The ecological crisis that we are currently enduring is indissociable from the impoverishment of the practices and affections that connect us to the Earth and to other living beings. Faced with the ever more real prospect of an uninhabitable planet, it is urgent to imagine a closer, more inclusive and more generous relationship with nature and the non-human aspects of life. It is in this context that the sensitive forms of our world have a political role to play. Inspired by a series of eco-feminist proposals, the historian Teresa Castro suggests that images and the cinema can help us to expand the limits of our attention, thus laying the foundations for an ecological reason. She does not defend the idea that the cinema must place itself at the service of ecological discourse, but instead proposes that it can restore the awe that we feel when faced with the world, which has been stolen from us by modernity.

Teresa Castro is an art historian and a teacher of Film and Media Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. Her research is centred on the relationship between film and animism, ecocriticism and forms of plant life. She published The Mediated Plant (E-flux, September 2019) and co-edited the collective work Puissances du végétal et cinéma animiste. La vitalité révélée par la technique (Presses du réel, 2020).