Seán Cubbit (University of Melbourne)

ABSTRACT We have always been told that everyone dies alone. A medium that tends to privilege individuals, film has tended to focus on these lonely deaths of isolated individuals, often treating them as unique events that start or end a story, fictional or documentary. James Dean’s character in "Rebel Without a Cause" experienced the planetarium scene of the heat death of the universe as a personal crisis. The Anthropocene is a collective existential trauma. Death is no longer an abrupt event but a slow global condition. The living inherit a vast repository of languages, knowledges and skills that are increasingly swallowed up in technologies that no longer belong to all of us. Even more depressing than ecological catastrophe is the thought that we will no longer be able to hand on what we made with our inheritance to future generations. Movies, in the era of their transition from film to video, have a special relation to mortality and the relation between past and future. This paper reflects on these themes in historical eco-cinema from the Lumières’ "Burning Oil Wells at Baku" to Herzog’s "Lessons of Darkness" ("Lektionen in Finsternis").

BIO Seán Cubitt is Professorial Fellow of Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include "The Cinema Effect" (2004), "EcoMedia" (2005), "The Practice of Light" (2014), "Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies" (2017), "Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image" (2020) and two volumes of a trilogy on aesthetic politics, "Truth" (2023) and "Good" (2025). Co-editor of "Ecocinema 2" (2023), "The Ecocinema Reader: Theory and Practice", (2012) and "Ecomedia: Key Issues" (2015), he researches ecocritical approaches to the history and philosophy of media, media arts and technologies.

The session is hybrid and will be held on October 15, 2025, at 15h00 WEST / 17h00 EET, at NOVA FCSH (B201) and online, via Microsoft Teams.

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