Reynolds, L. 2024. An Ethics of Place and Ways of Telling: Finding a Feminist Eco-cinema in Moving Image’s Ecological Turn. in: Knowles, K. and Walley, J. (ed.) The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 453-471
| Chapter title | An Ethics of Place and Ways of Telling: Finding a Feminist Eco-cinema in Moving Image’s Ecological Turn |
|---|---|
| Authors | Reynolds, L. |
| Editors | Knowles, K. and Walley, J. |
| Abstract | This chapter examines how the contemporary moving image artists Diann Bauer, Rebecca Birch and Alberta Whittle have engaged with the ecological questions being posed with increasing intensity in moving image and art culture. I argue that their films evidence a generative re-appraisal of feminist ecological discourse, refusing the homogenizing tendencies of an earlier eco-feminist binary of nature and culture, as well as questioning more recent discourses of material feminism. Each addresses environmental concerns using different strategies. Bauer's detournement of online culture’s memes and YouTube videos addresses current climate change denial, while Birch’s performative documentation of recent anti-fracking protests honors its all-female protestors, finding echoes of earlier eco-feminist activisms. Whittle traces the paths between hurricane devastation in the Caribbean and its colonial origins in Britain and Scotland, in her 2019 film installation between a Whisper and a Cry. Through my analysis, I make the case that common to their practices is a performative mode of storytelling, which projects the personal and experiential into a wider narrative of ecological thought, environmental activism and historical reflection. In my exploration of whether the tales and spaces recounted by Bauer, Birch and Whittle resonate in earlier eco-feminist filmmaking, I correlate Birch’s filmic reimagining of the Preston New Road anti-fracking protests to the film works generated by an earlier moment of environmental activism at the Greenham Common anti-nuclear protest camp in the work of the artists Annabel Nicolson, Tina Keane, Lis Rhodes and Joanna Davis. |
| Book title | The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema |
| Page range | 453-471 |
| Year | 2024 |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Publication dates | |
| Published | 05 Sep 2024 |
| ISBN | 9783031552557 |
| 9783031552564 | |
| Digital Object Identifier (DOI) | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55256-4_24 |