Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene(Thinking Cinema)

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.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: The Cinematic Imagination of Disaster Ethics of Encounter for a Disastrous Epoch Responsibility and Realism Tracing the Fault Lines of Film Form Part I: Hollywood and its Shadow 1. Hollywood's Disaster Movies Disaster as Encounter in Genre Films from the 1950s to the '70s From the 1990s into the Anthropocene Avengers: Age of Ultron and Disaster Franchises San Andreas Heroic Realism 2. Strange Disaster in American Independent Cinema Strange Weather as Disastrous Encounter in Short Cuts and Melancholia Safe: Face to Face with Strange Materiality Strange Apocalypse in Donnie Darko The Way the World has Ended: Southland Tales Part II: Two Documentary Views of Anthropogenic Disaster 3. The View from Above Objectivity, Truth, and Realism in Environmental Documentary The God Tricks of An Inconvenient Truth Before the Flood: Complicity and Bad Conscience 4. The View from a Body A Disaster Documentary Realism of Subjectivity and Situation The View from a Body of Water: There Once Was an Island The View from On an Unknown Beach Part III: A Neorealist Legacy for Eco-Catastrophe 5. Realist Auteurs after the Disaster Auteurism and Response-ability: Kiarostami, Haneke, Diaz The Long Take: Opening the Environment Sound and Silence: Resonance as Encounter Seers of Disaster 6. Coda: “The Fall of the Regular Fall of the Beat, the Disaster Again” The Quiet City from 9/11 to Covid-19 Disintegration Loop 1.1 and the Disaster Again and Again Bibliography Index

About the Author :
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.

Review :
Reading authors like Troon helps inform how narratives are shaped and the history of literary works influencing present-­day cinema … I recommend this book to anyone who has started researching disaster movies and wants to better understand the literary side of this medium. In Cinematic Encounters with Disaster Simon R. Troon brings poststructuralist and post-anthropocentric theory to bear on the significance of disaster imagery and apocalyptic cinema in relation to the 'increasingly disastrous flavour' of our contemporary climate crisis. This ranging study of a timely sub-genre and troubling paradigm for the collective imaginary adds to growing scholarly insistence that 'ethical thinking about responsibility in the Anthropocene has much to offer analysis of films' - and furthermore that in going beyond its historical foundations and conventions film theory still has relevance in today's discursive intersections between screen media and the environment. Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene offers a world atlas of cinematic imaginations of disaster-from the spectacular to the almost imperceptible-that explores what it might mean, as Haythan El-Wardany wondered, to “look disaster in the eye.” Across a bravura set of close readings of films, Simon Troon develops the inquisitive gaze of pluriform cinematic realisms and the ethical attunements of post-levinasian theory to help us think expansively about the fantasies, challenges, and local and geopolitical stakes of life facing disaster. A provocative and timely contribution from an exciting new voice in the field.