Rethinking extractivism and masculinity: aesthetics of the environment in There will be blood (2007) and First Cow (2019)

Pintor Iranzo, Ivan

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.31009/cc.2023.v11.i20.03

Rethinking extractivism and masculinity: aesthetics of the environment in There will be blood (2007) and First Cow (2019)

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Cordal A. Rethinking extractivism and masculinity: aesthetics of the environment in There will be blood (2007) and First Cow (2019). Comparative Cinema. 2023;11(20):26-47. DOI: 10.31009/cc.2023.v11.i20.03

Abstract

As today we face the urgency of thinking film history through the implications of the ecological emergency, the aesthetics of oil extraction in cinema can be linked to representations of petro-masculinity and to discourses of capitalist exploitation of nature. Considering the ecocritical trend in film studies, this paper analyzes the subgenre of the oil film, which is inextricably related to the genre of the western historical tradition and its revisions, and presents There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) as a key case. The comparative analysis discovers that the critical and aesthetic representational strategies of landscape and character of the US founding myth in First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2019) manifest a proposal that deconstructs the genre with the intention of filming the relationships between the human and more-than-human from a viewpoint that approaches environmental consciousness.