Cinema of Exploration

Through an expansive optic and re-imagining of films deep imbrication with exploration, this rich collection views cinema and exploration as mutually informing and vital allies in understanding twentieth century human history and our current crisis in the age of the Anthropocene. The authors productively take up the charge of discerning cinema in diverse contexts of exploration and critically engage with how adventure itself has long been a driving force and useful metaphor for cinema and/as epistemological practice. Alison Griffiths, Distinguised Professor, The City University of New York A remarkable transdisciplinary anthology exploring cinematic image-work in relation to issues of exploration, travel, colonial visual culture, experimental ethnographic film, and more broadly in relation to human encounters with intensive natural phenomena that confounds those who observe and participate in them. This collection will inspire and be useful to scholars in the human sciences, particularly media and visual anthropologists, who are willing to experiment with the new capacities of the cinematic. Tarek Elhaik, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Davis and author of The Incurable-Image: Curating Post-Mexican Film and Media Arts. In this intellectually rich set of essays, cinematic practices and ideologies of exploration are brought into illuminating contact. The authors in this collection read the spectacles of the spectacular that lie at the heart of 'cinemas of exploration' through the material circumstances and exploitations of their production. In so doing, the politics of 'exploration' are laid bare and placed in productive tension with the promises of enlightenment or adventure that such films tend to offer. Lisa Messeri, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Yale University Exploration is cinemas greatest, its most singular and enduring attribute, and so there is no overstating the importance of this stunning anthology. It takes a Fantastic Voyage through astonishing episodes that illuminate cinemas Copernican vocation to displace humans by exploring the befuddling world in which we co-exist. Cahill and Caminati lay out a shrewd itinerary leading into the body of the book where, chapter after chapter, we discover how cinema has evolved to bring within its purview unimaginable inner and outer worlds. As the probing coda proclaims, cinema is still mid-journey. Explore this book and you will explore a medium and an art that is as alive today as it was for Lumire and Mlies. Dudley Andrew, author of What Cinema Is! What an adventure! Cinema of Exploration productively unsettles any claim that the world pictured is a world known much less mastered. This volume offers surprising readings of a range of genres and terrains, from "pith-hat" safari movies to the microscopic, psychedelic, and atmospheric cinema of cosmonauts, aquanauts and even "psychonauts." A critique of the imperial projects underwriting exploration and environmental degradation, the essays collected here unfold a history and theory of cinema that is curious about the remote, unseen, overlooked, and as-yet unknown possibilities of both cinema and our marvelous, fragile world. Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene Cinema studies once overlooked such primary material, but this collections assembly of a roster of films formerly considered minor exemplifies a welcome opening up of the field to media in its fuller range of influence... The book joins together questions that cut across the often separate philosophical domains of ideology and ontology: Does exploration in cinema always embody a power dynamic, and is it a description of an attitude inscribed by the apparatus itself? Cinema of Exploration sifts through the utopian promises, challenges, and dead ends of the mediums eventful first century and a quart

James Leo Cahill is Director of the Cinema Studies Institute and Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and French at the University of Toronto. He is author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlev (2019) and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. Luca Caminati is Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Orientalismo eretico. Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del Terzo Mondo (2007), Il cinema come happening: Pasolini's Primitivism and the Sixties Italian Art Scene (2010), and Roberto Rossellini documentarista. Una cultura della realt (2012), along with many articles and book chapters on Italian cinema and media. He is currently serving as associate editor for the journal Italica.

1. Cinema of Exploration: An Adventurous Film Practice and Theory; Part I: Explorations in Perception ; 2. Chasing Bugs: Microbial Frontiers in American Epidemiological Documentaries, 194660; 3. Through the Body with Laser Gun and Camera: Fantastic Voyage and the Cinema of Exploration; 4. Outer and Inner Space: Psychedelia and Selected Representations of Altered Consciousness in Experimental Cinema; 5. Weird Loops: Climate Change, Drone Cinema, and the Work of Mourning; Part II: Cinema of Expedition; 6. Chance Wrote the Screenplay, Reality Directed the Film: The Exploration Films of Hans Hass; 7. Environmental Aesthetics: Tracing a Latent Image from Early Safari Films to Contemporary Art Cinema; 8. Travelling the World with a Smile: James Fitzpatrick's Traveltalks; 9. Aquariums, Diving Equipment, and the Undersea Films of John Ernest Williamson; 10. Sounding Travel Documentary in Wartime China: The Dual Journey of Long Live the Nation; Part III: Narratives of Exploration; 11. Exploring Markers Cuba: Shivers and Rhythms; 12. Like a Mobile, Living Archive: Antonioni the Traveler; 13. Adventure Cinema in the Age of Austerity: The case of Miguel Gomes Arabian Nights (2015) Trilogy; 14. Amazon Cinema: Vegetal Storytelling; Part IV. Cinema of Exploitation; 15. Mondo Exotica: Ethnography, Eros, and Exploitation in Italian Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s; 16. From Pierre Perrault to Rolf De Heer: Auteur Cinema and the Poetic Exploration of Indigenous Lands and Identities; 17. Prospecting: Cinema and the Exploration of Extraction; Coda: 18. Speculations on Film/theory and the Trope of Exploration"