The Cinema of Extractions
Film Materials and Their Forms
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Columbia University Press
Publishing:4th Feb '25
£25.00
This title is due to be published on 4th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
From the petroleum used to make film stock to the carbon and tungsten needed for studio lights and theater projectors, every movie relies on extractive processes. The film industry of Hollywood, moreover, rose alongside the oil and aeronautics industries that transformed Southern California. In this book, Brian Jacobson traces the surprising and inextricable connections between extractive industries and cinema, developing new ways to read films in light of the typically unseen material practices out of which they are built.
The Cinema of Extractions explores the ties between the worlds of movies and the materials that make movies possible and between the industries that make movies and the industries that use movies to reshape the world. Jacobson retells the history of cinema through the lens of extraction, considering its roots as a material form and its use as a tool for corporate and industrial world making. He brings together the material and industrial history of cinema with close formal analyses of films that depict extractive processes, juxtaposing early films and classics such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with industrial films made by companies like Shell Oil. Linking film and media studies with the energy and environmental humanities, this book models innovative historical and materialist approaches to formal film analysis and proposes a new poetics of industrial cinema.
Brian Jacobson's timely, brilliant, and teacherly book fundamentally reorients film history to the history of the energy economy, and he introduces methods of reading form through the logics of a new “raw materialism.” Nothing short of a “call to methodological action,” The Cinema of Extractions is for anyone who cares about media aesthetics and the operations that underwrite industrial modernity’s earth-defying ambitions. -- Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene
Jacobson’s The Cinema of Extractions proposes that cinema became a world-making system integral to the new order of extractive capitalism it grew from. Our world bears the stamp of this past. Jacobson’s sharp history of the entwining of cinema and its imaginaries with planetary matter is a vital intervention into the efforts to reckon with the work and environmental consequences of media. -- Lee Grieveson, professor of media history, University College London
Reckoning with cinema’s material dependence on our endangered planet alters our understanding of the medium. With TheCinema of Extractions, Jacobson hands us an invaluable guidebook to this approach. Giving a vivid account of how early Hollywood features and corporate shorts displayed or acclimated audiences to modernity’s extractive roots, he magnificently shifts disciplinary frames. Read this book. Teach it. See films anew with it. -- Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space
Jacobson is the guide we need for practicing cultural studies now. Moving back and forth between histories of material extraction and the world-making forms of cinema, he jolts us out of the old ruts dividing industrial and formalist approaches and lays out a thrilling new eco-formalist method for our moment. -- Caroline Levine, author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis
ISBN: 9780231213592
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
240 pages