Abstract/Summary

The Summer 2012 edition of ISLE collected various writings on the “materialist turn” in ecocriticism, providing a series of provocative questions about the implications of this turn, as well as a valuable account of its emergence. Few readers would come away from the collection with any doubts about the philosophical and theoretical richness of materialist ecocriticism. This article is a response to (and intervention in?) that conversation, from the perspective of eco-film criticism. It does not reiterate the conceptual premises of materialism in detail, but instead illustrates some of its potential effects on textual criticism and interpretation in cinema studies. These effects may not be exclusive to film, but they perhaps take on a particular kind of resonance with the moving image, and a medium whose ontology has so often been articulated in materialist terms.