cinema of the not-yet

[JSRNC 5.2 (2011) 186-209] JSRNC (print) ISSN 1749-4907 doi: 10.1558/jsrnc.v5i2.186 JSRNC (online) ISSN 1749-4915

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3, Lancaster Street, Shef!eld S3 8AF.

_________________________________________ Cinema of the Not-Yet:

The Utopian Promise of Film as Heterotopia _________________________________________

Adrian Ivakhiv

University of Vermont, 153 S. Prospect Street, Burlington, VT 05401, USA [email protected]

Abstract

Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s writings on utopia, Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, I argue that cinema is by its nature heterotopic: it creates worlds that are other than the ‘real world’ but that relate to that world in multiple and contradictory ways. The landscapes and people portrayed in !lm are affectively charged in ways that alter viewers’ relationship to the real objects denoted or signi!ed by them. But it is the larger context of social and cultural movements that mobilizes or fails to mobilize this affective charge to draw out its critical utopian potentials. I examine four !lms from the 1970s—Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Stalker—as examples of richly heterotopic !lms that elicited utopian as well as dystopian affects in their audiences, and I discuss some ways in which American environ-mentalists, British Pagans, Europe’s ‘generation of ’68’, and Soviet citizens worked with these affects to imagine change in their respective societies.

Keywords !lm, cinema, utopia, heterotopia, affect, ecocriticism

The utopian and dystopian impulses are part of the human projective capacity for envisioning qualitatively different worlds. Of the popular arts which offer tools for such imaginative projection, cinema is arguably the most immersive and affectively engaging. But its dependence on a complex infrastructure of !nancial and economic capital has tended to blunt its capacity for providing radically innovative revisionings of socio-ecological relations. Its dystopias have often captured and mobilized fears of natural disaster and ecological collapse, but its utopias have rarely, if ever, catalyzed broader movements for environmental change.

mailto:[email protected]

Ivakhiv Cinema of the Not-Yet 187

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2011.

Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s theories of the utopian impulse, Pat Brereton argues that popular !lm serves as a source of utopian imagery and affect. In Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema, Brereton (2005) excavates an ‘eco-utopian residue’ in !lm genres ranging from blockbuster action adventures to road movies, westerns, and science-!ction features. Brereton, however, underestimates the power of cinema’s cultural and economic contexts to shape the meanings !lms make. With Bloch’s writings on utopia and Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as my starting points, I present, in the !rst part of this article, a model of cinema as a form of heterotopia: !lms create worlds that are other than the ‘real world’ but that relate to that world in multiple and contradictory ways. For instance, the landscapes portrayed in cinema—urban or rural, mundane or exotic—are affectively charged in ways that alter viewers’ relationship to the real landscapes denoted or signi!ed by them. But it is the larger context of social and cultural movements that mobilizes, or fails to mobilize, this ‘affective charge’ to draw out its utopian or critical potentials. Any exploration of the utopian dimension of !lm must therefore examine not only !lm texts but also their public consumption and uptake within wider cultural contexts. In the second part of this article, I examine four !lms from the 1970s—Deliverance (USA, 1972), The Wicker Man (UK, 1973), Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 (Switzerland, 1975), and Stalker (USSR, 1979)—as exam-ples of richly heterotopic !lms that elicited utopian as well as dystopian affects in their audiences. To speak of ‘utopian and dystopian affects’ is to interpret something that does not lend itself to simple determination. In the recent ‘affective turn’ in social theory (Clough 2008), affects are understood to be pre-conceptual somato-psychic responses to stimuli that take on a certain life of their own as they spread by contagion through social groups.1 By introducing this terminology I intend to 1. See Brennan 2004; Clough 2008; Clough with Halley 2007; Connolly 2002; Massumi 2002; and Thrift 2008. Clough de!nes affect as ‘pre-individual bodily forces augmenting or diminishing a body’s capacity to act’ (2008: 1). Shouse de!nes it as ‘the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience’ (2005: 5), while Blackman and Cromby characterize affect as ‘a force or intensity that can belie the movement of the subject who is always in a process of becoming’ (2007: 6). In a more cognitive and empirical vein, Scherer de!nes affect as ‘an episode of massive synchronous recruitment of mental and somatic resources to adapt to and cope with a stimulus event that is subjectively appraised as being highly pertinent to needs, goals and values of the individual’ (2005: 314). While there is broad variation in these de!nitions, affects are generally taken to be more bodily than mental, and to contrast with feelings, which are subjectively experienced states, and emotions, which are culturally recognizable and interpreted feeling-states.

188 Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture


suggest a relationship between utopian/dystopian cinematic forms and the feelings, sentiments, sensations, and responses they elicit, especially those of hope and of fear.2 Understanding how such utopian and dystopian impulses are mobilized can help us understand the roots of those impulses and the ways in which humans are motivated to change the world for the better. It can aid us in gauging the power of art and of the utopian imagination to move people, as well as the ways in which such ‘movement’ is constrained and contained by institutional forces. If, as claimed below, cinema moves its audiences more deeply than other media, then an examination of the moving image is part of the project of developing more ecologically sensitized human relations with the natural world.

Utopia, Ecotopia, Heterotopia, and Cinematic Affect In Hollywood Utopia, Brereton aims to show how it is that ‘Hollywood draws on the therapeutic power of raw nature and landscape and that this becomes more ecologically charged and potent when coupled with human agency’ (2005: 38). This potency comes through the use of cinematic spectacle and the construction of a romantic sublime, for instance, through ‘extended moments of almost Gothic visual excess’, a ‘kinetic depth effect’ created by camera movement across static land-scape vistas, and the ‘transgressive potential and vision of excessive scenography and agency’ (2005: 14, 41, 213). Brereton’s argument takes in a wide range of !lms, but he reserves his highest praise for the Steven Spielberg blockbusters Jurassic Park (1993) and Lost World (1997). In Jurassic Park, Brereton claims, the viewer comes to identify with the awestruck observer of spectacular natural phenomena: the !lm begins with ‘expert witnesses’ regressing ‘to the awed wonder of children’, kneeling in ‘a reverent posture […] hypnotized by the sublime vision as they gaze into the lake and observe herds of dinosaurs roaming about freely, signaling the collapsing of time and space to produce the ultimate (chronotope) nature reserve’. Brereton celebrates the transformation of the protagonists’ ‘innocent gaze’ at the descent onto the island that opens Jurassic Park to a ‘!nal ascent’ which ‘registers !rsthand experience and ethical knowledge of the primary laws of nature’ (2005: 77-78)—the laws according to which interference, or ‘playing God’, with nature results in an unleashing of Frankenstein-like disruptive force. By the end of the 1997 sequel Lost World, the protagonist Hammond endorses ‘an 2. What I am calling ‘hope’ is roughly analogous to, or at least a variant of, what psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1995), in an in"uential account of the affects, describes as ‘interest-excitement’.



ecological position that supports “a new policy of non-intervention”’ (Brereton 2005: 80) with the island on which the (re-engineered) dinosaurs have staked their ecological claim. As I have argued elsewhere (Ivakhiv 2008), Brereton’s assessment of Spielberg’s !lms underestimates the distinction that Ernst Bloch makes between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopias. In his three-volume magnum opus, The Principle of Hope (1986), the early twentieth-century German Marxist theorist articulated a notion of utopia as a continual reaching forward so as to shape a better future. Utopia, for Bloch, was less a form of speculation about the future than an unleashing of the aspirations and unful!lled promises of the past. As Hudson put it, Bloch’s utopia ‘related to the dream of ful!llment, of happiness, of homecoming, which structured the human cultural world because it was given in the dynamic structure of the moment’ (2003: 21). In other words, the world in its every moment contains an openness to the ‘not yet’, and it is this structural openness that lends an affective immediacy to every hope for positive change toward a better future. Recovering the utopian ‘surplus’ within human culture is, for Bloch, a matter of willfully orienting oneself to the future as an open prospect so as to create the conditions for that future to arise. What Bloch called ‘abstract utopias’ are fantastic and compensatory forms of wishful thinking unaccompanied by a will to change things. In contrast, ‘concrete utopias’ both anticipate and effect the future. They are a form of ‘educated hope’ that is ‘born out of and articulates’ a ‘relationship between end and means, passion and reason, aspiration and possibility’ (Levitas 1997: 73). As Fredric Jameson put it, Bloch’s focus is less on ‘utopian programs’ than on the ‘utopian impulse’ (2005: 3), and it is this impulse I wish to examine in what follows. The relationship between mass media entertainment and utopia is complex. Cinematic genres from the musical and adventure-fantasy to experimental !lm have been called utopian in their portrayal of an abundance and excitement that contrasts with viewers’ everyday lives (Dixon 2006; Dyer 1981; Flinn 1992; Geraghty 1991). Hollywood itself has been characterized as a utopian enterprise: in its classic era, some of its leading producers, including many European Jewish émigrés, were guided by a vision of America emphasizing integration, tolerance, hope, and social possibility (Doyen 1996; Dyer 1981). In its portrayal of attrac-tive alternatives to local cultural realities, Hollywood !lm continues to play a utopian role in many parts of the world, for better or worse. In Blochian terms, however, one must distinguish between ‘abstract’, or escapist, utopia and the ‘concrete’ utopia that contributes to positive social change. In the case of Spielberg’s big-budget spectacles, as critics have pointed out, these !lms celebrate not so much the power of nature



as the power of cinema, with its sounds, lights, spectacular effects, and its godlike creator as an indulgent puppet-master behind the screen (Cholodenko 2005; Franklin 2000; Kolker 2000; Lacy 2001). For many !lm theorists, Spielbergian cinema is a kind of Wizard of Oz, to be unmasked by the tools of critical theory (Kolker 2000; Ryan and Kellner 1988; Wood 1986). Brereton argues that these critics underestimate cinema’s power to affect viewers at a non-rational level and thereby to transform ecological consciousness. Following Bloch’s de!nitions, however, if Spielberg’s !lms were to be such powerful instances of ‘concrete utopias’, they would have to have contributed to revolutionary changes in ecological consciousness—which, arguably, has not occurred to date. One could argue that today’s movie audiences have become not so much ecologically conscious as enthralled by a certain kind of represen-tation of nature: nature as a visual spectacle and a place of beauty and recreation for human visitors—nature, in other words, as out there, separate from the mundane lives of city dwellers. The !lms of Disney Studios have been touted as a powerful source for the re-enchantment of such a nature (Brode 2004; Whitley 2008). But critical opinion remains ambivalent, at best, regarding the political or ecological virtues of such portrayals of nature, in which an understanding of socio-natural systems is sacri!ced in the pursuit of narrative, spectacle, and sentimentality (Bousé 2000; Chris 2006; Hastings 1996; Lutts 1992; Mitman 1999; Roth 1996). For instance, environmental journalist Bill McKibben writes, ‘The upshot of a nature education by television is a deep fondness for certain species and a deep lack of understanding of systems, or of the policies that destroy those systems’ (1992: 79). Some, like Debord (1977), have argued that spectacle, far from generating social mobilization, is actually a powerful mechanism of social control. For Jurassic Park’s harsher critics, the !lm’s ostensive anti-biotechnol-ogy message is undercut by its celebration of cutting-edge technology including genetic science, robotics, and state-of-the-art digital animation. Following Disney’s ‘theme park model of consumption’, the movie, Sarah Franklin argues, is ‘structured as a ride’: it ‘offers a movie of a theme park which in turn becomes the main attraction of [real-life] theme parks’ (2000: 202-203). Premised on the magic of Hollywood spectacle in making possible anything imaginable, the movie became a global brand, with its multi-billion dollar spinoff industry of ‘dinomania’, which Stephen Jay Gould worried may ‘truly extinguish dinosaurs by turning them from sources of awe into clichés and commodities’ (in Franklin 2000: 212). The !lm’s ‘axis’ and ‘central invitation’, Franklin writes, is ‘the invitation to “go behind the scenes”’ and ‘share in the secrets of its own making’, thus inviting the audience to celebrate the technologiza-



tion of life itself, by which the secrets of life are opened up and made available to the human consumer for the cost of admission (2000: 216). Brereton’s and Franklin’s divergent positions echo a longstanding debate over representations of monumental nature. As is well known, the nineteenth-century monumental landscape art of Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, photographer Carleton Watkins, and others, provided much of the impetus for the creation of America’s !rst national parks, opening up practices of visual appreciation of natural scenery that still condition the responses of park and wilderness visitors today (Dunaway 2005). In The Magisterial Gaze (1991), art historian Alfred Boime argued that the elevated, panoramic gaze of this pictorial aesthetic enabled and conditioned a possessive and dominating approach to the North American landscape. The visual imagery, in other words, elicited reactions of pleasure and of desire that were channeled, by political and economic interests, into the project of colonizing, possess-ing, and commodifying the continent. In effect, the images helped to produce and mobilize the sentiments that made ‘manifest destiny’ possible. While Boime’s is a speculative and not uncontentious analysis, it seems reasonable to suggest that both national parks, themselves crystallizations of a romantic utopian impulse, and the utopian program of Manifest Destiny, resulted in part from the mobilization of utopian affects transmitted through artistic representations of the landscape (e.g., see Daniels 1993; Miller 1993; Runte 1997). Visual images can move us in this way not because they harbor a mysterious power over us, but because, through carrying and condens-ing meanings in forms that involve us emotionally, they mobilize a power that is already ours. They set us into motion, ‘taking us places’, as it were, and imaginatively transporting us to the people and places they show us, the moments and ideas they embody for us, and the memories these resonate with.3 Cinematic moving images, through their melding of 3. This claim that !lms ‘imaginatively transport us to the people and places they show us’ is really just another way of saying that when we watch, for instance, a !lm about Niagara Falls, we imagine ourselves looking at the Falls, as if we were there where the camera was when it shot the footage of the Falls. We travel not physically (since we don’t really leave our living room chair, the I-Max theater seat, etc.) but imaginatively, through our capacity to piece together a whole-bodily-like experience from images we see and sounds we hear. And if we have actually visited the Falls before seeing the !lm, the !lm will tend to remind us of those visits; it will combine with our memories to generate feelings. All of this happens when we read novels as well, but !lms tend to move us around more rapidly than novels, plays, poems, paint-ings (which don’t move us much in this sense), and other art forms. Novelistic ‘editing’ is slower, and takes more time to build up an image of a place or time, than !lm editing.



temporally sequenced visual display and sound, move us all the more forcefully. They take us on journeys (of a sort), and through the move-ment they exhibit and elicit, they give shape to imagined or perceived worlds. Cinema, in this sense, is a form of world-production, but the worlds so produced are neither identical to the world that preceded them nor completely different from it (Ivakhiv 2011; Yacavone 2008; Yates 2006). These worlds borrow from the non-cinematic world, selecting bits and pieces of it, fragments that are assembled and fused into temporal sequences, but through their many forms of cinematic !guration—montage, mise-en-scene, rhythm, lighting, sound, and so on—they create worlds that have been differently articulated, high-lighted, extended, compressed, re!gured, trans!gured, and reshaped. If cinema produces worlds, or as Martin Heidegger (1971) might say, if cinema worlds, this worlding sets off resonances, diffractions, and rippling interactions with the extra-cinematic world. Cinema is, in this sense, heterotopic. According to Michel Foucault, heterotopia is ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found with the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (1986: 24). It is a space of discontinuity and heterogeneity, which simultaneously mirrors, challenges, and overturns the meanings of those features to which it refers in the surrounding society. Foucault calls the mirror a utopia, in the literal sense of being a ‘placeless place’, and at the same time a heterotopia, in that it exerts a ‘counteraction’ on the world that it re"ects (1986: 24). Like a mirror, cinema is heterotopic in that it presents the world to us, but differently, in a reconstituted manner, with its presentation affecting the world in heterogeneous ways. And to the extent that moving images have come to pervade the fabric of our everyday lives, cinema is not so much an other-space as it is a means by which the world itself has become other from itself, othered from within by the layered and mobile hetero-imagery that presents that world to itself, re"ects it, diffracts and refracts it. ‘Moving pictures move us’, writes John Mullarkey in Refractions of Reality, ‘because movement is what is Real’ (2009: xv). As the most synthetic of the arts, cinema brings us closest to the dynamism of the world outside cinema, but it also adds dynamism to it; it heterogenizes our experience of that world. To understand how cinema heterogenizes our experience of the world, one must examine the ways in which audiences take up the images, narratives, and feelings or affects made available within a !lm, and the ways in which those meanings and affects !lter into the texture of social life over time.



Four Film Heterotopias While the four !lms to be discussed diverge in their generic strategies and in the national or regional contexts which they address and re"ect, each mobilizes an idea of nature—as a place of desirable solace, a place where men seek or revert to their primal selves (Deliverance, Stalker) and/or where communities seek sustainable reintegration with nature (Wicker Man, Jonah)—to play out a variation of the con"ict between urban-industrial modernity and a more ‘natural’ world that preceded it and that may follow it. Each, then, provides utopian or ecotopian ‘kernels’ of the sort that Bloch would have sought to excavate and make available. Deliverance Based on the James Dickey novel, John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) tells the story of four middle-aged, suburban Atlanta businessmen on a white-water canoeing trip down the !ctional Cahulawassee River in the forested southern Appalachians. The river is set to be "ooded for hydro-electric power. The four men’s quest for an adventure in nature ‘before it’s gone’ turns nightmarish following a meeting with local mountain men, whom the !lm portrays as backward, inbred ‘hillbillies’. The !lm’s centerpiece is an attack and rape at gunpoint of one of the four men, Bobby, by two mountaineers on a forested bank of the river. The attack is halted as the adventurers’ de facto leader, macho survivalist Lewis (Burt Reynolds), shoots and kills the rapist with an arrow from his hunting-bow. For the remainder of the !lm, the urbanites struggle, physically and morally, with the river and with the burden of their actions: should they report the crimes in which they have become implicated, or should they conceal the bodies and play innocent? The surviving men keep their secrets and return to their homes. In the !nal scene, Ed, the most tormented of the remaining three men (the fourth had died mysteri-ously), wakes up shaking from a dream of a corpse rising to the surface of the now "ooded river. The !lm’s main dynamic overlays an opposition between city and country, or civilization and wilderness, with a trajectory of decline that is, at once, both that of nature and that of the rural population that lives in closest proximity to it. The tourists’ rite of passage into the wilderness becomes a journey into a rural American ‘heart of darkness’—an embrace by a nature that is not pure and pristine, but threatening and demonic, a site of terror and brute force that strips their civilized veneer to the



bones. In this sense, the !lm follows in the tradition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1998) or Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), with wild nature becoming the site of human degradation, and with white fears projected onto a racially stereotyped ‘other’—portrayals that were protested by local audiences, denounced by Appalachian scholars, and long resented in Rabun County, Georgia (Bell 1997; Williamson 1995; Lane 2004). Despite the chasm between rural and urban cultures, however, the !lm successfully mobilized positive images of wild and seemingly benevo-lent nature. Its scenes of the men ‘shooting the rapids’, !lmed with hand-held cameras and edited with quick cuts and jarring transitions, have become canonical in environmental adventure !lmmaking. Deliverance ranked fourth in box of!ce sales for its year and was nominated for best !lm and best director Oscars. Much of its success was credited to its cinematography and on-location shooting, particularly of the scenes of white-water paddling, and to the banjo-driven bluegrass music that accompanies them. One of the !lm’s most memorable scenes is a lively and captivating duel between guitar-toting urbanite Drew and an apparently deformed and mentally retarded, local banjo-playing albino boy; the song, ‘Dueling Banjos’, became a popular hit. The music recurs through the !lm, and the combination of down-river camera kineticism (Ingram 2000: 30) and musical kineticism provides for the movie’s most uplifting moments. It is these moments of ‘kinetic harmony’—points at which the !lm’s dueling opposites (urban/rural, civilized/wild) are momentarily reconciled—that best capture the movie’s utopian affects. These affects were in turn mobilized into movements to protect such rivers from development and to enjoy those rivers once they were protected. In 1974, in part as a result of the !lm, the Chattooga River, where much of the !lm was shot, became the !rst river in the southeast and second in the nation to be protected under the Wild and Scenic River designation by Congress. (Over the following 35 years, some 11,000 miles of 168 rivers were designated under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.) The !lm played no small role in catalyzing a whitewater boom in Rabun County; since 1972, one and a half million paddlers have gone down the Chattooga. Its commercial and private users number close to a hundred thousand per year, with recreational boating on the river bring-ing in $2.6 million a year to the local economy (Lane 2004: 5, 9; American Rivers/National Park Service 2003: 8). For all that, novelist James Dickey, before his death in 1997, lamented that the Chattooga was ‘ruined now by people trying to cash in on it’ (Lane 2004: 9). The !lm, then, affords audiences with an ambiguous mixture of meanings and affects. Its portrayal of the Appalachian wilderness is



ambivalent and troubled. Implicitly, and explicitly through Lewis’s rants against ‘development’, the !lm disapproves of the damming of the river, but at the same time its damming is understood to be a way of cleaning up the de!lement and degeneracy that the forest comes to represent in the !lm (Hochman 1998: 71-92). In the words of the cabbie who drives Bobby and Ed into town in the !lm’s closing minutes, ‘All this land’s gonna be covered with water. Best thing ever happened to this town’. The men, no doubt, look forward to its "ooding, since it will cover up the bodies of two mountaineers whose deaths they precipitated. In the end, what viewers take away from the !lm is up to them: a fear of Appalachian nature, or of its denizens; a desire to protect the river, or to shoot those rapids; or all of the above in various measures, so that the desire to ‘do the river’ becomes a way to simultaneously conquer one’s fears of nature or of the men who dwell in it. The Wicker Man With its quirky mixture of horror, mystery thriller, faux-ethnography, and musical, Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man (1973) takes an original approach to a universal theme, that of the lone traveler journeying into a foreign cultural world and being surprised, and disturbed, by what he !nds there. Ads for the !lm announced, ‘They do things differently on Summerisle’. The !lm is about a police of!cer and devout Christian, Sargeant Howie, who travels from the Scottish main-land to a remote Hebridean island to investigate the reported disappear-ance of a young girl. On the island, he discovers a populace that lives by a pre-Christian Pagan religion that had been revived at the behest of its lord in the mid-1800s. In his attempt to unravel the mystery, Howie is drawn into a web of intrigue until it is revealed—to viewers and to Howie—that he had been summoned, in effect, by the islanders to become the human sacri!ce that would restore the fertility of the island for the year to come. In a community-wide ceremony on a cliff over-looking the sea, Howie is dragged screaming into the middle of a huge wicker statue of a man. The wicker man is ignited as the rhythmically swaying islanders sing the Middle English folk-round ‘Sumer is Icumen In’ and the terri!ed Howie shouts out lines from Christian psalms and prayers. Plagued by distribution problems, including a disastrous initial release and managerial interference that resulted in severe edits, the !lm only began to accrue recognition gradually, and today it is well regarded by !lm enthusiasts and a growing cult following (Kingsley 2009; Wright



2007).4 Part of the !lm’s attraction for its fans is in the subtlety, sophisti-cation, and humor of its portrayal of the con"ict between two alternative cultures. Howie’s law-abiding Christian traditionalism was pitted against a different, Pagan variant of ‘traditional’ culture, at a time (the early 1970s) when Britain was undergoing dramatic secularization, while, at the same time in the counterculture, there was an upsurge of interest in folk traditions and pagan and occult spiritualities. For a low-budget B movie, the !lmmakers took their ‘ethnographic’ mission surprisingly seriously: in an ironic nod to the ethnographic !lm genre, the !lm opens with a caption thanking the people of Summerisle for allowing ‘privi-leged insight into their religious practices’. Both Hardy and Shaffer spent months researching J.G. Frazer’s 12-volume compendium of folklore and beliefs, The Golden Bough, as well as extant practices of seemingly ancient traditions still found scattered around the British Isles, alongside a smattering of modern Druidic and Wiccan lore. While the particular mixture of practices portrayed in the !lm—amulets and charms, fertility rituals and sex magic, folk songs and maypole dances, May Day proces-sions and festivities—bear little direct resemblance to ancient Britain or to contemporary Paganism, they are presented as a form of reconstituted nineteenth-century Paganism, and as such provide a believable Victorian-era understanding of what ancient Britons might have practiced.5 As the !lmmakers attest: ‘The whole series of ceremonies and details that we show have happened at different times and places in Britain and Western Europe. What we did was to bring them all together in one particular place and time’ (Bartholomew 2008: 7). At the same time, the !lm maintains an elasticity of meaning, a poly-semic ambiguity that, combined with its abundant ethnographic detail, inconsistency with generic conventions, and lack of narrative closure, makes it possible for Pagan and Christian audiences alike to interpret it sympathetically (Wright 2007). As Fry argues, ‘Those who share Howie’s values can take comfort in his martyrdom and the dignity with which he

4. A special issue of Cinefantastique devoted to the !lm called it ‘the Citizen Kane of Horror Movies’, and the popular British !lm magazine Total Film (2004) has named it the sixth greatest British !lm of all time. 5. Frazer’s Golden Bough was based on the conception of ‘cultural survivals’, whereby any ‘superstitious’ practices were thought of as inheritances from long ago, destined to be lost as humanity becomes more enlightened. His understanding of human sacri!ce was also notably different from what is portrayed in the !lm. On the debate over the !lm’s portrayal of Paganism, see Koven (2008), Sermon (2006), and other essays in Murray et al. (2005) and Franks et al. (2006). For an authoritative account of British folk beliefs and practices including those connected to Beltane, the !lm’s central ritual event, see Hutton (1996).



faces death, while Pagans of all sorts and those sympathetic to New Age ideas and unsympathetic to Christian values can see his death as merited and symbolic of the demise of what he represents’ (2008: 183). Kingsley points out that the !lm ‘never at any time takes sides, not once tells the audience what it ought to be thinking or feeling; it shows courage in its handling of religious belief, revealing to us its glories, and its dangers, too. And it never loses its sense of humour, not even at the end’ (2008: 183). This polysemic elasticity blurs even the intent of the !lmmakers. Hardy and Shaffer have both referred in interviews to the ‘incipient fascism’ of religious cults, and the !nal scenes can be taken as a graphic depiction of this (Franks et al. 2006: 57). According to Hardy and Shaffer, Christianity and Pagan religion were both portrayed as social constructs that function in a way that ‘keeps people in the thrall of superstition’ (Bartholomew 2008: 9). The !lm’s reception, however, has been marked by a ‘gradual “Paganisation”’ (Sutcliffe 2005: 51), a ‘reclamation’ by Pagan audiences who form a signi!cant proportion of its cult following (Higginbottom 2006: 128; Fry 2008; Nichols 1997). Pagans have com-mented favorably on the !lm’s sympathetic portrayal of Pagan virtues and values, its sensitively detailed recreation of seasonal rituals, music, and other practices, and especially its presentation of Paganism as valid and normative—a reversal of traditional authority, with the Christian being a guest and interloper onto a Pagan ‘home turf’ rather than the latter being ‘a transgressive, exotic practice’ against a normative Christi-anity (Higginbottom 2006: 131). Of the !lms examined here, The Wicker Man is the most utopian in its construction of a fully formed alternative society. As in Deliverance, much of its affective utopianism is carried by the music, which includes original songs by composer Paul Giovanni, adaptations of thoroughly researched traditional songs and folk ballads, sung with verve and often with frankly sexual lyrics, and incidental music played on traditional instruments, mostly by students recruited so that the music would sound under-rehearsed. More than just atmospheric, the music is fre-quently diegetic in function, contributing importantly to the coherence of the narrative and of the island’s Pagan culture.6 For all these reasons, Pagan audiences have tended to forgive the !lm’s inaccuracies—includ-ing its inclusion of human sacri!ce—in favor of enjoying and celebrating the insider perspective the !lm affords. In his ‘Neo-Pagan !lmography’,

6. As Pitzl-Waters argues, the !lm’s music has been remarkably in"uential within Pagan musical subcultures, even though the soundtrack was only released commercially in 2002, circulating until that time only in unof!cial bootleg form (Pitzl-Waters 2007).



Nichols (1997) calls it ‘the most loving portrayal of a Pagan society ever committed to !lm’. That Sargeant Howie’s sacri!ce does not fatally offend the !lm’s fans tells us one of three things: they may accept it as part of the generic horror-!lm package, and therefore as a super!cial addition to an otherwise valuable !lm; they may even, as both Sutcliffe and Fry argue,7 get a certain pleasure from it; or they may accept that an occasional sacri!ce is warranted to maintain the cosmic order.8 The latter could be taken as a sign of the success of the cultural relativism promoted by the !lm’s quasi-ethnographic strategy, itself a kind of utopian impulse. The !lm’s in"uence can be found in the growth of festivals and other events incorporating the burning of wicker !gures, such as the Burning Man Festival, which attracts some 40,000 people to Nevada every year, the Wicker Man music and arts festival held annually in northern Scotland, Pagan festivals and rituals speci!cally incorporating imagery from the !lm, a range of fan publications and appreciation societies, and a Hollywood remake that was widely derided by critics (Aloi 2009; Arthen 1988; Pike 2001).9 Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000 Both Deliverance and The Wicker Man can be read as indirect responses to the sociopolitical movements of the 1960s. In Deliverance, all that is left of the countercultural quest for a more authentic form of human experience is the individualized pursuit of (white-water) speed against the 7. The ‘symbolism of burning a “Christian copper”’ may have carried resonances for youthful audiences in the post-1968 years and in the 1980s, especially after Britain’s ‘New Age traveler’ subculture, disproportionately represented in the country’s sizeable Pagan community, had suffered massive injuries at the hands of police following the 1986 ‘Battle of the Bean!eld’, a now-legendary standoff between squadrons of armed police and several hundred unarmed revelers attending Summer Solstice festivities at Stonehenge (Sutcliffe 2005: 40; Ivakhiv 2001: 89-90). 8. The question of human sacri!ce is complex. As Howie !nds out, the crops had failed the previous year on Summerisle, for the !rst time in over a century, so resorting to a human sacri!ce would not have been the norm. Yet one can argue that it is the exception that proves the rule that, ultimately, human life is part of a calculus of reciprocal relations between humans and their gods, and if the latter require sacri!ce, then the former better provide. In any case, research shows that the practice of human sacri!ce was not uncommon among agrarian and imperial societies (Bremmer 2007). Brass (2000) argues that The Wicker Man embodied a version of the ‘agrarian myth’ that uses religious belief to prop up the landlordism of the island’s power structure, headed by Lord Summerisle. All of this is forgiven by many contemporary Pagans, for the reasons given above. 9. Economic impacts include the marked growth in tourism inspired by the !lm both in Galloway, where the !lm was shot, and to some extent across the Scottish Western Isles, where the action ostensibly takes place (Stevenson 2005; Wright 2007).



background of the (recreational) slowness of nature. The Wicker Man, by contrast, takes up one of the strands of countercultural thought and turns it into a full-"edged utopian experiment, only to undercut it—but not fatally, given audience reactions—with its horri!c ending. Both !lms traded, to greater or lesser degrees, on the commercial dictates of the thriller genre, but both mobilized the aspirations of portions of their audiences, either to a river-running environmentalism or to a strength-ened identi!cation with the pre-Christian past. Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year 2000 (1976) utilized a more experimen-tal narrative form to pursue utopia more directly. Called by its director ‘a dramatic tragicomedy in political science !ction’, the !lm concerns the legacy of the ‘events of ’68’—the student-worker uprising in France, with its factory and university occupations, worker-farmer cooperatives, independent news agencies, and so on—on eight characters living in or near the Swiss city of Geneva, near the French border. Dreamers, phi-losophers, outcasts, and realists, each of them, as Stam put it, is ‘trying, in diverse ways, to free themselves from the institutional and societal chains that oppress them’ (Stam 1977: 1): through unorthodox and radical methods teaching high-school history, Tantric sex and trips to India, organic gardening, undercharging pensioners at a supermarket, foiling a malicious development scheme, and so on. Struggling to stay true to their ideals, their tactics end up largely failing them. But through a series of events the characters come to meet, live, or work at a farm outside the city, which becomes the site of a spontaneous and under-stated quasi-utopian communal experiment. It, too, ultimately fails, and in the end they go back to their individual (or family) lives. Co-written by director Alain Tanner and neo-Marxist art critic and novelist John Berger, the !lm uses an episodic and non-linear structure and Brechtian distanciation techniques to engage viewers intellectually and emotionally in the lives of its characters. Following Bertold Brecht’s ‘epic theater’ model, it consists of a series of ‘shot-sequences’—relatively long, uninterrupted, and semi-autonomous segments punctuated by sparse and pointillistic musical interludes, skits and songs, moments of guerilla theater, and occasional black-and-white scenes that function as momentary utopian thought-bubbles portraying what a character is imagining. Like much of what happens in the !lm’s smaller narrative units, these narratives converge, but only to fall apart again. Yet this failed convergence, a kind of ‘utopia deferred’, is imbued with positive or bitter-sweet affect so that the ‘almost’ becomes a Blochian ‘not yet’, a critical utopianism that highlights the conditions that make the characters’ dreams seem presently unreachable, but worthy and attain-able in a possible future.



This critical utopianism, or ‘counterpoint of hope and realism’ as Berger calls it, is introduced at the !lm’s outset when, against the back-drop of the statue of Geneva’s most famous citizen, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an off-camera voice quotes Rousseau decrying civilized man’s enslavement by institutions. In a Rousseauian vein, the !lm suggests that humans are convivial by nature but misshapen by unjust political, educational, and economic institutions. The !lm’s title is a reference to the child born to one of the !lm’s couples, named after the biblical Jonah who had been saved by a whale. In a memorable scene, the characters paint a mural of themselves in vivid colors on a wall bordering the farm. Later, following a caption ‘A Day in 1980’, the !ve-year-old Jonah is seen alone marking graf!ti on the same wall. This image can be taken to mean that art remains as a material carrier of the characters’ temporarily suspended utopian aspirations, and that the child, born of the belly of the whale and of the utopian communal moment, remains to pick up where the others left off. The !lm is, like this image, a fable, a ‘pedagogical exercise’, as Porton called it, that ‘without excessive heavy–handedness’ struggled ‘to endorse, and by implication teach, concerted resistance during a period when radical hopes were waning’ (1999: 194). Writing in Dissent magazine nearly thirty years after its release, Barkan noted that the hopes and desires portrayed in it are those that still animate the democratic left: ‘dignity in work, education for democratic citizenship, environmental stewardship of the planet, non-material ful!llment’ (2004: 108). Stalker Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) is based on a science-!ction novella in which fallen debris from an extraterrestrial ship has created a ‘Zone’ in which people are known to have disappeared, and which contains unusual artifacts and phenomena that defy science. The Zone is cordoned off behind an army-patrolled border and travel into it is prohibited, but over time guides known as ‘stalkers’ begin to lead risky expeditions into the Zone’s interior, at the center of which is an object—in the !lm it is a room—that allegedly grants visitors their deepest wishes. The main character, a stalker, leads two men, known only as Writer and Professor, into the Zone and to the Room at its center. The journey is circuitous, with the Stalker leading the men through military patrols, tunnels, passageways, and other lengthy detours as they work their way toward the Room. By the time they reach it, the Professor unveils his plan to detonate a bomb in order to destroy it so as to prevent malicious men from gaining the means to carry out evil deeds. In any case, he reasons, if the Room does not actually make dreams come true, it serves little



purpose. The Stalker and Professor struggle, and eventually the latter relents. The exhausted men, seated at the boundary of the Room, watch as a gentle rain begins to fall through the dilapidated ceiling. While the Stalker had repeatedly warned the men of various dangers, no harm has come to them, and little evidence has been presented that the Zone actually de!es nature or that the Room contains miraculous powers. The secret, or lack thereof, has seemingly concealed itself, and the men return home, leaving us uncertain as to the meaning of their journey. In its ambiguity, the Zone is like a zone of dreams, a tabula rasa for the projection of hopes and fears. The storyline, as Jameson points out, gives us ‘Utopia as it were backwards’: the Zone is a ‘magical, incomprehensi-ble area of radically other space—a space beyond the law, an ontological Chernobyl’, that presents us not with an attained utopia, but with the negativity of its imaginings by the people who encounter it (2005: 73). The narrative structure resembles the journeys of Deliverance, Apocalypse Now, and Heart of Darkness, but here the journey is to a less knowable world, led by a guide whom the others aren’t sure they can trust. In its form, the !lm encourages the audience to undertake a journey as well: its slow pace and 163-minute length, consisting mostly of long takes with the camera absorbing time in its movement around the landscape, provide space to allow meanings to unfold for viewers. Tarkovsky’s use of sound also leaves interpretation open, so that we can rarely be sure if something we hear on the soundtrack is diegetic (present in the scene) or not. The same can be said of the basic plot elements that are left unresolved. Does the Room grant wishes? Does the Stalker’s daughter, seemingly a mutant, have paranormal powers, as suggested in the !nal sequence? What, in the end, is the !lm about? In a perceptive analysis of the !lm, Slavoj Zizek (1999) refers to Tark-ovsky’s ‘cinematic materialism’, as an attempt, ‘perhaps unique in the history of cinema’, to develop a ‘materialist theology’ in which the texture and ‘heavy gravity of Earth’ exerts ‘pressure on time itself’. In a sepia-tone, dream-like sequence, as the three characters have laid down to rest, the camera pans slowly across the murky, algae-tinged surface of water, showing us objects decaying and rusting on the tiled "oor beneath it: a syringe, coins, a mirror, a revolver, an icon of John the Baptist, torn pages from a calendar, mechanical parts. Throughout the !lm, we see this dense materiality of a world in which the vestiges of human activities are being reclaimed by nature:

Swathed in fog and aquatic with spas, needled with drizzle, sluicing, streaming, coursing and dripping with rain and snow, indoors and out, Tarkovsky’s terrain is terrarium. The mottled forest "ora of mold, ferns, lichens, and toadstools traversed by his slow camera are lushly entropic.



The crumble and rust, detritus and dilapidation of his watery ruins [...] signal both the remnants of past cultures and ecological calamity (Quandt n.d.).

It is such elemental and dream-like imagery—pools of water, rock, light re"ected through a soft rain—and their accompaniment by a soundtrack of contemplative electronic music, that remain with the audience long after the !lm ends.10 As a dissident artist, Tarkovsky’s work was typically interpreted by Soviet audiences as allegorical, and Stalker’s Zone has been taken as a comment on the isolation of the Soviet Union and the allure of the prohibited West that lay beyond its borders. But it was also associated with the Gulag (the stalker’s shaved-head appearance being much like a zek’s, or prisoner’s), the secluded domain of the nomenklatura, and the territory of a trauma or calamity like that of the meteorite strike in Tunguska, Siberia (Zizek 1999). The !lm was made in the late 1970s in the Soviet Union, but in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl accident—which resulted in dozens of immediate deaths, the radioactive contami-nation of large parts of Ukraine and Belarus, the evacuation of tens of thousands from a 30-mile exclusion zone, and a legacy of radioactivity-related diseases and illnesses affecting thousands—Soviet citizens applied the !lm to their interpretation of the event. The exclusion zone was called ‘the Zone’, and those who later guided unof!cial (and illegal) visits into it were referred to as ‘stalkers’. The !lm’s biblical resonances also emerged in interpretations of Chernobyl as ‘wormwood’, the literal meaning of ‘chernobyl’ and, according to Russian and Ukrainian inter-pretations of the book of Revelation, the site of the apocalypse. A video game called ‘S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl’, created by a Ukrainian design team and now with over two million copies distributed worldwide, combines all these themes and adds its own mutants, physical anomalies, radioactive waste, and more (Rossignol 2007; GSC Game World 2008). The !lm, then, has served as a source of imagery and a template for the hopes and fears of Soviet citizens in the wake of Chernobyl, the ecological catastrophe that catalyzed an environmental movement that was to contribute powerfully to the demise of the Soviet Union itself (Dawson 1996). In its often-cited prescience, Stalker’s ‘cinematic material-ism’ can thus be taken as a symptom and an affect-laden carrier of hopes and fears that would ultimately bring the Union to its end.

10. Many of Amazon.com’s 154 responses (as of 2 November 2009) make direct reference to one or more of such scenes.



Conclusion: Cinema, Affect, Utopia, and Heterotopia

Like Tarkovsky’s Zone, cinema can be thought of as a Zone, an other-world different from ours, into which we journey and which affects us in the process. At its best, cinema exercises a compelling tug on the imagi-nation; it charges or magnetizes the psyche in ways that may not be fully evident to our conscious awareness. What we get out of !lms depends to a large extent on our hopes, fears, dreams, and desires. As in Stalker, however, what cinema reveals are real objects, artifacts from the material world: landscapes and places, mortal bodies and organisms, all caught up in the cycle of living, dying, and decomposition. These shown worlds—not the !ctional worlds portrayed by them, although the two are necessarily related—are part of !lm’s essential materiality. Cinema is neither a mirror nor a window, neither purely re"ective nor perfectly translucent: as Stalker’s cinematic surface suggests, it mixes opacity with a certain semi-transparency and mirror-like diffraction of the world outside. It captures images and sounds from the material world, but reassembles them into new con!gurations to produce new or different meanings. Each of the !lms discussed here engages utopian aspirations, for some viewers at least, but also highlights the realities that deny the possibility for realizing utopia. For some audiences, then, the !lms mobilize the kind of interest-excitement that psychologist Sylvan Tomkins (1995) describes as one of the two basic positive affects (alongside enjoyment-joy), and which, I would suggest, underlies the utopian impulse. With the possible exception of The Wicker Man, the !lms do not portray a utopian society—a utopian ‘program’, in Jameson’s terms. But through the combination of the images, sounds, movements, rhythms, storylines, projections, and sensations that we take from them, they set off affective ripples and contagious currents into the extra-cinematic world. The four !lms share certain discursive frames—speci!cally, the positing of a world that is ‘closer to nature’ than our own. In each, the journey from one world to the other is a struggle that remains ambiguous or uncon-summated. Jonah’s utopian aspirations are denied by the capitalist reality surrounding the quasi-commune, while the utopian quest of Stalker is a mirror of its characters’ ongoing inner struggles. In Deliverance and Wicker Man, nature turns out to be tinged with a ‘redness’ of ‘tooth and claw’. All four !lms, however, provide ‘pieces of affect’, sound-image sequences that generate utopian or dystopian meanings for viewers. Cinema is not unique in this among the arts. But in its ability to condense



meaning and affect in sound-image sequences—‘bits of experience’ or ‘pieces of world’ set into motion through the heightened experience of narrative—cinema has a strong capacity to ‘charge’ the world with utopian or ecotopian impulses. The scenes of white-water canoeing in Deliverance, accompanied by exhilarating music that has taken on a certain ‘harmonizing’ signi!cance within the !lm; the mixture of folks-ong, ritual, lighthearted humor, and the ambiguous valence of the religiously driven con"ict of ideas in The Wicker Man; the play of ideas, rhythmic juxtaposition of individuals’ stories and fantasies, and commu-nal moments of coming together characterizing Jonah; and the thick texture of Stalker’s ‘cinematic materialism’, experienced as part of a journey that draws (at least some) audience members ineluctably into its quest into the ‘Zone’ of hopes and dreams—all of these are examples of the variable strategies available to !lmmakers for integrating sound, image, and narrative into affectively engaging forms. To the extent that each of these !lms spurred some audience members to make sense of their worlds in new ways—ways that not only offer escapist pleasure, but that have contributed, directly or indirectly, to the reshaping of those worlds—each quali!es as a Blochian ‘concrete utopia’. In the decade following the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, the percep-tion of a gap between humans and nature was prevalent among many. These four !lms, in their culturally speci!c contexts, addressed that perception in ways that demonstrate the heterotopic nature of the rela-tionship between cinema and the world—a world that is no longer pre-cinematic, but that has been fundamentally altered by the proliferation of visual media within it. That world has become other than itself, heterotopic in relationship to what it had been before the arrival of cinema. There is a tendency among some environmentalists to lament the technologies that have brought us the ‘age of the world picture’ (Heidegger 1977), which one might argue has become the age of the world motion picture. I hope to have suggested here that the moving image also carries the potential to generate affective fuel for more posi-tive cultural and ecological change.

References Aloi, Peg. 2009. ‘“And with Thee Fade away into the Forest Dim”: Neopastoralism

and Romantic Renascence in the Ritual Literature of Modern Witchcraft’, in D. James and P. Tew (eds.), New Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont/Associated University Presses): 58-79.

American Rivers/National Park Service. 2003. Use and Economic Importance of the Wild and Scenic Chattooga River: Final Report, R.L. Moore and C. Siderelis, principal



investigators (American Rivers Inc. and Park Planning and Special Studies, and Rivers, Trails and Conservation Assistance Programs of the National Park Service). Online: http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/Document /fetch/documentid/271/.raw.

Arthen, Walter Wright. 1988. ‘The Wicker Man: A Ritual of Transformation’, FireHeart 1 (1997), EarthSpirit Web, last updated 26 June 2009. Online: http://www. earthspirit.com/!reheart/fhwkman.html.

Barkan, Joanne. 2004. ‘Jonah after the Year 2000’, Dissent (Winter): 105-109. Bartholomew, David. 2008 [1977]. ‘The Wicker Man’, Cinefantastique 6.3. Online:

www.wicker-man.com/articles/cinefantastique_TWM_article_1977.pdf. Bell, David. 1997. ‘Anti-idyll: Rural Horror’, in P.J. Cloke and J. Little (eds.), Contested

Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation, and Rurality (London: Routledge): 94-108.

Blackman, Lisa, and John Cromby. 2007. ‘Editorial: Affect and Feeling’, International Journal of Critical Psychology 21: 5-22.

Bloch, Ernst. 1986 [1959]. The Principle of Hope (trans. N. Plaice, S. Plaice, and P. Knight; 3 vols.; Cambridge: MIT Press).

Boime, Albert. 1991. The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830–1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press).

Bousé, David. 2000. Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). Brass, Tom. 2000. ‘Nymphs, Shepherds, and Vampires: The Agrarian Myth on Film’,

Dialectical Anthropology 25: 205-37. doi:10.1023/A:1011615201664. Bremmer, Jan M. (ed.). 2007. The Strange World of Human Sacri!ce (Leuven, Belgium:

Peeters). Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell). Brereton, Pat. 2005. Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema

(Bristol, UK: Intellect). Brode, Douglas. 2004. From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture

(Austin: University of Texas Press). Cholodenko, Alex. 2005. ‘“Objects in Mirror are Closer than They Appear”: The Vir-

tual Reality of Jurassic Park and Jean Baudrillard’, Journal of Baudrillard Studies 2.1. Online: http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/cholodenko.htm.

Chris, Cynthia. 2006. Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Clough, Patricia T., with Jean Halley (eds.). 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the

Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Clough, Patricia T. 2008. ‘The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and

Bodies’, Theory Culture Society 25.1: 1-22. doi:10.1177/0263276407085156. Connolly, William E. 2002. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press). Conrad, Joseph. 1998. Heart of Darkness and Other Stories (London: Wordsworth

Editions). Daniels, Stephen. 1993. Fields of Visions: Landscape Imagery and National Identity in

England and the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Dawson, Jane I. 1996. Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in

Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham and London: Duke University Press). Debord, Guy. 1977. The Society of the Spectacle (trans. K. Knabb; Detroit: Black & Red). Dixon, Wheeler Winston. 2006. Visions of Paradise: Images of Eden in the Cinema (New

Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).

http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/Document/fetch/documentid/271/.raw

http://www.americanwhitewater.org/content/Document/fetch/documentid/271/.raw

http://www.earthspirit.com/fireheart/fhwkman.html

http://www.earthspirit.com/fireheart/fhwkman.html

http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/A:1011615201664

http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263276407085156

http://www.wicker-man.com/articles/cinefantastique_TWM_article_1977.pdf

http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/cholodenko.htm



Doyen, Eugene. 1996. ‘Utopia and Apocalypse—The Cultural Role of Hollywood Cinema’, Unpublished manuscript, originally retrieved from internet (no longer available).

Dunaway, Finis. 2005. Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

Dyer, Richard. 1981. ‘Entertainment and Utopia’, in R. Altman (ed.), Genre: The Musical: A Reader (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul): 175-89.

Flinn, Caryl. 1992. Strains of Utopia: Gender, Nostalgia, and Hollywood Film Music (New Brunswick, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Foucault, Michel. 1986. ‘Of other Spaces’, trans. J. Misoweic, Diacritics (Spring): 22-27. doi:10.2307/464648.

Franklin, Sarah. 2000. ‘Life Itself: Global Nature and the Generic Imaginary’, in S. Franklin, C. Lury, and J. Stacey (eds.), Global Nature, Global Culture (London: SAGE): 188-227.

Franks, B., S. Harper, J. Murray, and L. Stevenson (eds.). 2006. The Quest for the Wicker Man: History, Folklore, and Pagan Perspectives (Edinburgh: Luath Press).

Fry, Carrol L. 2008. Cinema of the Occult: New Age, Satanism, Wicca, and Spiritualism in Film (Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont/Associated University Presses).

Geraghty, Christine. 1991. Women and Soap Opera (Cambridge: Polity). GSC Game World. 2009. ‘Stalker: Clear Sky’. Online: http://cs.stalker-game.com/

en/. Hastings, A. Waller. 1996. ‘Bambi and the Hunting Ethos’, Journal of Popular Film and

Television 24.2: 53-59. Hayward, Philip. 2007. ‘Western Edges: Evil Aliens and Island Otherness in British

Cinema’, Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 1.2. Online: http://shimajournal.org/issues/v1n2/i.%20Hayward%20Shima% 20v1n2.pdf.

Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Poetry, Language, Thought (trans. A. Hofstadter; New York: Harper & Row).

———. 1977. ‘The Age of the World Picture’, in The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (trans. W. Lovitt; New York: Harper & Row): 115-54.

Higginbottom, Judith. 2006. ‘“Do as Thou Wilt”: Contemporary Paganism and The Wicker Man’, in Franks et al. 2006: 126-36.

Hochman, Jhan. 1998. Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press).

Hudson, Wayne. 2003. The Reform of Utopia (Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Hutton, Ronald. 1996. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain

(Oxford: Oxford University Press). Ingram, David. 2000. Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Exeter,

UK: University of Exeter Press). Ivakhiv, Adrian. 2001. Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and

Sedona (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). ———. 2008. ‘Green Film Criticism and Its Futures’, Interdisciplinary Studies in

Literature and Environment 15.2: 1-28. doi:10.1093/isle/15.2.1. ———. 2011. ‘The Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine: Stalking the Zone of Cinema’, Film

Philosophy 15.1 (forthcoming). Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other

Science Fictions (London: Verso).

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/464648

http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/isle/15.2.1

http://cs.stalker-game.com/en/

http://shimajournal.org/issues/v1n2/i.%20Hayward%20Shima%20v1n2.pdf

http://shimajournal.org/issues/v1n2/i.%20Hayward%20Shima%20v1n2.pdf

http://cs.stalker-game.com/en/



Kingsley, Elizabeth A. 2009. ‘The Wicker Man (1973)’, And You Call Yourself a Scientist!, posted 14 May. Online: http://www.aycyas.com/wickerman73.htm.

Kolker, Robert P. 2000. A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman (New York: Oxford University Press).

Koven, Mikel J. 2008. Film, Folklore, and Urban Legends (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little!eld/Scarecrow Press).

Lacy, Mark J. 2001. ‘Cinema and Ecopolitics: Existence in the Jurassic Park’, Millennium—Journal of International Studies 30: 635-45.

Lane, John. 2004. Chattooga: Descending into the Myth of Deliverance River (Athens: University of Georgia Press).

Levitas, Ruth. 1997. ‘Educated Hope: Ernst Bloch on Abstract and Concrete Utopia’, in Jamie O. Daniel and Tom Moylan (eds.), Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch (London: Verso): 65-79.

Lutts, Ralph. 1992. ‘The Trouble with Bambi: Walt Disney’s Bambi and the American Vision of Nature’, Forest and Conservation History 36: 160-71. doi:10.2307/ 3983677.

Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

McKibben, Bill. 1992. The Age of Missing Information (New York: Random House). Miller, Angela. 1993. The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American

Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Mitman, Gregg. 1999. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press). Mullarkey, John. 2009. Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image

(Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan). Murray, Jonathan, Lesley Stevenson, Stephen Harper, and Benjamin Franks (eds.).

2005. Constructing The Wicker Man: Film and Cultural Studies Perspectives (Glasgow: Crichton Publications).

Nichols, Mike. 1997. ‘Neo-Pagan Filmography’, revised 2 May. Online: http:// webspace.webring.com/people/wm/mike_nichols.geo/!lms.html.

Pike, Sarah M. 2001. Earthly Bodies, Magical Selves: Contemporary Pagans and the Search for Community (Berkeley: University of California Press).

Pitzl-Waters, Jason. 2007. ‘Musical In"uence of The Wicker Man Soundtrack’, and ‘The Wicker Man Soundtrack’, A Darker Shade of Pagan, 20 June and 22 June. Online: http://www.adarkershadeofpagan.com/labels/The%20Wicker%20Man.html.

Porton, Richard. 1999. Film and the Anarchist Imagination (London: Verso). Quandt, James. n.d. ‘The Poetry of Apocalypse’, Cinematheque Ontario. Online: http:

//www.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Quandt_Essay. html.

Rossignol, Jim. 2007. ‘Worlds from the Zone’, The Escapist, 22 May. Online: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_98/544-Worlds-from-The-Zone.

Roth, Matthew. 1996. ‘Lion King: A Short History of Disney-fascism’, Jump Cut 40: 15-20.

Runte, Alfred. 1997. National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 3rd edn).

Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. 1988. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

http://www.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Quandt_Essay.html


http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_98/544-Worlds-from-The-Zone

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3983677

http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3983677


http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_98/544-Worlds-from-The-Zone

http://webspace.webring.com/people/wm/mike_nichols.geo/films.html

http://webspace.webring.com/people/wm/mike_nichols.geo/films.html

http://www.aycyas.com/wickerman73.htm

http://www.adarkershadeofpagan.com/labels/The%20Wicker%20Man.html



Scherer, Klaus R. 2005. ‘Unconscious Process in Emotion: The Bulk of the Iceberg’, in L.F. Barrett, P.M. Niedenthall, and P. Winkielman (eds.), Emotion and Consciousness (New York: Guilford): 312-34.

Sermon, Richard. 2006. ‘The Wicker Man, May Day and the Reinvention of Beltane’, in Franks et al. 2006: 26-43.

Shouse, Eric. 2005. ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, M/C Journal 8.6. Online: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php.

Stam, Robert. 1977. ‘The Subversive Charm of Alain Tanner’, Jump Cut 15: 1, 5-7. ———. 1992. Re"exivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard

(New York: Columbia University Press). Stevenson, Lesley. 2005. ‘Sightseeing in Summerisle: Film Tourism and The Wicker

Man’, in Murray et al. 2005: 107-22. Sutcliffe, Steven J. 2005. ‘Religion in The Wicker Man: Context and Representation’, in

Murray et al. 2005: 37-56. Tanner, Alain. 1983. ‘Interview with Alain Tanner’, in Jonah Who Will be 25 in the Year

2000: Screenplay by John Berger and Alain Tanner (trans. M. Palmer; Berkeley: North Atlantic Books): 165-74.

TheoFantastique. 2009. ‘Interview with Carrol Lee Fry’, TheoFantastique, 4 May. Online: http://www.theofantastique.com/2009/05/04/carrol-l-fry-cinema-of-the-occult-new-age-satanism-wicca-and-spiritualism-in-!lm/.

Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge).

Tomkins, Silvan. 1995. Exploring Affect: The Selected Writings of Silvan S. Tompkins (ed. E.V. Demos; New York: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge).

Total Film. 2004. ‘Total Film’s 50 Greatest Movies Ever’, Total Film 95. Online: http://www.listal.com/list/total-!lms-50-greatest-british.

VII Photo Agency. 2006. ‘Chernobyl Stalkers’. Online: http://www.viiphoto.com/ showstory.php?nID=875.

Whitley, David. 2008. The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation (Burlington, VT: Ashgate). Williamson, Jerry W. 1995. Hillbillyland: What the Movies Did to the Mountains and What

the Mountains Did to the Movies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Wood, Robin. 1986. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University

Press). Wright, Melanie J. 2007. ‘The Wicker Man’, in Religion and Film: An Introduction

(London: I.B. Tauris): 79-106. Yacavone, Daniel. 2008. ‘Towards a Theory of Film Worlds’, Film-Philosophy 12.2: 83-

108. Yates, Christopher S. 2006. ‘A Phenomenological Aesthetic of Cinematic “Worlds”’,

Contemporary Aesthetics 4. Online: http://www.contempaesthetics.org/ newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=394.

Zizek, Slavoj. 1999. ‘The Thing from Inner Space’, Mainview, September. Online: http://www.lacan.com/zizekthing.htm. Re-printed in R. Salecl (ed.), Sexuation (London: Duke University Press, 2000): 248-50.

http://www.theofantastique.com/2009/05/04/carrol-l-fry-cinema-of-theoccult-new-age-satanism-wicca-and-spiritualism-in-film/

http://www.viiphoto.com/showstory.php?nID=875

http://www.viiphoto.com/showstory.php?nID=875

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=394

http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=394

http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php

http://www.lacan.com/zizekthing.htm

http://www.theofantastique.com/2009/05/04/carrol-l-fry-cinema-of-theoccult-new-age-satanism-wicca-and-spiritualism-in-film/



Filmography

Apocalypse Now. 1979. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, USA. Deliverance. 1972. Directed by John Boorman, USA. Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000. 1976. Directed by Alain Tanner, Switzerland. Jurassic Park. 1993. Directed by Steven Spielberg, USA. Lost World, The. 1997. Directed by Steven Spielberg, USA. Stalker. 1979. Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, USSR. The Wicker Man. 1973. Directed by Robin Hardy and Anthony Shaffer, United

Kingdom.

cinema of the not-yet

Documents