Cinematic Encounters with Disaster

Reviews / Votes

Reading authors like Troon helps inform how narratives are shaped and the history of literary works influencing present--day cinema ... I recommend this book to anyone who has started researching disaster movies and wants to better understand the literary side of this medium. * Journal of Disaster Studies * In Cinematic Encounters with Disaster Simon R. Troon brings poststructuralist and post-anthropocentric theory to bear on the significance of disaster imagery and apocalyptic cinema in relation to the 'increasingly disastrous flavour' of our contemporary climate crisis. This ranging study of a timely sub-genre and troubling paradigm for the collective imaginary adds to growing scholarly insistence that 'ethical thinking about responsibility in the Anthropocene has much to offer analysis of films' - and furthermore that in going beyond its historical foundations and conventions film theory still has relevance in today's discursive intersections between screen media and the environment. * Hunter Vaughan, Senior Research Associate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge, UK * Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene offers a world atlas of cinematic imaginations of disaster-from the spectacular to the almost imperceptible-that explores what it might mean, as Haythan El-Wardany wondered, to "look disaster in the eye." Across a bravura set of close readings of films, Simon Troon develops the inquisitive gaze of pluriform cinematic realisms and the ethical attunements of post-levinasian theory to help us think expansively about the fantasies, challenges, and local and geopolitical stakes of life facing disaster. A provocative and timely contribution from an exciting new voice in the field. * James Leo Cahill, Associate Professor, Cinema Studies and French, University of Toronto, Canada *