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D-ecocinema

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In this section, I won’t focus on a specific film or director, but present a more theoretical study of cinema by introducing the scholarly notion of d-ecocinema/Indigenous cinema. The goal of this section is for you to understand how Indigenous ecocinema can powerfully act as a hacking tool by challenging mainstream cinema as well as traditional ecocinema. It does so by centering Indigenous sovereignty, knowledge and relationships to the environment: cinema can become a political tool in the Anthropocene by being reframed as a decolonial and ecological practice.

D-ecocinema
Scholar Salma Monani introduces this concept in her book Indigenous Ecocinema: Decolonizing Media Environments. D-ecocinema combines decolonial and ecological approaches, looking at both on and off-screen meanings such as representation and production methods (Monani 8). It treats cinema as embedded in nature and not as separate from it, bringing forward a new critical, Indigenous-centered framework. 
Indigenous worldview of ecology indeed emphasizes ideas of reciprocity, responsibility and relationships with the more-than-human world. These perspectives are political, unlike some western and scientific ones (Monani 27).
Political stakes are centralized in Indigenous ecocinema because of the land and the people’s history. Colonialism has caused severe environmental disruption and transformations, like what many other people fear will happen to them today. “80 percent of all planetary biodiversity exists on 22 percent of Indigenous lands” (Monani 28), and the forces driving climate change therefore threaten Indigenous people’s relationship with their homelands. Indigenous discourse is therefore both necessary and central to understanding our epoch, and cinema can visually expose it.

Critique of dominant cinema
Monani explains that Indigenous peoples have been represented in cinema, but these depictions have always been embedded either in hypervisibility or invisibility. They were hypervisible through stereotypes, for instance in old Westerns that placed “cowboys against the savage “Injuns””, or more recently in new westerns where a “more sympathetic image of Native people as noble savages living at one with nature” (Monani 21) was conveyed. On the other hand, their invisibility was due to their depiction as sympathetic, “unsuspecting victims of Eurowestern greed threatened by capitalism’s harm” (Monani 22). Most often, these movies relied on white savior narratives, erasing Indigenous resistance, agency and autonomy. These representations direct and limit how we imagine solutions to environmental crisis.
Through romanticized and stereotypical images of Indigeneity, Hollywood cinema appropriates Indigenous identities, limiting and flattening their voices.
Monani then tackles known kinds of ecocinema, ones that focus on slow and independent cinema, but that still remain Eurocentric. This is why Monani proposes Indigenous ecocinema as a third wave of ecocinema, one that studies, represents and acknowledges Indigenous sovereignty, environmental relationality and the ongoing violence of settler colonialism.


Indigenous cinema, or d-ecocinema, is not only about representation, but about rearranging cinema’s visual system in itself. It intervenes in who controls and produces the image, disrupting the long-lasting Western visual monopoly.
This cinema hacks mainstream, Eurocentric Hollywood cinema, exposing its limited visual workings in environmental and Indigenous representation. It undoes its presupposed authority and therefore opens space for alternative narratives, for ways to refilm the Anthropocene.

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  1. Hacking through Visual Exposure Aurore Landman

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