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Inhospitable World
ii
Inhospitable World
Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene
Jennifer Fay
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paperback printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America
For Abby Wells
vi
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
PART I: On Location . . . 21
1. Buster Keaton’s Climate Change 23
2. Nuclear Conditioning 59
3. The Ecologies of Film Noir 97
Notes 209
Bibliography 229
Index 243
vi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Emma Furman, and Cindy Martinez) for inviting me to share work related
to this project. The Vanderbilt Research Scholar Grant provided me with
the funds to extend my research leave and write most of this manuscript
while keeping close contact with my Nashville community. A few blocks
from campus is the Belcourt Theatre, a hub for cinephilia and the center
of my social world. Stephanie Silverman and Allison Inman have made
Belcourt a home for cinema and a welcoming place for the conversations
it stimulates. I am indebted to Allison and Toby Leonard for the sneak pre-
view of Dawson City: Frozen Time. That film helped me to write the conclu-
sion and thus to think my way out of this project.
Beyond Nashville, I am grateful for the invitations from friends and
colleagues to share work in progress at other institutions. I thank Neill
Matheson at the University of Texas, Arlington; Jill Smith, Aviva Briefel,
and David Collings at Bowdoin College; Timothy Bewes and Jacques Khalip
at Brown University’s Pembrook Center for the Humanities; Christopher
Sieving and Richard Neupert at the University of Georgia; Aaron Jafee
for organizing the great Paleo-Futurism Conference at the University of
Kentucky; Jeff Menne and Graig Uhlin at Oklahoma State University;
Caetlin Benson-Allott at the University of Oklahoma; and Ian Whittington,
who invited me to participate in a plenary panel for the Space Between
Conference at the University of Mississippi.
For their feedback on this project and general expressions of enthusi-
asm for this work (and ideas in general), I also thank David Clarke, Daniel
Morgan, Gerd Gemünden, Karl Schoonover, Paul K. Saint-Amour, Scott
Curtis, Barbara Klinger, Mark Goble, Jennifer Peterson, Daniel Nasset,
Georges Toles, Johannes von Moltke, Erica Carter, Sarah Keller, Brian
Jacobson, Paul Young, Jacques Khalip, Akira Lippit, Sara Blair, James
Cahill, Jeff Menne, Leslie Stern, Eric Rentschler, and Bonnie Honig. Davide
Panagia read most of this manuscript and provided invaluable direc-
tion at a crucial stage. Ackbar Abbas, who has taught me so much about
Hong Kong and Chinese cinema, generously offered detailed feedback on
chapter 4. Justus Nieland and Scott Juengel, my inner circle and trusted
insiders, read everything a few times even as they were up against their
own impending deadlines. Scott, especially, pushed me to think harder, to
linger in contradiction, and to appreciate the time needed for reflection.
My friends and former colleagues at Michigan State University, including
Justus, Zarena Aslami, my former chair Patrick O’Donnell, and my buddy
Sarah Wohlford continually remind me of how good I had it back in East
Lansing. Whoever else may read this book, whatever conversations it may
or may not inspire, the process of writing it has been truly joyous in the
company (sometimes only virtually or in spirit) of these people.
[x] Acknowledgments
At Oxford University Press, Angela Chnapko has been a model editor
and I am grateful to her for contracting this project on film for lists in polit-
ical theory and environmental studies. Above all, I thank her for finding
two amazing outside readers whose generous and incisive reports have
guided the manuscript’s completion. Tom Conley, one of the readers, has
offered especially detailed commentary (twice!), and his enthusiasm for
the project has buoyed my confidence. I hope I have fulfilled the promise
both readers found in the earlier draft. I also thank Yang Yi for permission
to reproduce two astounding images from his Uprooted series and Hélène
Lacharmoise of Galerie Dix6 for providing the images and facilitating the
permission. Liu Xiaodong has graciously allowed me to reproduce his dev-
astating painting Out of Beichuan. Thanks to him and to Lisson Gallery for
this permission.
Family members have been supportive and so patient with me as I have
hunkered down with this long-term and rather melancholic book. Sonja
Fay, Kathleen Fossan, Chris Fossan, Paula Page, Joan Squires, Walt Sell,
and Loie Galza have encouraged me with their kindness and understand-
ing. Sonja helped with a German translation at a key moment. Fellow pro-
fessor Brendan Fay has been a most sympathetic ear and interlocutor on
matters both intellectual and emotional, especially around the difficult
events of the passing of my mother, Gae Galza, and our father, Tom Fay.
I thank my parents in absentia and invoke them in memoriam.
Scott Juengel, my partner in life and favorite human being, fills me with
love for the world and hope for the future in whatever form it (and we) may
take. He is my best reader and my most beloved distraction. To repurpose
a 1980s love song for the Anthropocene: “I’ll stop the world and melt with
you.” I dedicate this book to another good one. Abby Wells is the remark-
able woman, family friend, and surrogate parent who put me through col-
lege and helped me through graduate school. Through her own example,
Abby has taught me about the forms generosity takes and what it means,
in all senses, to invest in the people we love.
Chapter 1 draws on material published as “Buster Keaton’s Climate
Change” in Modernism/modernity 21:1 (2016). Chapter 2 is a significantly
revised and expanded version of the essay “Atomic Screen Tests,” also in
Modernism/modernity 23:3 (2016). I thank Johns Hopkins University
Press for permission to republish this material. Chapter 5 is based on the
essay “Antarctica and Siegfried Kracauer’s Cold Love,” which appeared in
Discourse 33:3 (2011, published in 2012). I thank Wayne State University
Press for permission to republish this material.
Nashville
Summer 2017
Acknowledgments [ xi ]
xi
Inhospitable World
xvi
Introduction
[2] Introduction
the reader with the degree of human-caused damage, is also an aesthetic or
sensory response to this doppelgänger planet. Eaarth raises to a new level
of disorientation what the uncanny for Freud summons forth: the feeling
that home, homeliness, and all that is familiar have been transformed into
their dreadful opposites, that the home has been replaced with an artificial
substitute that resembles it. A feeling that leads to a disintegrated psyche
and perhaps also to death (at least in the literary examples from which
Freud draws), the uncanny is a dread that emerges from a brush with (and
even self-canceling preference for) the mechanical or the mystical.8 That
the extensive definitions of heimlich quoted by Freud make reference to
“cheerful” weather, to heimlich waves and ocean currents, and to heimlich
woods and shady paths suggests how nature may be absorbed into this aes-
thetic regime when we encounter its artificial double.9
The Anthropocene is to natural science what cinema, especially early
cinema, has been to human culture. It makes the familiar world strange
to us by transcribing the dimensionalities of experience into celluloid,
transforming and temporally transporting humans and the natural world
into an unhomely image. Maxim Gorky’s oft-quoted reflection on the
program of Lumière films exhibited in 1896 begins more like a gothic
novel than a report on the evening’s entertainment. The first motion pic-
tures, black and white, silent except for the sound of the projector, are
short snatches of everyday life, and they deeply unsettle Gorky as ghostly
animations:
Introduction [3]
4
[4] Introduction
To write about cinema in the epoch of the Anthropocene is to bring out
new connections between these two terms or practices that change how
we think about both of them. This book explores the connection between
film theory and aesthetics, on one hand, and the production of artificial
worlds, weather, climates, and even planets, on the other, in or on which
hospitality and survival in the world are at stake. Specifically, I posit a phil-
osophical relationship between the histories, temporalities, and aesthet-
ics of human-driven climate change and the politics, environmentalism,
and ethics of cinema. While films are the primary objects of analysis, the
chapters focus on the historical materiality of film production and the envi-
ronmental design of on-location shooting. As I explain in the balance of
this introduction, film enjoys a rather unique relationship to the material,
elemental world through which we may appreciate both the artificiality of
human world-making and the ambitions to design an artificial, unhomely
planet.
Introduction [5]
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suostuisi tähän, niin hän mieluimmin lähtisi miehineen Baratariasta
iki-päiviksi; he olivat valmiit mihin persoonallisiin uhrauksiin hyvänsä
hengen, tavaran ja toimeentulon puolesta, ennenkun taipuivat
pakostakaan kohottamaan aseitaan Yhdysvaltoja vastaan. Samaan
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jäsenelle, ja molemmat kirjeet olivat erittäin taitavasti laaditut
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XXXI luku.
AARTEENKÄTKIJÄ-SISSI.
<tb>
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surmatun neidon huuto kuuluu varhain sumuisina aamuhetkinä
hänestä nimensä saaneelta luodolta mantereelle.
<tb>
Mary sulki nyt silmänsä tiivisti, mutta Abnerin olivat ihka selällään.
Kuului äkkiä pistoolin kimakka paukahdus — lyhyt, valittava
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kuoppaa umpeen, ja uskomattoman lyhyessä ajassa oli se täytetty
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viiniköynnöksen vesoja, niin ettei tavallinen silmä olisi huomannut
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XXXII luku.