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The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. By Nadia Bozak. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Pp. vii+241. $26.95.
Images of the "iron horse"-a surging mass of smoke-spewing metal-electrified early film audiences, mythically sending viewers scrambling for the exits, butmore likely transporting themsafely intomodernmovie reveries of moving machines. From the Lumières' L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de la Ciotat (1895) and Edison's Black Diamond Express (1896) to Dziga Vertov's masterpieces of technological celebration, films made emblems not only of trains, but also of the electric lights, factorymachines, towering smokestacks, and feats of civil engineering that helped build the modern world. That they did so should come as no surprise. Given its origins in the technologies and materials produced by the first Industrial Revolution and the social and cultural conditions engendered by the second, cinema could not help but become product, producer, and re-producer of industrial modernity.
The corollary of this relationship, rooted in the film industry's longstanding contributions to modern forms of environmental destruction and their implicit visual celebration, has rarely been recognized. Inspired by contemporary eco-criticism, Nadia Bozak's provocative, if at times disappointing, The Cinematic Footprint investigates this darker side of cinema's technological and environmental history. Pairing accounts of film's industrialization and use of natural resources with close readings of film representations of nature and technology and calls to action to environmentally conscious filmmakers, the book makes...