new situation is to geological science what cinema has always been to human culture.

Film, like the Anthropocene, is a product of the industrial revolution, but arises out of a desire to preserve life and master time and space. It also calls for the creation of artificial worlds, unnatural weather, and deadly environments for entertainment, scientific study, and devising military strategy. Filmmaking stages, quite literally, the process by which worlds and weather come into being and meaning, and it mimics the forces that are driving this new planetary inhospitality. Cinema, in other words, provides an image of "nature" in the age of its mechanical reproducability. Fay argues that cinema exemplifies the philosophical, political, and perhaps even logistical processes by which we can adapt to these forces and also imagine a world without humans in it. Whereas standard ecological criticism attends to the environmental crisis as an unraveling of our natural state, this book looks to film (from Buster Keaton, to Jia Zhangke, to films of atomic testing and early polar exploration) to consider how it reflects upon the creation and destruction of human environments. What are the implications of ecological inhospitality? What role might cinema and media theory play in challenging our presumed right to occupy and populate the world? As an art form, film enjoys a unique relationship to the material, elemental world it captures and produces. Through it, we may appreciate the ambitions to design an unhomely planet that may no longer accommodate us.

Genres: Nonfiction, Film

267 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 1, 2018

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dazzling work of cultural theory and/as film analysis. The level of sophistication on both fronts is downright jealousy-inducing, while the selection of materials for analysis is both impeccable and innovative. Couldn't recommend it more highly.

[nick]

Rich with specific insights but held back by overly general statements about Anthropocene and cinema alike; the problem with talking about "the Anthropocene" as such is that everything in the world is an index of it or can be made to speak about it, and most often what we learn is the same thing we already knew. Here recognition of our impacts lapses into a kind of dark narcissism, failing to see the rest of the biosphere against our own negative signature. Fay avoids literally apocalyptic media objects but nonetheless goes hard for forms of post-apocalyptic resignation or withdrawal, which can feel pointless or even obfuscatory, missing the active work of dismantling, restructuring, and cultivating that our ecocidal present requires.

[Anton Cebalo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe this just wasn't exactly what I was looking for since there is not much written at all on this topic, but I wish a historian proper wrote this to give more context to the world these examples inhabited. Much of early cinema and pre-documentarian "actuality films" dealt with industrial labor, railroads, extraction, and man v. nature themes which is not mentioned in this book. That would have been a more appropriate way to open this. One of the first-ever Azeri films was about a hellish oil rig fire... you'd think that'd be worth mentioning. Still, this book is worth looking over, especially the sections on the atom bomb and polar expeditions.

[Henry Dennen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dense

[Ali Atef · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer Fay's wonderfully thoughtful text considers what cinema means in the age of the Anthropocene. She thinks of the Anthropocene not just by following what geologists and scientists tell us about it, but complements that with a discerning history of the aesthetic or sensory responses proffered across the 20th century vis-a-vis the conditions of our earth. "The Anthropocene is to natural science what cinema, especially early cinema, is to human culture," she opens the introduction in Inhospitable World, thus urging us to think about cinema as a technology of the Anthropocene and the ways its has produced our understanding of the earth today.

This writing project is exciting because it connects between film theory and film aesthetics, on the one hand, to the production of the 'worlds', opening up a larger philosophical relationship between history, aesthetics of the Anthropocene, contemporary environmentalism, and the ethics of cinema.