Ecomedia

Key Issues

Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317670568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Sustainable Development
• Index: Economics

Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment.Each chapter introduces a distinct type of media, addressing it in a theoretical overview before engaging with specific case studies. In this way, the book provides an accessible introduction to each form of media as well as a sophisticated analysis of relevant cases. The book includes contributions from a combination of new voices and well-established media scholars from across the globe who examine the basic concepts and key issues of ecomedia studies. The concepts of "frames, " "flow", and "convergence" structure a dynamic collection divided into three parts. The first part addresses traditional visual texts, such as comics, photography, and film. The second part of the book addresses traditional broadcast media, such as radio, and television, and the third part looks at new media, such as advertising, video games, the internet, and digital renderings of scientific data.

In its breadth and scope, Ecomedia: Key Issues presents a unique survey of rich scholarship at the confluence of Media Studies and Environmental Studies. The book is written in an engaging and accessible style, with each chapter including case studies, discussion questions and suggestions for further reading.

Part I Frames

1 Overview Framing visual texts for ecomedia studies

Carter Soles and Kiu-Wai Chu

DOI: 10.4324/9781315769820-2

Introduction

Framing, both aesthetic and ideological, is integral to the construction of visual images. Photography, film, and comics all rely upon framing to shape viewer/reader perceptions and to express a particular point of view via choices about visual perspective. As the essays in this section make clear, this concept of framing is of special importance to ecocritics, since matters of point of view and vision are so dramatically at stake in works grappling with environmental and interspecies issues. Framing, and the aesthetics of the image within a frame, shape how artists and their audiences perceive the environment.

Since the emergence of media and cultural studies in the 1960s and ‘70s, film and media texts have been analyzed through different conceptual frames such as gender, class, and race. Taking an environmental turn over the past decade, scholarship in media studies has increasingly placed a wider range of texts into ecocritical contexts. We should now ask of any text – be it a comic strip, a photograph, or a film – what does it tell us about the environment? How does it reflect humans’ complex relationships with the more-than-human world? Every text can now be framed and read from an ecocritical perspective.

Ecocritical framing across media – photography, film, and comics

Photographer Edward Burtynsky suggests that photographing landscape involves “impos[ing] a rectangle or square over a chunk of reality, eliminating much more than it includes” (Campbell 2008, 47). With framing, certain aspects of the environment and its relationships with human beings are emphasized and magnified, while others are omitted or eliminated. Reality must be framed and turned partial in order to be represented. In cultural studies scholar John Berger’s words, “all photographs have been taken out of a continuity,” and with such discontinuity, photographs are by nature contradictory and ambiguous (Berger and Mohr 1995, 7, 85–92). These contradictions and ambiguities make photography both an aesthetic arte-fact that satisfies our visual and affective pleasures and, at the same time, a reflexive political tool that facilitates thinking about environmental issues.

In recent years, film, or moving image, began to engage in more systematic conceptualization and theorization in terms of “ecocinema” and “eco-films.” In examining the ecocritical capacity of film, Paula Willoquet-Maricondi establishes a clear distinction between environmentalist film and ecocinema. To her, the former usually consists of a specific environmental or political agenda and tends to offer a pro-environment, pro-conservation, and pro-sustainability perspective which “affirms, rather than challenges, the culture’s fundamental anthropocentric ethos” (2010, 47). “Ecocinema,” on the other hand, covers a broader range of films that may cultivate our perceptions of ecological and environmental issues through various approaches. These eco-films range from lyrical and contemplative films that foster viewers’ appreciation of nature’s constituents, to cinema with overt activist potential that “inspires our care, inform[s], educate[s], and motivate[s] us to act on the knowledge they provide,” often without asserting a single-sided environmentalist or political agenda to viewers (2010, 45).

Beyond these fairly specific definitions, different popular film genres adopt various cinematic styles and conventions that convey environmental and ecocritical ideologies. Certain fictional genres seem to open themselves more readily than others to ecocritical analysis, framing their ecological investments in ways more apparent to viewers and critics. Ecocritical work on science fiction (Brereton 2005), the Western (Murray and Heumann 2012; Carmichael 2006), and horror (Rust and Soles 2014) demonstrates that, for many ecocritics, analysis of popular Hollywood genres is crucial for understanding how these texts convey ecological ideas to the mass viewing public. Of course, as Andrew Hageman cautions us, these films are always embedded in consumer capitalist ideology and therefore contain many internal contradictions which require dialectical ideological critique to expose: “holding a film’s constituted and constitutive ideologies together indicates its contradictions, which brings into view the determinate disorder of ecological crises we face within capitalism” (2013, 77). Yet Hageman sees such critique as ecocritically productive and encourages ecocritics to analyze all cinema “with an eye to form and content alike” (2013, 83–84).

Comics share certain formal characteristics with film and, since the early 2000s, provide the source material for most mainstream blockbuster cinema. Similarly to film editing, comics panels and the gutters that separate them offer an interesting model by which we may understand how gaps between panels (or shots) invite the reader (or viewer) into the text, supplying meaning by interpreting what takes place in the ellipses created by blank spaces between panels. Cuts and gutters invite suture, what comics theorist Scott McCloud calls closure, an act of interpretation in which the reader supplies that which exceeds the static frame, contributing meaning to an unfolding sequence of shots or panels; in essence, narrativizing time. As McCloud writes, comics in particular are “a medium where the audience is a willing and conscious collaborator and closure is the agent of change, time, and motion” (1994, 65). The potential for reader agency in comics has potent implications for how comics regulate time and space and, ultimately, how they generate meaning.

Kom Kunyosying explores comics form’s potential to convey ecocritical messages, arguing that comics panels draw metonymic potential from their juxtaposition (2014, 570). Since comics panels always exist in relation to each other, “simultaneously still and sequential,” they elide many of the reductive and anthropocentric traps of metaphor (2014, 570, 571). For Kunyosying, comics form is ecocritical because it resists metaphor, in which nature is reduced to symbols, instead promoting environmental consciousness by rejecting artificial hierarchies that consider the human as clean and exclusive from the ecological and animal.

Photographic frames, cinematic frames, and comics panels have much in common; they delimit visual space and regulate time in their respective media. In recent years, visual ecomedia studies sees an expansion in framing as essential to addressing contemporary environmental conditions in new ways. Such expansions can be seen in three particular aspects: spatial, temporal, and speciesist.

Framing of space and place

Contemporary photographers and artists such as Burtynsky, Chris Jordan, and Vik Muniz focus their lenses beyond pristine nature and towards deteriorated industrial landscapes and garbage dumps. Their works reveal how landscapes of ruins, garbage, and toxic waste, when being framed or digitally enhanced, can look aesthetically pleasing. When considering the meaning and impact of a photograph, it is important to take into account the context in which an image is shown or exhibited and how the viewer encounters it. Burtynsky, Jordan, and Muniz’s works are often exhibited in art galleries and museums in magnified, giant proportions. These exhibits urge us to confront what we reject and disavow in real-life settings, and in turn to reassess our ecocritical responsibilities and awareness in the era of global environmental degradation.

With technological advancements, we are now able to frame images of spaces and places otherwise unseen by the human eye, such as the accumulated trash deep beneath the ocean, or in a different scale, the interiors of human organs in medical photography. Such imagery facilitates our understanding of interactions between human beings and the more-than-human world, as well as what Karen Barad describes as intra-actions within human and nonhuman bodies. In viewing such images, we are prompted to alter our sense of self as we reflect on the material and discursive practices that constitute a world of interconnectedness in its state of becoming (Barad 2007).

With a growing emphasis on transnational and global perspectives in perceiving the world, some ecocritics such as Ursula Heise advocate a shift from a sense of place to a sense of planet, which signifies a territorial expansion of framing not just in photography (for example, through the ubiquitous presence of satellite imagery) but also in ecocinema (Heise 2008). In the last fifteen years, ecocritical emphasis has significantly shifted from western wildlife cinema to various genres produced globally, resulting in a diverse range of transnational films that deprioritize place in order to “overcome some of the limitations of the binary between globalized and national forms of ecocinema” (Kääpä 2013, 37). From Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke’s avant garde films (The Qatsi Trilogy, 1982, 1988, 2002; Baraka, 1992; and Samsara, 2011), to cross-regional documentaries (e.g., Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes, 2006, and Jia Zhangke’s Useless, 2007), to coproduced fictional films (e.g., Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, 2009, and Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, 2011), many transnational ecofilms offer deterritorialized, planetary perspectives that are in cohesion with Ursula Heise’s concept of ecocosmopolitanism.

Comics may have certain formal advantages when it comes to conveying an ecocritical experience via framing and sequence. Comics use framing and the layout of panels to represent complex, fluid, and ultimately rewarding tensions – between images and text, between sequential panels and pages – to their readers. Comics theorist Thierry Groensteen broadly defines the comics medium as necessarily, yet not sufficiently, composed of images that are “multiple and correlated in some fashion,” and he refines this definition by stating that “a page of comics is offered at first to a synthetic global vision, but that cannot be satisfactory. It demands to be traversed, crossed, glanced at, and analytically deciphered” (2009, 130). This traversing and crossing of the physical and visual territory of the comics page, while unique to how comics frame space, can be seen as analogous to Scott MacDonald’s ecocinema experience, a conscious and thoughtful engagement with the text that both requires and generates a meditative, analytical frame of mind akin to what one finds in experiences of the natural world. However, the comics page may do this in an even more multilayered and complex, if less immersive, fashion than does cinema. Whereas, in film viewing, the viewer is always locked into the strict sequential revelation of frames as they are projected, Groensteen notes that the “moment-to-moment” style of reading encouraged by comics panels in sequence “does not take a lesser account of the totality of the panoptic field that constitutes the page (or double page), since the focal vision never ceases to be enriched by peripheral vision” (2009, 130). The experience might be likened to that of engaging photographs in an art gallery, where viewers can similarly be prompted to explore the individual shot within its broader context of other shots.

While to some extent the spatial dimensions of the cinematic frame may be approached in this holistic way, both focally and peripherally, the temporality of motion pictures – unless paused in home-video playback – limits this dual reading/viewing strategy in a way that comics and still photography do not. More control over temporality and chronology is ceded to the viewer of still images and the reader of comics than to the viewer of cinema.

Framing and time

Framing and time are of particular concern to ecocritics due to the need to consider nonhuman modes of reckoning chronology, i.e., geological time, “deep” time, slow cinema, etc. Gilles Deleuze notes that the cinematic frame “gives a common standard of measurement to things which do not have one […] the frame ensures a deterritorialisation of the image” (1986, 14–15). Thus framing plays a key role not only in demarcating physical and visual space, but creates the basic units – shots, panels – by which time is rendered legible.

In the photographic series Manufactured Landscapes and Water, Burtynsky documents naturally scarred and human-destroyed physical environments in static shots, framing instants of the ever-transforming and -deteriorating landscapes in the contemporary world into timeless images. Supplementing the photo series are Jennifer Baichwal’s films Manufactured Landscapes (2006) and Watermark (2013, codirected by Burtynsky). The two documentaries center on Burtynsky’s development of his photographic projects and take viewers on cinematic journeys to places all over the world, from the demolished ruins of the Three Gorges Dam area along the Yangtze River in China, to the dried-up lands along Colorado River and the barren desert delta, to the Ganges River in India in whic...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Toby Miller
• Introduction Ecologies of media
• PART I Frames
• PART II Flow
• PART III Convergence
• Index