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Limit Cinema
Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film
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Book Presentation:
WINNER of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Best First Book Award 2023
Limit Cinema explores how contemporary global cinema represents the relationship between humans and nature. During the 21st century this relationship has become increasingly fraught due to proliferating social and environmental crises; recent films from Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) to Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) address these problems by reflecting or renegotiating the terms of our engagement with the natural world. In this spirit, this book proposes a new film philosophy for the Anthropocene. It argues that certain contemporary films attempt to transgress the limits of human experience, and that such 'limit cinema' has the potential to help us rethink our relationship with nature. Posing a new and timely alternative to the process philosophies that have become orthodox in the fields of film philosophy and ecocriticism, Limit Cinema revitalizes the philosophy of Georges Bataille and puts forward a new reading of his notion of transgression in the context of our current environmental crisis.
To that end, Limit Cinema brings Bataille into conversation with more recent discussions in the humanities that seek less anthropocentric modes of thought, including posthumanism, speculative realism, and other theories associated with the nonhuman turn. The problems at stake are global in scale, and the book therefore engages with cinema from a range of national and cultural contexts. From Ben Wheatley's psychological thrillers to Nettie Wild's eco-documentaries, limit cinema pushes against the boundaries of thought and encourages an ethical engagement with perspectives beyond the human.
About the Author:
Chelsea Birks is the Learning and Outreach Director at The Cinematheque in Vancouver, Canada and a sessional instructor at the University of British Columbia, Canada. She received her PhD in 2018 from the University of Glasgow, UK. She won the 2017 SCMS Student Writing Award and has been published in Cinema Journal, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and Journal of Gender Studies.David Martin-Jones is Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, UK. He is the author of Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity (2006), Deleuze Reframed (2008) and Scotland: Global Cinema (2009), and co-editor of Cinema at the Periphery (2010) and Deleuze and Film (forthcoming). He is on the editorial boards of Film-Philosophy and A/V: The Journal of Deleuzian Studies.
Press Reviews:
"This is an exciting book which offers a lucid argument about contemporary limit cinema's interrogation of the human and its relationships with nature and the non-human. By bringing the philosophy of Georges Bataille into dialogue with recent scholarly debates about the Anthropocene, Limit Cinema develops an original and compelling critical framework for thinking about the limits of the human, and for reflecting on cinema's role in exposing us to ethical perspectives and encounters beyond anthropocentric reality. An essential contribution to contemporary film philosophy." ―Tina Kendall, Associate Professor of Film and Media, Anglia Ruskin University, UK
"Limit Cinema is a powerful exploration of how cinema takes us to the limits of thought .. Limit Cinema's close engagement with Bataille's ideas on limits, excess, interiority, and the outside makes for an effective methodology that complements an original eco-critical theoretical perspective … It is a very convincing demonstration of the usefulness of Bataille both for film studies and for eco-critical approaches." ―Augustin Denis, University of Cambridge, UK, Film-Philosophy Journal
See the publisher website: Bloomsbury Academic
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