This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of film in the context of the Anthropocene: the new geological era in which human beings have collectively become a force of nature. Daniel White draws on perspectives in philosophy, ecology, and cybernetics (the science of communication and control in animals and machines) to explore human self-understanding through film in the new era. The classical figure of Janus, looking both to the future and the past, serves as a guide throughout the study. Both feature and documentary films are considered.
Table of Content
1. Introduction: Stepping into the Play Frame—Cinema as Mammalian Communication.- 2. Janus’s Celluloid and Digital Faces: The Existential Cyborg—Autopoiēsis in Christopher Nolan’s
Memento.- 3. Documentary Intertext: Robert Gardner’s
Dead Birds 1964.- 4. Cinema’s Historical Incarnations: Traveling the Möbius Strip of Biotime in
Cloud Atlas.- 5. Documentary Intertext: John Marshall,
The Hunters 1957.- 6. Janus East and West: Multicultural Polyvocality—Trinh Minh-ha’s The Fourth Dimension and
The Digital Film.- 7. Documentary Intertext:
Trance and Dance in Bali 1951.- 8. Janus’s Interspecies Faces: Biomorphic Transformations in the Ecology of Mind in James Cameron’s
Avatar.- 9. Documentary Intertext: André Singer’s and J. Stephen Lansing’s
The Goddess and the Computer 1988.- 10. Conclusion: Toward a Transdisciplinary Critical Theory of Film.
About the author
Daniel White is Professor Emeritus and founding faculty member of the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University.
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