Over
the past 15 years or so, ‘ecocriticism’
has established itself reasonably well
within
literary scholarship. But it has yet to do so in the other arts.
What
would a ‘green’
film and visual scholarship look like? It may ask questions of
the
relationship
between visual representation and social and ecological reality
(such
as Gregg
Mitman’s and Derek
Bouse’s
studies of wildlife documentary); it may seek to delineate
‘positive’
versus ‘negative’ images of nature, of environmental activism,
and of
human-environment relations (see David
Ingram’s
Green Screen); or it
may probe
both the limitations and potentials offered by film and visual
media –
including the potential to expand awareness, empathy, and
understanding
across
species and across socio-ecological cultural differences (see
Scott
MacDonald's The
Garden
in
the Machine, Jonathan Burt’s Animals
in
Film,
and recent work on
ethnographic cinema, ‘cultures of vision,’ etc.). It would deal
with
what Andrew Ross has called "images of ecology" - those familiar
images
of "belching smokestacks, seabirds mired in petrochemical
sludge, fish
floating belly-up, traffic jams in Los Angeles and Mexico City,
and
clearcut forests; on the other hand, the redeeming repertoire of
pastoral imagery, pristine, green, and unspoiled by human
habitation,
crowned by the ultimate global spectacle, the fragile,
vulnerable ball
of spaceship earth" (Andrew Ross, Chicago
Gangster Theory of Life,
p. 171) -- but also with the "ecology of images," that is, the
ethics,
politics, economics, and 'ecologics' of the ways images are
produced,
circulated, and consumed in our society. The latter might best
be
thought of as consisting of three interconnected dimensions or
levels:
the material, the perceptual, and the social. Cinema's (and
photography's) material ecologies, or its ecologics,
concern the technologies by which images are made and the
ecologies
from which resources are extgracted to make them, and to which
waste
materials return following their use. Its perceptual ecologies,
or epistemologics,
concern its effects on perception and on culture, including
changing
aesthetic and visual cultures as these affect and shape
philosophies
and ideologies relating humans to the nonhuman world. Finally,
its
social ecologies concern questions of differential access ro
production
(including its production costs in human and environmental
health),
consumption, and interpretation and control.
Spaces
at an Exhibition: Immersive Passages through Central/Eastern
European
Identities, Занурення/Zanurzenie/Immersion,
exhibition
catalogue, ed. Jerzy Onuch (Kyiv, Ukraine: Centre for
Contemporary Art), pp. 11-19. Ukrainian
version reprinted in Krytyka
VII (12), 2004, on-line version.
