Italian Ecocinema Beyond the Human

Elena Past is Associate Professor of Italian in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Wayne State University. She is author of Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection and Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction, editor (with Deborah Amberson) of Thinking Italian Animals: Human and Posthuman in Modern Italian Literature and Film, and editor (with Serenella Iovino and Enrico Cesaretti) of Italy and the Environmental Humanities: Landscapes, Natures, Ecologies.

• AcknowledgmentsNote on TranslationOn Location: Italian Ecocinema1. Hydrocarbons, Moving Pictures, Time: Red Desert2. Location, Dirty Cinema, Toxic Waste, Storytelling: Gomorrah3. Posthuman Collaboration, Cohabitation, Sacrifice: The Wind Blows Round4. Silence, Cinema, More-than-Human Sound: Le quattro volte5. Volcanoes, Transgenerational Memory, Cinema: Return to the Aeolian IslandsEpilogueBibliographyIndex

"Part memoir, part close analysis of the films themselves, and illustrated with numerous excellent frame grabs, Past's book casts a dreamlike spell as it contemplates the past, present, and future of the cinema and moves smoothly between environmental issues and aesthetic and practical concerns."—Choice"[Past] uniquely and innovatively combines film studies and material ecocriticism with a focus on Italy. Such weaving of tales brings the films to life and reads them as ecological documents and Italian stories."—Heather I. Sullivan, author of The Intercontextuality of Self and Nature in Ludwig Tieck's Early Works"A timely and incisive study that interrogates a new, though growing, trend in film criticism and makes an important and rich contribution to Italian film studies, Italian cultural studies, and ecocriticism."—Bernadette Luciano, author (with Susanna Scarparo) of Reframing Italy: New Trends in Italian Women's Filmmaking