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.
Preface Acknowledgements Introduction: Cinema at the Limit Part One: Objectivity 1. Sacrifice and the Sacred in Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ben Wheatley 2. Objectivity, Speculative Realism, and the Cinematic Apparatus Part Two: Subjectivity 3. Eco-consciousness in Under the Skin and Nymphomaniac 4. Limits of Love in Grizzly Man and Koneline: Our Land Beautiful Conclusion Bibliography Filmography Index
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.
Reviews for Limit Cinema: Transgression and the Nonhuman in Contemporary Global Film
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
- Winner of SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) Best First Book Award 2023 (UK)
