The Cinematic Footprint

Film is often used to represent the natural landscape and, increasingly, to communicate environmentalist messages. Yet behind even todays green movies are ecologically unsustainable production, distribution, and consumption processes. Noting how seemingly immaterial moving images are supported by highly durable resource-dependent infrastructures, The Cinematic Footprint traces the history of how the hydrocarbon imagination has been central to the development of film as a medium. Nadia Bozaks innovative fusion of film studies and environmental studies makes provocative connections between the disappearance of material resources and the emergence of digital mediawith examples ranging from early cinema to Dziga Vertovs prescient eye, from Chris Markers analog experiments to the digital work of Agns Varda, James Benning, and Zacharias Kunuk. Combining an analysis of cinema technology with a sensitive consideration of film aesthetics, The Cinematic Footprint offers a new perspective on moving images and the natural resources that sustain them.