We sat down with Matthew Thompson to discuss his forthcoming book: On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s. The book charts various environmentalisms in 1970s films, containment vs. contamination, that evolved out of the environmentalist work of the 1960s typified by Rachel Carson and Paul Ehrlich. Thompson's idea of "contamination" jockeys with the conceptual north star of recent ecocriticism: interconnectivity. This connects to an earlier episode we had with Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay on Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction.
For more of Thompson:
Website: https://matthewithompson.com
ASLE EcoCast:
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Episode recorded February 4, 2025
