The Material Gaze: Horizontalizing the Anthropos through Film

This PhD research project aims to construct a theoretical framework with which to examine film and the multitudinous ways in which the medium might function to institute a cinematic engagement with the world that illuminates the complex entanglements of its inhabitants, both biota and abiota. Principally, I aim to re-contextualize the ecologically conscious politics of Jane Bennett and other New Materialists within the framework of film and film theory. In doing so, I hope to position such politics as implicated in the cinematic form, as well as situate the medium as its praxis.