“Cinema and the (Post-)Human” Lecture Series

At a time when the human has been reconceptualized as “human animal” among other organisms, in this posthuman age of critiqued anthropocentrism, an intense debate around the “Anthropocene” has formed. The human, thought to be a fixation of scholars of the past, curiously has moved back to the center of attention—as originator of environmental disaster, as creator of a geological age, and, consequently, as agent now called upon to act responsibly. However, this understanding of man as a world-maker is not as unprecedented as widely believed. Cinema has always been, like the Anthropocene, a result of human creation. Just as the Anthropocene seems to describe an epoch of “artificial worldmaking,” cinema has ever created its own worlds. What role, then, can cinema play with regard to our understanding of the anthropogenic age. How can cinema and media studies contribute to the study of the Anthropocene and to the ethical imperatives arising from the planet’s “anthropogenic turn”?