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Film Ecology
Defending the Biosphere - Doughnut Economics and Film Theory and Practice
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Book Presentation:
Using the Regenerative economic model – also known as Doughnut Economics – Susan Hayward offers a thought-provoking sketch for a renewed, tentatively revolutionary approach to both film theory and film practice.
This book attempts to answer the questions posed by T.J. Demos (in Against the Anthropocene, 2017): how do we find a way to address planetary harm and the issues it raises within the field of Film Studies? How do we construct a theoretical model that allows us to visualize the ecological transgressions brought about by the growth-model of capitalism which is heavily endorsed by mainstream narrative cinema? By turning to the model set out in Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics (2017) and adapting its fundamental principles to a study of narrative cinema, Film Ecology proposes to show how, by using this model, we can usefully plot and investigate films according to criteria that are not genre/star/auteur-led, nor indeed embedded in anthropocentric theoretical models, but principles which are ecologically based. These arguments are brought to life with examples from mainstream narrative films such as The Giant (1956), Mildred Pierce (1945), Erin Brockovich (2000), Wall Street (1987), Hotel Rwanda (2004), and Missing Figures (2016).
This approach will inspire film practitioners, film theorists, critics and analysts, film students and film lovers alike to consider how they might integrate this Doughnut model into their thinking or work as part of their process.
About the Author:
Susan Hayward is Emeritus Professor of Cinema Studies at Exeter University. She is the author of numerous books on French Cinema and Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (now in its fifth edition).
See the publisher website: Routledge
> From the same author:
The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (2024)
Dir. Gábor Gergely and Susan Hayward
Ecology Documentaries (2021)
Their Function and Value Seen Through the Lens of Doughnut Economics
Subject: Genre > Documentary
French Costume Drama of the 1950s (2010)
Fashioning Politics in Film
The Films of Luc Besson (2007)
Master of Spectacle
Dir. Susan Hayward and Philip Powrie
Subject: Director > Luc Besson
> On a related topic:
Ecological Film Theory and Psychoanalysis (2023)
Surviving the Environmental Apocalypse in Cinema
by Robert Geal
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Moving Image Theory (2005)
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Cinema of/for the Anthropocene (2025)
Affect, Ecology, and More-Than-Human Kinship
Dir. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Andrea Ruthven
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Towards a Film Theory from Below (2025)
Archival Film and the Aesthetics of the Crack-Up
by Jiri Anger
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