Scott MacDonald

Comprehending Cinema: Panoramic Audiovisioning, the third book in Scott MacDonald's "Avant-Doc" trilogy (with Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema, 2015; and The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama, 2019) is a collection of 15 in-depth interviews and 3 essays. Central themes include modern uses of the cinematic archive and varieties of filmmaker collaboration. Interviewees include Su Friedrich, Guy Maddin and Evan and Galen Johnson, poet John Ashbery, Tadhg O'Sullivan, Jennifer West, Penny Lane, Dean Fleischer Camp, Daniel Lindsay/TJ Martin, Jennifer Anderson/Vernon Lott, Paul Cronin, Bill Morrison, Lucien Castaing-Taylor/Véréna Paravel, Erin Espelie, and Chloé Galibert-Laîné. Three panoramic essays function as entr'acts within the drama of filmmaker voices. In “Night Light: The Modern Cine-Nocturne,” MacDonald discusses a range of filmmakers who have brought the tradition of musical and painterly nocturne into modern cinema: Kenneth Anger, Peter Hutton, Barry Jenkins, Abbas Kiarostami, Rebecca Meyers, Mary Beth Reed, Phil Solomon, Chick Strand, and Laura Washington. In “Loznitsa X 4” MacDonald surveys the wide-ranging filmmaking of Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, who has worked in four different cinematic modes: archival filmmaking, cinema-verité documentary, quiet meditation, and political horror film. “Recent Archival Engagements with ‘The War to End All Wars,’” explores responses to the anniversary of World War 1 by Bill Morrison, Yervant Gianikian/Angela Ricci Lucchi, and Peter Jackson. Comprehending Cinema concludes with an interview with the group that Roger Ebert called, “the best in the world at accompanying silent film”: the Alloy Orchestra (Terry Donahue, Roger Miller and Ken Winokur), at the conclusion of their 30-year run.

When I chose the term “eco-cinema” for my essay, “Toward an Eco-cinema”, published in the Summer 2004 issue of ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), I don’t believe I meant to invent a term. “Eco” seemed everywhere in the early 2000s; and it is in the nature of language to respond to the interweaving of cultural developments. “Eco-cinema” seemed a good way of referencing the intersection of the continuing evolution of cinema with a cultures-wide recognition that many ecosystems on our planet, and the planet itself, are in a process of transition, if not entropy.