1. Envisioning the World reconfigures conceptions of world and the global in the cinema by shifting consideration away from questions of circulation and traffic and on to the way cinema and related media have imagined the world itself at a time when there is a pressing urgency to think our planet in holistic terms. 2. It revitalises our understanding of the Earth by showing that media do not simply represent or show the world but indeed directly shape the way we perceive and interact with the world. 3. It offers the first major study of the global as a category informing the visual culture of the turns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the belief that a consideration of past and present global imaginings can help us imagine and create new worlds. 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.
Industry Reviews
"This timely book traces a history of universalizing whole-Earth images from panoramas, world exhibitions, stereographs, and silent-era cinema to IMAX and BBC nature documentaries, showing the problems and promise of such universalizing visualizations for our current moment of ecological crisis."
- Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Woodbury University, Los Angeles
"At our current critical juncture in which new thinking about the planet has never been more urgent, Tiago de Luca's Planetary Cinema reminds us of media's long history of reflecting, shaping, and questioning planetary consciousness. This work offers a fascinating interdisciplinary exploration of how the figure and image of the world have been constructed and challenged through film and related media. Combining an innovative conceptual approach with illuminating case studies across history from panoramas and early cinema to experimental film and tv documentaries, Planetary Cinema makes important contributions to the growing field of ecocinema. A philosophically-informed and historically sensitive study of how media have made us feel at home, or not, in the world and its remaking."
- Paula Amad, University of Iowa
"This fascinating study shows how cinema has both bolstered and challenged our planetary imaginaries, from 19th-century imperialism to the current ecological crisis. With deep historical knowledge, De Luca brings past and present media practices into a productive dialogue, where each transforms our understanding of the other."
- Michael Cowan, University of Iowa
