Abstract

This paper discusses the significance of the process-relational framework within the history of film theory that Adrian Ivakhiv suggests in his 2013 book, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. The author highlights three modes of filmic representation, the geomorphic, the anthropomorphic, and the biomorphic, in order to explain how cinema continuously constitutes worlds and subjects. Based on Charles S. Peirce’s triadic model that postulates interaction between the representamen, an object, and an interpretant, Ivakhiv revisits the cinematic experience that has been marginalized in the theories of film spectatorship. His process-relational approach, which is also related to Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze’s process philosophy, also encounters speculative realism, a new philosophical movement emerging in the 21 century. Speculative realism suggests affective relationship between objects, challenging correlationism in the Anthropocene epoch. It helps us to reconsider the significant human impact on the ecosystem since the Industrial Revolution and rethink the condition of human existence from a materialist perspective. Thus, this paper argues that Ivahkiv expands the concept of eco-cinema emerging with environmentalism in the 2000s, in terms of speculative realism. The affective possibility of eco-cinema also can enrich discourses of the posthuman ecophilosophically. In sum, this paper argues that following the phenomenological trend in contemporary film theory, Ecologies of the Moving Image attempts to make a material turn with eco-philosophy, and thus it can contribute to critical posthumanism in terms of affect.