Thinking Cinema

Placing film, theory, and philosophy in dialogue with work in critical plant studies, and drawing upon plant life and scholarship to pose innovative questions within film studies, this reprint explores how engaging with a myriad of aspects of the vegetal world through film has the capacity to open up new lines of thought, in cinema and beyond. The volume brings together film scholars working on the vegetal from a range of different methodological positions: from the historical and archival through film theory and philosophy to film practice. Considering a wide selection of plants in film from experimental filmmaking to a Netflix production, and across varied genres, from natural history film to arthouse cinema, and from a Hollywood studio comedy of the 1950s to a longform streaming television series, contributors question what it means to think cinema with plants from cinema’s moment of inception to the present.