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- Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture - Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
Volume 4, Issue 2, 2013
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Ecocinema for all: Reassembling the audience
By Chris TongAbstractHowever 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.
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Towards a political economy of ecodocumentary
More LessAbstractDocumentary film has long been a tool used by progressive political and social movements to raise awareness of social issues and to advocate for action to create change. This is especially true for documentarians working within the environmental movement. However, film-makers often fail to take into account the role economics plays in their ability to have their film seen by the public, and how certain portrayals within the film may undermine its ability to effect social change. Analyses of An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006), The Cove (Psihoyos, 2009) and Journey to the End of Coal (Bollendorf and Segretin 2008) show how traditional modes of documentary distribution fail to reach the desired audience, while exploring non-traditional distribution models and outlets may be more effective in using film to spur social activism. Film-makers need to re-envision their relationship with the audience to create work with more impact and to use audience involvement to garner a larger viewership.
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Princess Mononoke and beyond: New nature narratives for children
More LessAbstractEco-cinema for children is a growing sub-genre of film that attempts to introduce environmental issues to young audiences. The conventional approach employed by many of these films from Bambi (Algar et al., 1942) to The Lorax (Renaud and Bauda, 2012) is to use a melodramatic narrative structure in which heroic nature is pitted against harmful humanity. The use of melodrama makes sense given the narrative tradition’s revolutionary roots and its accessibility to wide (and young) audiences. However, the efficacy of such an approach is debatable, especially in regards to its positioning of the audience as passive consumers rather than active participants. Given the understanding of film viewers as ‘active audiences’, this issue of the subjectivity of the child spectator is especially important. The following article engages in a comparative analysis of the conventional approach to eco-cinema for children and a new nature narrative, principally demonstrated by Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997). While including certain elements from melodrama, Mononoke is able to more effectively represent some of the complexities of environmental discourse and subsequently encourage more critical, active participation among its young viewers. Finally, the article argues that Princess Mononoke initiated a new trend in nature narratives for children, and that films like Wall-E (Stanton, 2008) continue to demonstrate the efficacy of eco-cinema for children that artfully balances complexity with accessibility.
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Audience responses to environmental fiction and non-fiction films
Authors: Pat Brereton and Chao-Ping HongAbstractHaving been closely involved with developing a textual analysis strategy for examining ecology within Hollywood fiction, it has become necessary to test some of the hypotheses and assertions embedded in such analysis and explore how actual audiences perceive and decode ecocinema. Consequently in this small pilot study of communications students at Dublin City University, using pilot survey/questionnaires, discussion groups and the Q-methodology, we have tried to tease out the relative benefits and usage of such methods with the aim of producing some tentative findings, which will be explored and tested across further studies over the next few years. In particular this article focuses on comparing audience perspectives using non-fictional as against fictional evocations of an environmental agenda.
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Review
By Kiu-wai ChuAbstractEcocinema Theory and Practice, Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (eds) (2013) New York and Oxon: Routledge (AFI Film Reader), vii + 325 pp., ISBN: 978-0-415-89943-7, p/bk, USD$36.95
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