Ecological Aesthetics of Michelangelo Frammartino

The Ecological Aesthetics of Michelangelo Frammartino offers the first extended ecophilosophical study of Michelangelo Frammartino’s cinema, examining how his films challenge anthropocentric ways of seeing and invite a radically different understanding of the relationships between human and nonhuman.Bringing together film theory, environmental humanities, material ecocriticism, phenomenology and posthumanism, the book develops an ecophilosophical approach to cinema centered on slowness, duration, perception, and the agency of the more-than-human world. Methodologically, the study combines close textual analysis of Frammartino’s films, short works, and visual-installations with philosophical and ecocritical interpretation. Particular attention is given to the material and sensory dimensions of cinematic experience: the role of landscape, sound, darkness, bodily perception, vegetal life, animals, geological formations, and apparently insignificant gestures. Rather than treating nature as a passive setting or symbolic backdrop, the book considers moving images as encounters between heterogeneous human and nonhuman forms of life and agency. Through analyses of Frammartino’s early audiovisual works, Il dono, Le quattro volte, Alberi, and Il buco, the book demonstrates how his cinema develops an alternative visual and temporal language capable of displacing human centrality. It ultimately proposes Frammartino’s cinema as an ecophilosophy of silence, slowness, and material perception, offering new ways of thinking about ecocinema and the Anthropocene.This volume will interest academics and scholars, and is well-suited to support advanced undergraduate and graduate education in Film Studies, particularly ecocinema, Italian cinema, and aesthetic theory, Environmental Humanities, Film Philosophy, Media and Cultural Studies, and Italian Studies.