The Cinema of Extractions

Priya Jaikumar, author of Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space:
Reckoning with cinema’s material dependence on our endangered planet alters our understanding of the medium. With The Cinema of Extractions, Jacobson hands us an invaluable guidebook to this approach. Giving a vivid account of how early Hollywood features and corporate shorts displayed or acclimated audiences to modernity’s extractive roots, he magnificently shifts disciplinary frames. Read this book. Teach it. See films anew with it.

Lee Grieveson, professor of media history, University College London:
Jacobson’s The Cinema of Extractions proposes that cinema became a world-making system integral to the new order of extractive capitalism it grew from. Our world bears the stamp of this past. Jacobson’s sharp history of the entwining of cinema and its imaginaries with planetary matter is a vital intervention into the efforts to reckon with the work and environmental consequences of media.

Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene:
Brian Jacobson's timely, brilliant, and teacherly book fundamentally reorients film history to the history of the energy economy, and he introduces methods of reading form through the logics of a new “raw materialism.” Nothing short of a “call to methodological action,” The Cinema of Extractions is for anyone who cares about media aesthetics and the operations that underwrite industrial modernity’s earth-defying ambitions.