ABSTRACT
Ecomedia studies tend to analyze ideological preoccupations as they appear in textual content. While such approaches have pushed the field in exciting directions, a recent material turn has focused on the emissions generated by production practices and digital communications. The lifecycle of the media extends far outside the text on which academic critiques often focus. Indeed, it is necessary to shift critical attention beyond the more obviously anthropocentric concerns in the textual frame (including representations of environmental concerns) to thinking how films reveal and critique the extraction and subsequent manipulation of materials (including metals, minerals, coal, hydro, etc.) that enable the production infrastructure of contemporary media. Nadia Bozak’s work focuses on the resource image as a means to trace cinematic representations back to the energy infrastructure that facilitates their production. Expanding on this concept, a focus on the material circumstances of the production environment—that is, the choices made on set in terms of technology, transport, location, objects such as the cameras used, as well as the role of the human as an organic being—translate into the film text. Such aspects, often ignored, can reveal to us much about the film’s ecological relationship with the lived environment. By focusing on Wang Bing’s monumental Tie Xi Qu (2003), the chapter will formulate an approach to how documentary films generate awareness of the complex environmental and material infrastructures of the resource image. In doing so, it will suggest an analytical framework for evaluating how the material roots of media production—and not only the materiality of the media itself—make themselves felt on the textual level. Wang’s work is especially powerful as it brings into focus many of the key concerns in depicting a transition as fundamental as that of China’s post-socialist society. In such complex processes, the role of environmental concerns are often sidelined. Yet this chapter suggests that Wang challenges such tendencies by consciously foregrounding non-human materials as agents in the textual process.
