ISCC 4 (2) pp.

107–111 Intellect Limited 2013

Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture

Volume 4 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/iscc.4.2.107_2

Editorial

Pietari Kääpä

Understanding the audiences

of ecocinema

Far from only reproducing appreciative odes to the nature sublime or

constructing ideological critiques of the exploitation of nature, studies of
ecomedia are proliferating in scope. Expanding on the valuable research on
the content of media texts, scholars such as Matthew Fuller (2005) and Jussi
Parikka (2010) have pushed the field of ecomedia in entirely new directions.
The form of media ecology practiced by these scholars as well as Adrian
Ivakhiv (2013), Ned Rossiter (2008) and others, is not so much aligned with
traditional avenues in ecomedia scholarship, but provides, instead, a complex
assertion of the media’s material and social role in the world (if you will, the
planetary ecosystem). Michael Goddard and Parikka phrase this role well in
their opening salvo to a special issue on media ecology in the digital journal
Fibrecultures. They argue that the study of

media ecologies is able to provide methodological clues with which to

map the messy ontologies of contemporary culture − the translations
and transpositions between nature and technology, but also between
subjectivity and media, the social and the political, and the political
economy in which such energetic processes take place.
(http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/)

While much of the ‘ecosophical’ research conducted under the guise of new
materialism and media ecology is essential in encouraging media studies and
the environmental humanities to venture in new directions, other studies take

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more tangible approaches to exploring the material realities with and within
which the media work. Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s Greening the Media
(2011) and Nadia Bozak’s The Cinematic Footprint (2011) show how the mate-
rial ecologies (based on Guattari’s three ecologies, 2000) operate. The three
ecologies are those of nature, society and the mind (to simplify somewhat
their implications), with this materialist turn contributing much to exploring
the relationship between natural resources and the society in which the media
operate. Felix Guattari’s work has also been essential to the media ecology
practices described above, especially in Ivakhiv’s use of the three ecologies to
pose a more holistic understanding of the ways cognitive practices can shed
light on the media’s relationship with the planetary ecosystems.
While the three ecologies of nature, society and the mind hold central roles
in ecosophical debates, the study of audience responses and their material
implications remain somewhat ignored in all this. Reception practices are very
much implicit in much of the work of media ecologists, but I would argue
that even as we outreach into the realms of theory-becoming-material, we
need to get a better understanding of the different forms of impact the media
have on their viewing publics. This is not intended as a call for simplification
of theoretical advances, but as a means to ensure a place for thorough stud-
ies of audience appropriations of environmental messages in film and other
media. Simultaneously, this call for more research on the audiences of ecome-
dia is not intended to disparage existing studies that address the reception of
environmental communications. Matthew Hibberd and An Nguyen’s work on
climate change communications (2013) and Anthony A. Leiserowitz’s (2004)
work on Hollywood films are just some of these studies as are the frequent
publications of articles in journals like Environmental Communications and
International Studies in Literature and the Environment.
The studies do assert strongly that media has an impact on our social ecol-
ogy as they construct dialogic understandings of the relationship between
nature, producers, audiences and policy. The impetus of these works is largely
on providing formulas for what works and what does not, or charting the ways
communications impact specific audience demographics. In this, they contrib-
ute much to nurturing the sociological humanities and often contribute to
critiques of green policy. In terms of the three ecologies discussed above, such
studies pose vital questions for how media works in the context of ecological
politics as well as human understandings of the world.
While it is clear that audiences in general have been a central concern for
ecomedia scholars, their significance for the field is still not thoroughly under-
stood. Indeed, most studies in ecomedia make references to spectators and how
they may or are even expected to respond to mediated stimuli. For example,
Scott MacDonald (2004) and Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (2011) both suggest
that visual and narrative experimentation has the potential to generate more
efficient means of environmental communications as they challenge audiences
to view their relationship with nature anew. Yet, it is also necessary to consoli-
date these brief observations into more systematic approaches to studying both
hypothetical and actual audiences, a concern this issue aims to address.

The outline of the issue

Greg Garrard (2011) and David Ingram (2012), amongst others, outline several
predominant response patterns with which audiences tend to react to ecocin-
ema. These range from moral responses concerning the exploitation of nature

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 Understanding the audiences of ecocinema

to concern over where the insustainable uses of the planet’s resources may lead.
Whether this is about cruelty to animals as in Shaun Monson’s Earthlings (2007)
or the immediate and planet encompassing threat of global warming, audiences
are invariably positioned to do something about what they see on-screen. The
awareness of a need to address audiences even goes as far as catering for global
diversity as arguably happens in An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim 2006), a
documentary with a very American premise. Crucially, the film shows Al Gore
visiting diverse locations around the world and, for example, addressing audi-
ences in China. Through this, the film makes a direct address to cultural located
audiences, and even includes a graphic depiction of climate change conse-
quences on the Chinese mainland. But do audiences and spectators respond as
expected (as ‘programmed’) to these provocations or do we see more complex
variations that may challenge or even subvert the ‘encoded’ meanings of the
texts? Is it even worth addressing audience specifics as this is likely to result in
too specific or fragmented individual perspectives or alternatively, provide data
that are much too generalized and thus of very little use.
The articles in this collection address these and several other relevant ques-
tions. To initiate the discussion, Chris Tong provides both an elaboration and
a challenge to studying ecocinema. He starts out from one of the key tenets
of Cubitt, Monani and Rust’s recent collection Ecocinema Theory and Practice
(2012), that is, the suggestion that all cinema can be considered ecocinema.
This is based on the assertion that ecological communications does not only
concern the more obviously identifiable areas of environmentalist rhetoric or
evocations of nature. Ecocinema is also concerned with the ways the human
mind and the social world cohabit the ecosystem and the reciprocal impact
they have on one another. Starting out from this premise, Tong argues that
scholars need to rethink some of the premises of audience research, which
is often used to verify their assertions of their own readings of a given text.
Instead of considering the audience as another means to ideological debate,
scholars need to encourage open dialogue that is available to the most general
participant, i.e. everyone. After all, to think in an ecological way is to consider
all possibilities and connections, even ones that may not seem particularly
relevant at first.
Tong raises a number of legitimate questions regarding the use value and
motivations of ecocinema studies, including expressing a very healthy sense of
skepticism about the abilities of ecocinema to evade succumbing to the logic
of the cultural industry which commercializes both the topic of the film and
its consumer. Megan Selheim takes up the roles of capitalism and commerce
in her discussion of the political economy of ecodocumentary production and
distribution. The mechanisms of creating and disseminating a film as well as
the availability of the films, is a key concern that is not as central to the study
of audiences as it ought to be. Selheim takes up this argument to investi-
gate the complex obstacles and opportunities new channels of distribution
have for ecocinema. This is a question premised on the notion that conven-
tional distribution channels may not be the best ways to reach audiences of
ecocinema, especially as they are often too implicated in the machinations
of the entertainment industry. To challenge these limitations, technological
innovations and interactive audiences create new forms of activism amongst
both producers and viewers, providing a form of reinvigoration that can make
the communication of environmental issues more efficient.
Benjamin Thevenin’s article on children’s ecocinema spectatorship expands
on many of the political concerns Selheim proposes in her work. While Selheim

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Pietari Kääpä

is more concerned with the overall ability of films to navigate the constraints of
activism and commercialism, Thevenin sees the commercial roots of much ecor-
hetoric as a potential fallacy, again dictated by an ‘Adornian’ culture industry. By
comparing the audience address modes of Hollywood animations and Hayao
Miayazaki’s films as well as the melodramatic narrative conventions they employ,
he suggests that by drawing on diverse approaches to environmental thinking
and cultural practice, Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (1997) is able to construct
a ‘new’ nature narrative capable of producing complex viewing perspectives.
This enables it to communicate with young viewers in a way that confronts
their taken for granted beliefs in environmental narratives and provokes them
to see humanity’s nature embeddedness anew. The ability to generate complex
ecological understandings by narrative and cultural differences brings to mind
some of Willoquet-Maricondi’s arguments, though with the difference that we
now have a specific target audience – young consumers – in mind.
The potential of the media to elicit educational conversation with young
audiences harkens back to some of the moralistic media effects debates char-
acterizing the social responsibilities of the media industry. While Thevenin
does not take a moralistic approach, he does indicate that this is a political
question that has to do with zooming in on the consumption habits of specific
audience groupings. Other studies on culturally specific audiences of ecoc-
inema (Kääpä 2012) have come to the conclusion that context is a substan-
tial concern for environmental communications. While certain moral forms
of response can be anticipated, the ways audiences respond to environmental
messages differs, and all of this requires empirical research. Whereas the other
articles in this collection work from a largely theoretical basis, Pat Brereton
and Chao-Ping Hong adopt a more sociological approach to studying audi-
ences. They study the responses of Irish university students using a partic-
ularly promising audience study tool, the Q-methodology. This enables the
researchers to synthesize qualitative and quantitative audience studies by
creating large sets of empirical data, but also include room for the participants
to vocalize their own perspectives and preferences in more elaborate terms
than mere surveys or questionnaires would. By adopting a distinctly mixed
methods approach to the study of audiences, Brereton and Hong ensure that
the study of ecocinema audiences meets the standards of other studies of film
audiences. And by providing a specifically hands-on approach, they consoli-
date some of the theoretical work advanced in other sections of this issue.
The articles in this collection reflect the current state of affairs in the study
of audiences and ecocinema, even as they push the field in new directions.
Simultaneously, it is clear that the study of ecocinema audiences is still in
development and requires further theoretical as well as empirical sophis-
tication. To these ends, the need to conduct theoretical work that is both
adventurous and critical of its own parameters must be met with practical
work to ensure that the calls to social relevance in the field are met. If these
are achieved, audiences will certainly continue to play a key role in the new
materialist directions of media ecology and the environmental humanities.

References
Bozak, Nadia (2011), The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Cameras, and Natural
Resources, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Fuller, Matthew (2005), Media Ecologies, Materialist Energies in Art and
Technoculture, Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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 Understanding the audiences of ecocinema

Garrard, Greg (ed.) (2011), Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies,
London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Guattari, Felix (2000), The Three Ecologies, New York: Continuum.
Guggenheim, D. (2006), An Inconvenient Truth, Los Angeles: Participatory
Media.
Hibberd, Matthew and Nguyen, An (eds) (2013), International Journal of Media
and Cultural Politics, 9: 1. Special issue on climate change communications.
Ingram, David (2012), ‘The aesthetics and ethics of eco-film criticism’, in
S. Monani, S. Rust and S. Cubitt (eds), Ecocinema Theory and Practice,
London: Routledge, pp. 43−61.
Ivakhiv, Adrian (2013), Ecologies of the Moving Image, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier
University Press.
Kääpä, Pietari (2012), ‘The politics of viewing ecocinema in China’, Interactions,
2: 2, pp. 159−75.
Leiserowitz, Anthony A. (2004), ‘Before and after The Day After Tomorrow:
A U.S. study of climate change risk perception’, Environment, 46: 9,
pp. 22−37.
MacDonald, Scott (2001), The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to
Independent Films about Place, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Maxwell, Richard and Miller, Toby (2011), Greening the Media, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Parikka, Jussi (2010), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Parikka, Jussi and Goddard, Michael (eds) (2011), Unnatural Ecologies,
Fibreculture http://seventeen.fibreculturejournal.org/ (Accessed 25.11.2013).
Rossiter, Ned (2006), Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New
Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi Publications.
Rust, Stephen, Monani, Salma and Cubitt, Sean (eds) (2012), Ecocinema Theory
and Practice, New York: Routledge/AFI.
Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula (ed.) (2011), Framing the World: Explorations in
Ecocriticism and Film, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Contributor details
Pietari Kääpä is a lecturer in media and communications at University of
Stirling. His research specializes in environmental communications and digital
environmentalism.
Contact: Department of Communications, Media and Cultures, University of
Stirling, FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK.

Pietari Kääpä has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

111
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