Ecocinema for all: Reassembling the audience

However well-intentioned, the ‘audience’ may be a limiting concept in ecocinema studies. The audience does not sit passively in front of the screen, but rather participates actively in the world of multimedia. In fact, there is no hard and fast boundary between actors and spectators, producers and consumers, senders and receivers, academics and fans. Ecocinema studies benefits greatly from this insight: researchers can now turn to the most general user of media, i.e. everyone. The more we open ourselves to how others view ecocinema, the more we can uncover - rather than suppress - cinema’s latent richness. An inclusive dialogue on ecocinema keeps us attuned to the sense of coexistence that is the hallmark of ecological thinking. In this article, I propose four modes of viewing ecocinema: activist, allegorical, evocative, realist.