and environmental justice. She is co-editor of four ecocritical media anthologies. As part of her College’s Land Acknowledgment Committee, she also engages in public eco-humanities along with community research with Indigenous partners.
Monani applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Indigenous Ecocinema at the West Virginia University Press website.Despite its time-consuming nature, Calder often works independently on her projects. Her decision to work without large crews is deliberate. First, she finds that the process allows her to more easily experience the relational spaces of her stories--“I often think of it as I'm going to the forest today, or I am being confined in that little room, as in Snip.” Second, she rejects the production norms of mainstream animation that employ an estranged Taylorized model of production. Such a model is geared to capitalist efficiency, often churning out films with such slick production that Calder notes they “feel like a roller coaster ride; I’m buckled in, it’s a dynamic thrill.” In contrast, Calder’s low-budget, individually created films are aimed to help audiences “feel” the labor and materials that are so often invisible in mainstream animation’s immersive projects (think Disney, in particular). While Disney might acknowledge some of its high-profile animators (e.g., in “how the film was made” extras), these acknowledgments tend to glamorize the process and hide systems that continue to perpetuate fleshy and earthly violence through problematic labor and environmental practices. For example, Hollywood productions often outsource labor to countries where working conditions are worse than those in home countries; the impacts are felt at home too where workers are laid off…The excerpt from page 99 works well to provide a partial snapshot of the book’s goals as it draws attention to the ecological dimensions of one Indigenous filmmaker, stop-motion animator Terril Calder (Métis)’ cinema practices. In the book, I argue that we can learn a lot about a) how cinema—its onscreen messages as well as its off-screen production, reception and distribution practices—are enmeshed in environmental contexts, and b) how contemporary Indigenous cinema helps us re-evaluate these enmeshments with an eye to social and environmental justice. Essentially, a goal of Indigenous Ecocinema is to bring ecocritical attention to a thriving Indigenous cinema archive, and simultaneously, another goal is to bring, Indigenous intellectual voices front and center into (eco)cinema conversations. Interlacing these two goals, the book offers d-ecocinema criticism, a methodological approach that invites Indigenous (and, thus relatedly, decolonial) frames to our understandings of cinema’s ecological entanglements.
… Calder refuses to partake in these discriminatory systems. Despite knowing that her production choices might disadvantage her in terms of how quickly she can make a film, she would rather situate her filmmaking within a work ethic that is relationally bound—to her Indigenous communities and the decolonial and ecological messages she presents onscreen. In other words, much like Monnet, Calder is acutely attentive both to how she encodes Indigenous cinema time(s) onscreen and to how she grounds her production in material practices that honor Native being in time as relational processes of living ethically and in kinship with the human and more-than-human world.
In this excerpt, Calder reflects on her cinema, comparing it to the practices of mainstream animation cinema industries. In discussing her process of working independently, despite the time it takes, Calder helps direct our attention to the environmental and social justice implications of cinema production. At the end of the excerpt, I mention another filmmaker (Caroline Monnet, an Anishinaabe/French experimental artist) whose work is also ethically oriented to ecosocial justice. Throughout the book, I showcase film creatives who challenge the business-as-usual modes of cinema industries and instead engage in cinema practices that engage land and community responsibilities, on and off screen.
Not surprisingly, it would be a lot to ask one page of the book to best capture Indigenous Ecocinema’s broader goal to offer the methodological approach of d-ecocinema criticism. The page definitely implies this goal as I foreground Calder’s insights as essential to my analyses. However, this excerpt does not demonstrate how extensively I draw on Indigenous intellectual thought and scholarship to expand the current purview of (eco)critical cinema theory and practice. To engage with this broader goal, I invite you to read the book, which explores three essential ingredients of cinema worlds—place, time, and feelings. Spotlighting these three components, the book reads Indigenous cinema as d-ecocinema (with attention to decolonial and ecological frames of reference) and offers cinema aficionados and scholars alike a roadmap to re-orient away from current business-as-usual extractive and exploitative media environments.
--Marshal Zeringue
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