Film is often been used to represent the natural landscape and to communicate environmentalist messages. Yet behind even the "green" images shown on screens are ecologically unsustainable production and distribution processes. Noting that celluloid is often composed of petroleum byproducts, The Cinematic Footprint traces the history of how the "hydrocarbon imagination" has been central to the development of film as a medium. Nadia Bozak's innovative fusion of film studies and environmental studies leads her to make provocative connections between the disappearance of material resources and...