Social Themes in Motion Pictures, Television Broadcasting - Social Aspects

EcoMedia

Name: EcoMedia
Author: Sean Cubitt
ISBN: 9789042018853

by Sean Cubitt

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Overview

For the last twenty years ecology, the last great political movement of the 20th century, has fired the imaginations not only of political activists but of popular movements throughout the industrialised world. EcoMedia is an enquiry into the popular mediations of environmental concerns in popular film and television since the 1980s. Arranged in a series of case studies on bio-security, relationships with animals, bioethics and biological sciences, over-fishing, eco-terrorism, genetic modification and global warming, EcoMedia offers close readings of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, Miyazake's Princess Mononoke, The Perfect Storm, X-Men and X2, The Day After Tomorrow and the BBC's drama Edge of Darkness and documentary The Blue Planet. Drawing on the thinking of Flusser, Luhmann, Latour, Agamben and Bookchin, EcoMedia discusses issues from whether animals can draw and why we like to draw animals, to how narrative films can imagine global processes, and whether wonder is still an ethical pleasure. Building on the thesis that popular film and television can tell us a great deal about the state of contemporary beliefs and anxieties, the book builds towards an argument that the polis, the human world, cannot survive without a three way partnership with physis and techne, the green world and the technological.

Synopsis

EcoMeida sets out to understand the ways ecological concerns are mediated through popular film and television. In case studies of Japanese animation, wildlife documentary, TV drama and Hollywood and art house cinema, Sean Cubitt traces the conflicted working of the popular imagination of global warming, eco-terrorism, bio-security, genetic modification, environmental ethics and our fraught relationships with animals. Drawing on the work of Habermas, Flusser, Luhmann and Latour among many others, Cubitt argues that, far from distorting the truth or closing down relationship between us and our environments, the technological media are integral to communication between humans and the green world.