"Graduate students, scholars and professionals interested film and addressing problems posed by the rising Anthropocene might find this book useful in providing ways to think outside the box and expand thinking to be more inclusive." (Morgan Danker, CBQ Communication Booknotes Quarterly, Vol. 51 (3-4), 2020)
Chapter 1: Introduction Stepping into the Play Frame: Cinema as Mammalian Communication
Chapter 2: Janus’s Celluloid and Digital Faces: The Existential Cyborg: Autopoiēsis in Christopher Nolan’s Memento
Chapter 3: Documentary Intertext: Robert Gardner’s Dead Birds 1964
Chapter 4: Cinema’s Historical Incarnations: Travelling the Möbius Strip of Biotime in Cloud Atlas
From Novel to Film
Chapter 5: Documentary Intertext: John Marshall’s The Hunters 1957
Chapter 6: Janus Speaks: Multicultural Polyvocality: Trinh Minh-ha’s The Fourth Dimension and The Digital Film Event
Chapter 7: Documentary Intertext: Gregory Bateson’s and Margaret Mead’s Trance and Dance in Bali 1952
Chapter 8: Janus’s Interspecies Faces: Biomorphic Transformations in the Ecology of Mind in James Cameron’s Avatar
Chapter 9: Documentary Intertext: J. Stephen Lansing’s and André Singer’s The Goddess and the Computer
Chapter 10: Conclusion: Toward a Transdisciplinary Critical Theory of Film
Daniel White is Professor Emeritus and founding faculty member of the Wilkes Honors College of Florida Atlantic University.
This book provides an interdisciplinary analysis of film in the context of the Anthropocene: the new geological era in which human beings have collectively become a force of nature. Daniel White draws on perspectives in philosophy, ecology, and cybernetics (the science of communication and control in animals and machines) to explore human self-understanding through film in the new era. The classical figure of Janus, looking both to the future and the past, serves as a guide throughout the study. Both feature and documentary films are considered.