Cinematic Encounters With Disaster : Realisms for the Anthropocene

Cinematic Encounters with Disaster takes Hollywood’s 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 book’s 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 planet’s present juncture.

Simon R. Troon is Lecturer in Film, Screen and Culture at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His writing on cinema and the environment has been published in Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Media International Australia, Studies in Documentary Film and elsewhere.

David Martin-Jones is Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (2006), Deleuze Reframed (2008) and Scotland: Global Cinema (2009), and co-editor of Cinema at the Periphery (2010) and Deleuze and Film (forthcoming). He is on the editorial boards of Film-Philosophy and A/V: The Journal of Deleuzian Studies.