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Contemporary Screen EthicsAbsences, Identities, Belonging, Looking Anew

Edited by Lucy Bolton, David Martin-Jones and Robert Sinnerbrink

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£95.00

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About this book

Explores the intertwining of the ethical with the sociopolitical across a range of screen media in different contexts internationally.
  • Includes such diverse examples as: intersectional feminist ethics (from the housemaid in Brazilian “Big House” dramas to Carol Morley documentaries); the human/nature dichotomy in John Akomfrah’s art installations and Bong Joon-ho’s “superpig” thriller Okja; race in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us and Luisa Omielan’s stand-up comedy on BBC television; the memory of traumatic Cold War pasts in The Look of Silence (Indonesia) and Though I am Gone (China); Nina Wu’s exploration of rape culture in the film industry; and the digital visuality of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s virtual reality experience Carne y arena.
  • Contributes to the decolonizing of thinking by including scholars from various continents discussing screen media from around the world, analysed through engagement with thinkers not typically thought of when considering screen ethics (e.g. María Lugones, Françoise Vergès, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Kalpana Sheshadri-Crooks, José Esteban Muñoz).

Contemporary Screen Ethics focuses on the intertwining of the ethical with the socio-political, considering such topics as: care, decolonial feminism, ecology, histories of political violence, intersectionality, neoliberalism, race, and sexual and gendered violence.

The collection advocates looking anew at the global complexity and diversity of such ethical issues across various screen media: from Netflix movies to VR, from Chinese romcoms to Brazilian pornochanchadas, from documentaries to drone warfare, from Jordan Peele movies to Google Earth. The analysis exposes the ethical tension between the inclusions and exclusions of global structural inequality (the identities of the haves, the absences of the have nots), alongside the need to understand our collective belonging to the planet demanded by the climate crisis. Informing the analysis, established thinkers like Deleuze, Irigaray, Jameson and Rancière are joined by an array of different voices – Ferreira da Silva, Gill, Lugones, Milroy, Muñoz, Sheshadri-Crooks, Vergès – to unlock contemporary screen ethics.

Reviews

Walking away from our despondency fuelled by watching worlds ruined and abandoned on screens, this timely collection assembled by the most rigorous of film philosophers and theorists infuses a renewal of enchantment in the worlds of cinema and the cinemas of the world.
In this brilliantly curated collection of essays, scholars from around the world discuss ways in which cinemas today negotiate – and sometimes, failure to address – traumas, corporeality, renewed relationships with our environment, caring, and empathy. It opens new opportunities for us to rethink what cinema and film philosophy have done, and how they can be deterritorialised and reterritorialised today.
Table of contents

AcknowledgementsList of Figures

Introduction: Absences, Identities, Belonging: Looking Anew at Screen Ethics - Lucy Bolton, David Martin-Jones, and Robert Sinnerbrink.

Part 1 Histories and Absences

  1. Domestic Work, Gender, Race, Class and the Ethical Paradox of the Big House in Brazilian Cinema - Alessandra Soares Brandão and Ramayana Lira de Sousa

  2. Cinematic Ethics and a World of Cinemas: A Reason to Believe in this World’s History in in Hu Jie’s Wo sui si qu/Though I am Gone (2006) - David Martin-Jones

  3. Memory, Witnessing, and Reenactment: The Look of Silence, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, and Cinematic Ethics - Robert Sinnerbrink

Part 2 Bodies and Identities

  1. Becoming Beyoncé: Disidentification and Racial Imaginaries - Tina Chanter

  2. Race, Bodies, and Altered Identities in Sleight and Us - Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo

Part 3 Love and Belonging

  1. A Planetary Whole for the Alienated. John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea Through Jameson and Deleuze - Jakob A. Nilsson

  2. Mermaids and Superpigs: Loving Nature Under Global Capitalism - Chelsea Birks

  3. Dreaming of Joyce Vincent’s Life: Carol Morley’s Intersectional Ethics of Care - Lucy Bolton

Part 4 Looking Anew

  1. Empathy Machines, Indifference Engines, and Digital Extensions of Perception - Nick Jones　

  2. Do you see what I see? The Ethics of Seeing Race in Get Out - Berenike Jung

  3. Don’t look away: Production-assemblages of rape culture in Midi Z’s Nina Wu - Jiaying Sim

Notes on ContributorsIndex

About the contributors

Lucy Bolton

Lucy Bolton is Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (2011) and Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch (2019, EUP) as well as the co-editor of' Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (2016) and Contemporary Screen Ethics (2023, EUP). She is co-series editor of EUP’s Visionaries series.

David Martin-Jones

David Martin-Jones is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Glasgow

Robert Sinnerbrink

Robert Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney