Brian Jacobson
@bleudeciel.bsky.social
The Cinema of Extractions (2025), Media Climates (2022), In the Studio (2020), Studios Before the System (2015)
Writing about Art, Media, Energy, Environment. Next book: oil, gas, and media culture in France+empire
Caltech Professor of Visual Culture
Writing about Art, Media, Energy, Environment. Next book: oil, gas, and media culture in France+empire
Caltech Professor of Visual Culture
This new book extends the project to more explicit connections between infrastructural forms and image forms, in part to ask what place visual/formal/textual analytic approaches have after the turn to what I call Raw Materialism
cup.columbia.edu/book/the-cin...
cup.columbia.edu/book/the-cin...
The Cinema of Extractions | Columbia University Press
From the petroleum used to make film stock to the carbon and tungsten needed for studio lights and theater projectors, every movie relies on extractive proce... | CUP
cup.columbia.edu
November 27, 2025 at 3:08 PM
This new book extends the project to more explicit connections between infrastructural forms and image forms, in part to ask what place visual/formal/textual analytic approaches have after the turn to what I call Raw Materialism
cup.columbia.edu/book/the-cin...
cup.columbia.edu/book/the-cin...
This book expanded the historical and geographic scope of the infrastructure-image project with essays by 12 scholars working from early cinema to television and avant-garde new media - and infrastructure from iron/glass and rail to electrical grids and FTZs
www.ucpress.edu/books/in-the...
www.ucpress.edu/books/in-the...
November 27, 2025 at 3:08 PM
This book expanded the historical and geographic scope of the infrastructure-image project with essays by 12 scholars working from early cinema to television and avant-garde new media - and infrastructure from iron/glass and rail to electrical grids and FTZs
www.ucpress.edu/books/in-the...
www.ucpress.edu/books/in-the...
one source is here: archive.org/details/pho1...
Photoplay (Apr - Sep 1918) : Chicago, Photoplay Magazine Publishing Company : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
archive.org
November 17, 2025 at 9:15 PM
one source is here: archive.org/details/pho1...
Did you ever post the enviro course list? I’d love to see that one too
September 19, 2025 at 11:51 PM
Did you ever post the enviro course list? I’d love to see that one too
Oh yeah of course, it’s great stuff
July 29, 2025 at 12:01 AM
Oh yeah of course, it’s great stuff
they offer so many good options, it's hard to choose
July 28, 2025 at 10:54 PM
they offer so many good options, it's hard to choose
(and the rest of the wonderful essays in that issues by Debashree Mukherjee, Weihong Bao, Katerina Korola, and Yuri Furuhata - they are all so terrific): online.ucpress.edu/representati...
Volume 157 Issue 1 | Representations | University of California Press
online.ucpress.edu
July 28, 2025 at 9:57 PM
(and the rest of the wonderful essays in that issues by Debashree Mukherjee, Weihong Bao, Katerina Korola, and Yuri Furuhata - they are all so terrific): online.ucpress.edu/representati...
Jennifer Fay's essay about Baichwal (et al)'s 2018 Anthropocene The Human Epoch, which I know a lot of people have problems with, but that is precisely what Fay's essay takes up: online.ucpress.edu/representati...
Do I Know the Anthropocene When I See It?
Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) is a film that gives rise to productive confusion about the sight and state of our planet and the inadequacy of our current concepts and aesthetic categories. The ...
online.ucpress.edu
July 28, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Jennifer Fay's essay about Baichwal (et al)'s 2018 Anthropocene The Human Epoch, which I know a lot of people have problems with, but that is precisely what Fay's essay takes up: online.ucpress.edu/representati...
two more shoutouts: Jennifer Peterson's @jenniferpete.bsky.social essay about watching old films from the perspective of the so-called Anthropocene: online.ucpress.edu/representati...
An Anthropocene Viewing Condition
This essay explores what I call an Anthropocene viewing condition, a contemporary spectator position in which images of nature, particularly moving images of natures past, resonate with present and fu...
online.ucpress.edu
July 28, 2025 at 9:57 PM
two more shoutouts: Jennifer Peterson's @jenniferpete.bsky.social essay about watching old films from the perspective of the so-called Anthropocene: online.ucpress.edu/representati...
Two short and (I think) very undergrad ready essays about these kinds of films: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
The Shadow of Progress and the Cultural Markers of the Anthropocene | Environmental History: Vol 24, No 1
www.journals.uchicago.edu
July 28, 2025 at 9:49 PM
Two short and (I think) very undergrad ready essays about these kinds of films: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1...
Self interested, but this is short, aims to be easy to read, and was fun to write (I’ve heard from folks who had success teaching it last year): online.ucpress.edu/fq/article/7...
Evil Does Not ExistDownstream Environmental Form
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist (2023) takes a formal approach to environmental criticism that this article names the “downstream.” Delivered audio-visually and thematically, Hamaguchi’s techn...
online.ucpress.edu
July 28, 2025 at 9:47 PM
Self interested, but this is short, aims to be easy to read, and was fun to write (I’ve heard from folks who had success teaching it last year): online.ucpress.edu/fq/article/7...
I have had success teaching corporate oil shorts, especially BP’s Shadows of Progress. They tend to blow the students’ minds. Shell’s Climate of Concern is another good one
July 28, 2025 at 9:45 PM
I have had success teaching corporate oil shorts, especially BP’s Shadows of Progress. They tend to blow the students’ minds. Shell’s Climate of Concern is another good one
Evil Does Not Exist
July 28, 2025 at 9:42 PM
Evil Does Not Exist