ABSTRACT
Ecomedia play an ambiguous role in people’s affective relationships with their environments. They demand and condition attention and are often seen as an obstacle to healthy human-nature relationships because they “exhaust” our attentional resources in ways that affect our perception of our actual surroundings. At the same time, they also mediate such relationships, immersing us in environments other than those we physically inhabit and treating us to embodied experiences that are both imaginary and real. Alexa Weik von Mossner’s chapter explores the psychological mechanisms behind this complex interplay of attention, cognition, embodiment, and emotion, focusing on the example of film. The first part of the chapter considers the ways in which film production and exhibition take into account the affective and embodied nature of human perception and cognition. The second part uses the example of Jean-Marc Vallée’s biopic Wild (2014) to demonstrate how cinematic techniques enable viewers to viscerally experience a character’s experience of a natural environment.
