Cinematic Encounters with Disaster

"This book takes Hollywood's disaster movies and their codified versions of natural disaster, post-apocalyptic survival, and extra-terrestrial threat as the starting point for an analytical trajectory toward new understandings of how cinema shapes and informs our conceptions of disaster and catastrophe. This book examines a range of films from distinct regional and industrial contexts: Hollywood, indie movies, different kinds of documentaries, and auteurist-realist cinema. Moving across and beyond critical and industrial categories that inform thinking about cinema, it contends that different approaches to film style can push us to imagine disaster in distinct ways, with distinct ethical connotations"--

Simon R. Troon is a Sessional Teaching Associate and Research Assistant at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His writing on cinema and the environment has been published in Continuum Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and elsewhere.