Land Cinema in the Neoliberal Age

Abstract

Land Cinema in the Neoliberal Age studies a global corpus of films made in the 1970s and 80s that constitute contributions to Marxist and environmental thought during the rise of neoliberalism. Taking these experimental and activist films from countries such as Japan, Chile, Britain, and the US, as vivid social barometers and historical testimonies, I argue that land, plant life, and agricultural labour came to occupy a privileged position in the social imaginary during this time of sociopolitical change. Cultivating land through gardening or farming, and producing cultural representations of it through film, became means of resisting changes neoliberalism wrought on landscapes and society. The films testify to their makers’ political visions and oversights, revealing tensions between the country and the city, retreat and engagement, or individual and collective activism. By treating these tensions as dialectical products of social relations, Land Cinema in the Neoliberal Age sheds light both on the conditions in which they were made, and on debates around social and environmental justice today.