The Cinema of Extractions

Reviews / Votes

Brian Jacobson's timely, brilliant, and teacherly book fundamentally reorients film history to the history of the energy economy, and he introduces methods of reading form through the logics of a new "raw materialism." Nothing short of a "call to methodological action," The Cinema of Extractions is for anyone who cares about media aesthetics and the operations that underwrite industrial modernity's earth-defying ambitions. -- Jennifer Fay, author of <i>Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene</i> Jacobson's The Cinema of Extractions proposes that cinema became a world-making system integral to the new order of extractive capitalism it grew from. Our world bears the stamp of this past. Jacobson's sharp history of the entwining of cinema and its imaginaries with planetary matter is a vital intervention into the efforts to reckon with the work and environmental consequences of media. -- Lee Grieveson, professor of media history, University College London Reckoning with cinema's material dependence on our endangered planet alters our understanding of the medium. With The Cinema of Extractions, Jacobson hands us an invaluable guidebook to this approach. Giving a vivid account of how early Hollywood features and corporate shorts displayed or acclimated audiences to modernity's extractive roots, he magnificently shifts disciplinary frames. Read this book. Teach it. See films anew with it. -- Priya Jaikumar, author of <i>Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space</i> Jacobson is the guide we need for practicing cultural studies now. Moving back and forth between histories of material extraction and the world-making forms of cinema, he jolts us out of the old ruts dividing industrial and formalist approaches and lays out a thrilling new eco-formalist method for our moment. -- Caroline Levine, author of <i>The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis</i> Meticulous and well-researched, The Cinema of Extractions shines. * PopMatters * This concise book demonstrates how...analysis may be performed with a series of case studies, which lend themselves well for teaching on specific films or on ecocritical approaches more broadly. * Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television *