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Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, arguing that how we make and consume films has serious ecological consequences. He examines the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, considering how screen media shapes and reflects our understanding of the natural world.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Big Picture
1. Burning Down the House: Fire, Explosion, and the Eco-ethics of Destruction Spectacle
2. "Five Hundred Thousand Kilowatts of Stardust": Water and Resource Use in Movies and the Marketing of Nature
3. Wind of Change: New Screen Technologies, the Visualization of Invisible Environmental Threats, and the Materiality of the Virtual
4. Apocalypse Tomorrow: The Myth of Earth's End in the Digital Era
5. The Fifth Element: Hollywood as Invasive Species and the Human Side of Environmental Media
Conclusion: An Element of Hope
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index
About the author
Hunter Vaughan is Environmental Media Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Colorado Boulder and a 2017 Rachel Carson Center Fellow. He is the founding editor of the
Journal of Environmental Media, the author of
Where Film Meets Philosophy (Columbia, 2013), and the coeditor of
The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (2018).
Summary
Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, arguing that how we make and consume films has serious ecological consequences. He examines the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, considering how screen media shapes and reflects our understanding of the natural world.
Additional text
In Vaughan’s deft readings of multiple films and their production apparatuses, film theory and analysis also become “updated” into a cutting-edge discipline. Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret is an essential book in ecocinema and ecomedia studies and an important contribution to ecomaterialism within cultural studies more broadly.
