In Cinematic Encounters with Disaster Simon R. Troon brings poststructuralist and post-anthropocentric theory to bear on the significance of disaster imagery and apocalyptic cinema in relation to the 'increasingly disastrous flavour' of our contemporary climate crisis. This ranging study of a timely sub-genre and troubling paradigm for the collective imaginary adds to growing scholarly insistence that 'ethical thinking about responsibility in the Anthropocene has much to offer analysis of films' - and furthermore that in going beyond its historical foundations and conventions film theory still has relevance in today's discursive intersections between screen media and the environment.

Hunter Vaughan, Senior Research Associate, Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, University of Cambridge, UK

Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Realisms for the Anthropocene offers a world atlas of cinematic imaginations of disaster-from the spectacular to the almost imperceptible-that explores what it might mean, as Haythan El-Wardany wondered, to “look disaster in the eye.” Across a bravura set of close readings of films, Simon Troon develops the inquisitive gaze of pluriform cinematic realisms and the ethical attunements of post-levinasian theory to help us think expansively about the fantasies, challenges, and local and geopolitical stakes of life facing disaster. A provocative and timely contribution from an exciting new voice in the field.

James Leo Cahill, Associate Professor, Cinema Studies and French, University of Toronto, Canada