| Popis: |
This essay aims to reconsider the scholarship of eco-cinema criticism and, from a new critical perspective, explore how cinema can serve to form, intervene in, and expand the global and ethical imagination of radioactive waste. For this purpose, I first illustrate the material conditions of radioactive waste in terms of modernity, time, space, and “hyperobject” or the quality of transcending physical senses. The material conditions are integral as a base for the operation and development of imaginations of radioactive waste. I then propose a critical model in which to address the dynamic relations between film and a wider sphere of intertextual and transmedial imaginations. This model significantly differs from what I call purist criticism, or a conventional critical study that aesthetically and/or morally evaluates films one by one. At this point, as I elucidate, ethics is a key factor for film to link individual audiences to the global imagination of the environmental issue. Finally, in analyzing the cinematic expressions of Charka (Shimada Kei, 2016) in comparison with two other films representing the issue—Into Eternity (Michael Madsen, 2010) and Waste: Nuclear Nightmare (Éric Guéret, 2009)—, I show the potentials this film enacts so as to intervene in the public imaginations of radioactivity. In so doing, I argue that while Charka may appear to be sentimental, didactic, and nationally framed, the film can vitalize a global and ethical imagination of ecological issues, in that it questions the very modernity based on capitalism and colonialism by disclosing multifaceted relations between the local and the global. |
