“PANORAMA: Three Ecocinematic Territories,” an essay by Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald, appears as a chapter in the Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. Edited by Hubert Zapf, the book was recently published by De Gruyter, a German publishing house.
MacDonald’s essay is divided into three sections. “Metafilm,” focuses on James Cameron’s Avatar (2009). A section titled “Polemic” examines polemical films both for and against fracking, including Josh Fox’s Gasland films. Fox was a guest of the fall 2014 Forum on Image and Language in Motion (F.I.L.M.) series.
The third section, “Slow Cinema,” is about James Benning and Sharon Lockhart, whose recent films challenge the hyper-consumerism of most mass media and model a more patient, environmentally sensible relationship to spectatorship. Both Benning and Lockhart have presented their work in F.I.L.M. series events.
