Available From UC Press

Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction considers nonfiction filmmakers and film collectives whose work advances an understanding of land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility. Diving into little-known archives to explore films that resonate across geographies, Becca Voelcker unearths key examples of eco-political counterculture, from farmer-filmmakers in Japan and Mali to a gardener-filmmaker in Massachusetts, and from filmed landscape-portraits of women in Los Angeles, Orkney, and the Navajo Nation to Indigenous documentaries about land dispossession in Colombia. Proposing "land cinema" as an urgent genre for our time, this book reveals how images and ideas produced half a century ago sowed the seeds for climate justice movements today.

Becca Voelcker is Lecturer in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. She was named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2024.

"A groundbreaking account of global film cultures rooted in land-based struggle, Becca Voelcker's Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction offers the compelling new framework of 'land cinema,' through which filmmakers confront environmental harm and envision repair. Passionate and wide-ranging, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction returns cinema to the land, revealing film's political urgency in times of environmental crisis. Essential reading for scholars of visual culture, the environmental humanities, and film and media studies."—Siobhan Angus, author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography

"Attentive equally to historical contexts and contemporary concerns, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction proposes a corpus of films that represent, illuminate, and potentially reframe our relationship to the land. This lucid, vivid book is both a significant work of scholarship and a pleasure to read."—Dennis Lim, artistic director of the New York Film Festival

"Spanning several continents while attending to local communities, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction defines a new genre of moving images with critical, luminous, and reparative interpretations of our planetary crisis. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the fields of world cinema, nonfiction film, and environmental humanities."—Jie Li, author of Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China

"With clarity, precision, and urgency, Becca Voelcker compellingly intervenes into a discipline absorbed with auteurs and aesthetics to explore the idea of nonextractive modes of cinema as a form of sustainable storytelling. Articulating the connections between production, culture, and the environment is an essential shift for documentary studies in our state of ecological crisis. Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction powerfully elevates our embodied traditions of participatory cinema and culture making to collectively reimagine our world."—Angela J. Aguayo, independent filmmaker and author of Documentary Resistance: Social Change and Participatory Media 

"Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction offers a novel and cutting-edge approach to our understanding of the roles of environments in the cinema of the 1970s and 1980s undertaken by women and racialized minorities across four continents and various filmmaking practices. A transformative approach to the study of environmental media."—Scott MacKenzie, coauthor of New Arctic Cinemas: Media Sovereignty and the Climate Crisis