Table Of ContentMoving Environments
Moving Environments
Affect, Emotion, Ecology, and Film
Alexa Weik von Mossner, editor
Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Gov-
ernment of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Moving environments : affect, emotion, ecology, and film / edited by Alexa Weik
von Mossner.
(Environmental humanities series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77112-002-9 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-77112-004-3 (epub).—
ISBN 978-1-77112-003-6 (pdf)
1. Motion pictures—Psychological aspects. 2. Motion pictures—Social aspects. 3.
Human ecology in motion pictures. 4. Ecocriticism. I. Weik von Mossner, Alexa,
author, editor II. Series: Environmental humanities series
PN1995.M73 2014 791.43’66 C2014-902718-4
C2014-902719-2
Front-cover image: Being Caribou © 2005 National Film Board of Canada. Cover design
and text design by Angela Booth Malleau.
© 2014 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from
100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas
energy.
Printed in Canada
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material
used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors
and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction: Ecocritical Film Studies and the Effects of Affect,
Emotion, and Cognition ~ Alexa Weik von Mossner 1
PART I GENERAL AND THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
1 Emotion and Affect in Eco-films: Cognitive and
Phenomenological Approaches~David Ingram 23
2 Emotions of Consequence? Viewing Eco-documentaries
from a Cognitive Perspective ~ Alexa Weik von Mossner 41
3 Irony and Contemporary Ecocinema: Theorizing a New
Affective Paradigm ~ Nicole Seymour 61
PART II ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND THE NON-HUMAN IN
DOCUMENTARY FILM
4 On the “Inexplicable Magic of Cinema”: Critical
Anthropomorphism, Emotion, and the Wildness of
Wildlife Films ~ Bart H. Welling 81
5 Emotion, Argumentation, and Documentary Traditions:
Darwin’s Nightmare and The Cove ~Belinda Smaill 103
6 Documenting Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics
at Sea ~ Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann 121
PART III THE EFFECTS AND AFFECTS OF ANIMATION
7 Animation, Realism, and the Genre of Nature ~ David Whitley 143
8 What Can a Film Do? Assessing Avatar’s Global Affects ~
Adrian Ivakhiv 159
9 Animated Ecocinema and Affect: A Case Study of Pixar’s UP ~
Pat Brereton 181
vi ~ Contents
PART IV THE AFFECT OF PLACE AND TIME
10 Moving Home: Documentary Film and Other Remediations of
Post-Katrina New Orleans ~ Janet Walker 201
11 Evoking Sympathy and Empathy: The Ecological Indian and
Indigenous Eco-activism ~ Salma Monani 225
12 Affect and Environment in Two Artists’ Films and a Video ~
Sean Cubitt 249
List of Contributors 267
Index 271
Acknowledgements
My great thanks go out to everyone who contributed to making this col-
lection possible, which grew out of a highly successful and inspiring
workshop I had the pleasure of organizing at the Rachel Carson Center for
Environment and Society at the University of Munich during my time as Car-
son Fellow. The book owes its existence, foremost, to the community of col-
leagues who participated in this workshop and whose fine work is represented
here. To all my contributors, thank you for the many rich and thought-pro-
voking exchanges and conversations about the interrelations of affect, emotion,
ecology, and film that took place before, during, and after the workshop and
for your enthusiasm, dedication, and great patience. I also wish to thank the
two directors of the Rachel Carson Center, Christof Mauch and Helmuth
Trischler, for their extremely generous support of the project, both during the
workshop phase and later on when it began to transform itself into a book.
I am indebted to Lisa Quinn, Acquisitions Editor at Wilfrid Laurier Uni-
versity Press, and to the series editor, Cheryl Lousley, who immediately saw the
timeliness and worth of the project and supported it from the earliest moment
of its gestation. My thanks also go to the two anonymous readers for their
insightful comments and suggestions for revisions.
I am grateful to Elsevier for granting permission to reprint portions of
my article “Troubling Spaces: Ecological Risk, Narrative Framing, and Emo-
tional Engagement in Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid,” which originally
appeared in Emotion, Space and Society 6.1 (2013), in Chapter 2 of the volume.
vii
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Introduction
Ecocritical Film Studies and the Effects of
Affect, Emotion, and Cognition
Alexa Weik von Mossner
Moving Environments explores the role played by affect and emotion in the
production and reception of films that centrally feature natural environ-
ments and nonhuman actors, both real and animated. Affect—our automatic,
visceral response to a given film or sequence—and emotion—our cognitive
awareness of such a response—are, in the words of Carl Plantinga, “fundamen-
tal to what makes film artistically successful, rhetorically powerful, and cultur-
ally influential.”1 Without doubt this is also true for films that are implicitly
or explicitly concerned with environmental issues and themes. However, the
exploration of affect and emotion and their relevance to human experience of
and attitudes toward nonhuman nature has occupied, at best, a marginal place
within ecocritical film studies. This is why I initiated a workshop on the topic
in the summer of 2011, hosted by the Rachel Carson Center for Environment
and Society at the University of Munich and bringing together some of the
leading ecocritical film scholars. Participants were asked to respond to the
following questions: How do films represent human emotion and affect in
relation to different environments? How do these films influence our emotions
while seeing them and after seeing them, and how do they generate meanings?
How do they affect our relationship to the human and more-than-human
world and what can we say about their affective or “passionate” politics? The
essays assembled in this volume are our partial and preliminary answers to
these questions and the result of a two-day intensive workshop of presenting
and discussing early drafts, with much deliberation and revision in the after-
math of the meeting.
1
