Books by Tiago de Luca
The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Ea... more The story is now familiar. In the late 1960s humanity finally saw photographic evidence of the Earth in space for the first time. According to this narrative, the impact of such images in the consolidation of a planetary consciousness is yet to be matched. This book tells a different story. It argues that this narrative has failed to account for the vertiginous global imagination underpinning the media and film culture of the late nineteenth century and beyond. Panoramas, giant globes, world exhibitions, photography and stereography: all promoted and hinged on the idea of a world made whole and newly visible. When it emerged, cinema did not simply contribute to this effervescent globalism so much as become its most significant and enduring manifestation. Planetary Cinema proposes that an exploration of that media culture can help us understand contemporary planetary imaginaries in times of environmental collapse. Engaging with a variety of media, genres and texts, the book sits at the intersection of film/media history and theory/ philosophy, and it claims that we need this combined approach and expansive textual focus in order to understand the way we see the world.
Articles and Book Chapters by Tiago de Luca
A cursory glance at reviews of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) reveals the overwhelming recurrence o... more A cursory glance at reviews of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) reveals the overwhelming recurrence of the expression “intimate epic” to describe it. In this article I explore the implications of this oxymoron for an appreciation of the film. Much of the discussion surrounding Roma attributed its politics, or lack thereof, to aspects of narrative representation and character psychology. I suggest that Roma’s politics is to be found, instead, in its aesthetic interplay of scale and the monumental. Commonly understood in terms of large-scale objects designed to memorialise and glorify regimes, nation-states and doctrines, monumentality is often deemed aligned with a conservative and authoritarian project. But what happens when the monumental is applied to objects and subjects existing outside the remit of its scale? At the same time, “intimate epic” assumes another meaning here related to the fact that, while the film was conceived for the largest possible screen, it was relegated to domestic viewing due to its Netflix distribution. To properly account for questions of scale in Roma, I suggest, aesthetics and representation must thus be examined alongside modes of reception and spectatorship.
As billowing masses averse to stillness and defined by perpetual variability, clouds, fog and mis... more As billowing masses averse to stillness and defined by perpetual variability, clouds, fog and mist share common ontological properties. This article will group them together under the rubric of the "nebulous," and probe its conceptual and aesthetic relationship with film. Fog, smoke and mist are pervasive through the entire history of cinema and crop up in an array of genres and modes. What would film history look like if traced from the perspective of these cloud forms? The article hopes to sketch out the first contours of such a history by honing in on a durational cinematic tradition, from the "landscape film" of the 1970s through to contemporary slow cinema. It will conceive of such a history as intermedial both in the sense that it extrapolates the boundaries of the film medium and in that it treats fog, mist and clouds as elemental "media" in their own right.
This is a pre-published version. Please cite from the original.
Studies in World Cinema , 2023
Recent ecocritical strands of thought have proposed a conceptualisation of the environment on the... more 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
This chapter considers the ways in which the use of photography can function as an intermedial de... more This chapter considers the ways in which the use of photography can function as an intermedial device to provoke reflection on that which is only partially visible, or almost invisible, at the edge of the frame, and on how this marginal visibility acts as the visualisation of wider, structural and social, forces of marginalisation. To explore this, my focus is on two contemporary Brazilian films: the short audiovisual essay Babás (Nannies, Consuelo Lins, 2010) and the fiction film Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2016).
Studies in World Cinema, 2020
The world envisioned by the idea of world cinema is often tied to a conception of the planet in t... more The world envisioned by the idea of world cinema is often tied to a conception of the planet in terms of the global circulation of films and networks of production, consumption and distribution. This article argues for the need to confront the world as a representational and aesthetic category in and of itself.
This article explores the way in which the global can be imagined in the cinema by taking up the ... more This article explores the way in which the global can be imagined in the cinema by taking up the concept of cognitive mapping as proposed by Marxist cultural theorist Fredric Jameson. It contends that the totalising remit of the concept offers an especially productive avenue through which to assess how the world has been mapped out in contemporary genres as disparate as the global network film and the world symphony. In particular, the article proposes that the film The Human Surge (2016), by the Argentinean Eduardo Williams, updates an aesthetics of cognitive mapping in revealing ways -one that is as attuned to the phenomenology of lived experience and the topology of an elusive world system, as it is to the earth as both the ground and planet we share with other human and nonhuman beings.
Sitting in the Dark among Anonymous Strangers, Afterthoughts & Postscripts, Cinema Journal 56:1
This article examines how the body of fi lms commonly described as "slow cinema" require the fi l... more This article examines how the body of fi lms commonly described as "slow cinema" require the fi lm theater for their spectatorial contract to be fully met, an aspect illustrated by recent durational fi lms that focus on the theatrical experience as a theme in its own right. By exploring the ways in which slow cinema eschews the conventional temporal articulations of narrative cinema in favor of indeterminate temporalities, the article posits that the slow style might be fruitfully understood as a metarefl ection on a collective mode of spectatorship that loses its exclusivity as cinema ventures into new spaces and onto new screens.
This is the first book to compile a collection of essays on 'slow cinema', a term that has acquir... more This is the first book to compile a collection of essays on 'slow cinema', a term that has acquired remarkable visibility in film criticism over the last decade, thus arriving attached to particular cultural phenomena and inserted within specific public debates. Before delving into an analysis of the cinematic style with which the term has become associated, a brief survey of these phenomena and debates is immediately required.
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Books by Tiago de Luca
Articles and Book Chapters by Tiago de Luca