Narrative Ecology in Artists’ Cinema

Discussing key filmmakers— Albert Serra (1975, Spain), Helena Wittmann (1982, Germany), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (1970, Thailand) and Saodat Ismailova (1981, Uzbekistan)— Narrative Ecology in Artists’ Cinema challenges the assumptions of narrative theory, asking precisely what is a narrative world, what drives a story, how it is configured, how stories cause, and how endings inflect our attention.“We need new stories” has become a tagline amongst creators and thinkers working on global ecological disorders. This book answers this call. It draws from narratology, film theory, philosophy, and environmental humanities to interrogate what narrative does, and how. The book focuses on the concepts of diegesis, forces, plot, event, causality, and teleology to uncover key avenues of exploration for narrative theorists and storytellers.Narrative Ecology takes a global approach, engaging specifically with the work of the aforementioned artists to foreground key ecological questions: first, how does filmic narrative attend to the excessive thickness of more-than-human worlds?; second, how are these worlds made attractive to us, all-too-human animals? For we do not merely need new stories, but new ways to tell stories and new tools to analyze them. Uniquely, the analysis of artists’ fiction feature films is undertaken in tandem with their companion video installations. This expanded analysis reveals how contemporary artist-cineastes draw from cinema’s affinity with storytelling, while also engaging with a long tradition of critique of narrative in experimental cinema and video art. In doing so, they create new narratives for a time of permanent crisis.