Ecocinema Ars et Praxis

Ecocinema places the relationship between humans, nonhumans, and the environment at the centre of film narration. As an earth-centred approach rather than an anthropocentric one, ecocinema is ethically charged and political, offering a bioegalitarian view of the world while denying human moral preeminence. As I view it, it is a diegetic feature, a modality of representation and storytelling, as well as an environmentally aware production mode. Drawing on blossoming ecomedia scholarship, I aim at refining the concept of ecocinema in an Italian context. After mapping the necessity and growth of green film production practices, I examine Alice Rohrwacher’s Lazzaro felice/Happy as Lazzaro (2018) as a film that leads the way in Italian sustainable filmmaking. Lazzaro implements the good practices of Ecomuvi, the first European green film protocol, and embraces a slow filmmaking practice to grapple with the crumbling of rural society and the human cost of modernity with its exploitation of both human and nonhuman nature. It exemplifies the most powerful form of political ecocinema, one that conjugates ars et praxis

Aesthetics · Anthropocentrism · Art · Art history · Environmental ethics · Filmmaking · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Praxis · Sociology · Storytelling · Cinema and Media Studies · Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy

• Layers of Meaning, Layers of Earth

  Open Access•Agnieszka Powierska, Adam Domalewski•Kwartalnik Filmowy•2025

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