Planetary Cinema

"This timely book traces a history of universalizing whole-Earth images from panoramas, world exhibitions, stereographs, and silent-era cinema to IMAX and BBC nature documentaries, showing the problems and promise of such universalizing visualizations for our current moment of ecological crisis." - Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Woodbury University, Los Angeles "At our current critical juncture in which new thinking about the planet has never been more urgent, Tiago de Luca's Planetary Cinema reminds us of media's long history of reflecting, shaping, and questioning planetary consciousness. This work offers a fascinating interdisciplinary exploration of how the figure and image of the world have been constructed and challenged through film and related media. Combining an innovative conceptual approach with illuminating case studies across history from panoramas and early cinema to experimental film and tv documentaries, Planetary Cinema makes important contributions to the growing field of ecocinema. A philosophically-informed and historically sensitive study of how media have made us feel at home, or not, in the world and its remaking." - Paula Amad, University of Iowa "This fascinating study shows how cinema has both bolstered and challenged our planetary imaginaries, from 19th-century imperialism to the current ecological crisis. With deep historical knowledge, De Luca brings past and present media practices into a productive dialogue, where each transforms our understanding of the other." - Michael Cowan, University of Iowa

Tiago de Luca is Reader in Film Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality (2014), and the editor (with Nuno Barradas Jorge) of Slow Cinema (2016) and (with Lucia Nagib and Luciana Correa de Araujo) Towards an Intermedial History of Brazilian Cinema (2022). He is the editor, with Lucia Nagib, of the Film Thinks series.

List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction The (Whole) World in Motion Earth * World * Globe * Planet Multiple Media Worlds Towards the Planetary The Chapters 1 Sublime Earth Humboldt's Panoramas Humboldt's Globes IMAX Whole-Earth Who Does the Earth Think It Is? Unearthing the Earth 2 The Unseen World Across the World Unseen Worlds Never Before Seen Never Before Seen (Again) Never to Be Seen Again 3 The Universal Equality of Things The Encyclopedia, or 'The Sun is No Respecter of Persons or of Things' The Integrated Whole, or 'An Instantaneous Survey of the World' The Database, or 'YouTube is the World Stage' 4 The Face of the World The Inter-Face Death's Head 'Don't Blink!' The Face in the Crowd 5 A Networked Humanity 'One Common Flood of Humanity' A World of Strangers Networking the Earth 6 A Disappearing Planet A Human Planet An Inhuman Planet A Nonhuman Planet A Non-Planet Bibliography Index