Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis

Motivated by the exigency of climate change, 'Cinematic Ecosystems: Screen Encounters with More-than-Humans in the Era of Environmental Crisis' takes cinema to be an audiovisual form whose creation and meaning are deeply connected to more-than-human worlds. As part of the third wave of ecocinema studies, this collection gathers contributions on multiple cinema forms from an international group of scholars and artists who offer diverse, critical perspectives that respond to the question: How does cinema help or hinder us in coming to know the more-than-human world?

The collection homes in on the concept of the ecosystem as a biological and technological system that comprises a network of inter-relational living and their inanimate elemental affordances to explore encounters with cinema as a material object and practice, a spectatorial experience, and a representational text. The chapters cover environmental topics that span five continents and multiple histories. This book will be of special interest to film studies scholars and artists interested in cinema and climate change, environmental justice, and posthumanism.

Mary Hegedus is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. After a career as an IT Consultant, she moved to academia to pursue degrees in anthropology and film. She completed both her undergraduate and Master's degrees in Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, where her research focused on fungi and post-apocalyptic film. She has presented papers at conferences both nationally and internationally, examining works with themes of climate change. Her current research explores the transhistorical theme of decomposition as an aesthetic in early cinematic film and as a material and aesthetic practice in contemporary Ecomedia filmmakers' work.

Jessica Mulvogue is a Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She is a researcher of ecocinema and environmental catastrophe, immersive and interactive cinemas, and experimental and documentary film and has published articles and chapters in these areas in 'Studies in World Cinema', 'Transformations Journal', 'The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema', and 'The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change'. She is the co-editor (with Michael Brendan Baker) of 'The Interactive Documentary in Canada' (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024), and she is currently working on her first monograph, 'Catastrophe Aesthetics: Immersive Media and Climate Change' (Amsterdam University Press).