Dr Becca Voelcker’s forthcoming book (University of California Press, 2026) explores the lives and works of 10 non-fiction filmmakers and filmmaking collectives in the 1970s and 80s who cultivated environmental justice in the face of extractive capitalism
Image courtesy Becca Voelcker.
Image Description: Photograph of wildflower meadow and mountain.
Diving into little-known regions and archives, and exploring films and photographs that resonate across geographies, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction unearths key examples of eco-political counterculture, ranging from farmer-filmmaker collectives in Japan and Mali to a gardener-filmmaker in Massachusetts, and from film portraits of women farmers in Orkney and the Navajo Nation to indigenous documentaries about land dispossession in Colombia.
The book proposes a new term—land cinema—as an urgent genre for our time, intersecting political, ecological, and aesthetic aspects of land in a web of related concerns. Land cinema presents a counterproposition to imperial and masculinist drives within genres of landscape romanticism and land art, understanding land as a locus of social and environmental responsibility, and film as a tool for resistance. Land cinema is oppositional in the way it documents territorial expansion, material extraction, and labor exploitation, and propositional in its presentation of grassroots and collective possibilities for ecological and social repair. Recognizing the camera’s historical imbrication with imperial and industrial projects of objectifying communities and landscapes as resources for extraction, land cinema reappropriates lens-based media and reframes land.
The book’s focus is the 1970s and ‘80s, a period characterized both by an intensification of material extraction under neoliberal drives for economic growth, and forms of activist resistance to it guided by green and socialist concerns for environmental and social wellbeing, and the influence of feminist and anticolonial movements. Today, in a contemporary media landscape saturated by divisive images and misinformation regarding land rights and climate change, theorizing land cinema is an urgent task for imagining, imaging, and enacting climate justice. This book is a history of land cinema’s development, written with an eye to future possibilities for the genre.
The book brings together two critical discourses pertaining to land and social justice in the context of climate breakdown. First is a body of literature identifying extractivism as a key ideology and process for the manufacture of capitalist growth and environmental damage. Second is a set of discourses concerning the ethics of representation, drawn from anticolonial and intersectional feminist perspectives, which explores how words, images, and sound represent (or misrepresent) places and people subjected to extractive violence. The book’s methodological agency is in bringing films’ propositional potentials into critical conversation with this theoretical nexus of anticolonial, ecofeminist and post-extractive ideas—its specific alchemy, in the mutual support these practices and theories provide for understanding climate justice today.
While speaking to visual cultures scholars and practitioners, Land Cinema also addresses a wider readership curious in exploring connections between human and natural history in the context of climate. Constellating films and their makers’ stories as overlooked and underacknowledged perspectives, Land Cinema studies how practices of yesteryear might motivate a generation of readers facing climate breakdown today.
Dr Becca Voelcker
Dr Becca Voelcker lectures in art and film history at Goldsmiths, University of London, specialising in anticolonial and ecofeminist representations of land since the 1970s. Becca earned her PhD in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University in 2021. Alongside research, Becca writes for Sight & Sound, introduces films at the British Film Institute, serves on film festival juries, and broadcasts with BBC Radio. In 2024 Becca became a BBC New Generation Thinker. Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction is Becca’s first book. www.beccavoelcker.com
