Elemental World Cinema

Abstract

Recent ecocritical strands of thought have proposed a conceptualisation of the environment on the basis of its elemental constitution rather than an amorphous 'nature' supposedly divorced from humans (Macauley, 2010;Cohen & Duckert, 2015;Peters, 2015). In this burgeoning 'elemental ecocriticism' , the classical elements -earth, air, fire and water -reappear as objects of sustained philosophical enquiry and as concrete entities with which to recalibrate our interaction with the environment in the so-called Anthropocene. As David Macauley (2010: 2) suggests, we sensuously encounter (and domesticate) earth, air, fire and water on a quotidian and often distracted basis; to reanimate these elements can therefore "make us aware of the complexand sometimes very necessary -mediations that exist between us and the environment".In his influential The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015), John Durham Peters takes this idea one step further. He notes that the current conception of media as informational and communicative message transmitters obscures the fact that, up until the nineteenth century, medium widely designated earth, air, fire and water as dynamic vessels and