New Books Network Becca Voelcker, "Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction" (U California Press, 2025)
Mar 21, 2026
Becca Voelcker, a lecturer at Goldsmiths and author of Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction, explores films that treat land as a site of social and ecological responsibility. She discusses farmer- and gardener-filmmakers, archival discoveries across Japan, Mali, Colombia and the US, and how cinema functions as communal practice and repair in struggles over extraction and belonging.
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Land Cinema Frames Land As Ecology Politics And Aesthetics
- Land cinema names films that treat land as ecological, political, and aesthetic concern rather than picturesque backdrop.
- Becca Voelcker traces this genre from late 1960s onward across Japan, Mali, Navajo Nation, Colombia to expose extraction and mobilize repair.
Foreground Positionality To Avoid False Documentary Authority
- Question documentary authenticity by foregrounding positionality and self-reflexivity so audiences ask whose view is shown.
- Voelcker highlights insider-outsider filmmakers like Margaret Tait and Arlene Boman who reveal contested land relations.
Why Land Replaces Landscape In Her Terminology
- Voelcker chose land over landscape to avoid aestheticizing dispossession and to call out extractive visual traditions.
- She uses cinema expansively to include filmmaking, screenings, collective making, slideshows and off-screen activism.
