Elemental World Cinema: Cinematic Entanglements of Earth, Fire, Water and Air - Paperback

by Tiago de Luca (Volume Editor), Matilda Mroz (Volume Editor)

This is the first book-length study on the relationship between cinema and the classical elements. It centres on earth, fire, water and air to offer new perspectives on the intersection of film and the nonhuman in a time of climate emergency. Mobilising a range of analytical frameworks, including early film theory, Indigenous epistemologies and environmental sciences, the essays in this collection trace the complex agencies of the elements as they intersect with the material properties of the cinematic image across fiction, animation, documentary and experimental film. In doing so, the book positions elemental cinema as a multifaceted process and experience that might encompass attempts to think with, alongside or even 'like' the elemental, all the while recognising the limitations of our anthropocentric systems of meaning.

Author Biography

Tiago de Luca is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Warwick. His research lies broadly in the fields of contemporary world cinema, global film aesthetics and ecocinema. He is the author of Planetary Cinema: Film, Media and the Earth (2022) and Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (2014), and the co-editor of Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema (2022) and Slow Cinema (2016).

Matilda Mroz is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests lie broadly in film-philosophies and filmed environments, particularly in the context of genocide and violence. She was a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (University of Sussex) and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (University of Cambridge). She is the author of Framing the Holocaust in Polish Aftermath Cinema: Posthumous Materiality and Unwanted Knowledge (2020) and Temporality and Film Analysis (2012), the co-editor of The Cinematic Bodies of Eastern Europe and Russia (2016) and the co-author of Remembering Katyn (2012).