| The main objective of this study is to participate in the development of an ecologically informed approach to the study of cultural productions. Green cultural studies, or ecocriticism, pertains to the application of concepts and preoccupations derived from the science of ecology to the study of literary and cinematic texts, and to the investigation of the relationship between these texts and the physical environment. I apply this approach to the study of Peter Greenaway's artistic productions---his films, paintings, writings, installations, exhibitions, and operas---and show that Greenaway's works embody an ecological consciousness. If one of the goals of cultural studies has been to investigate social relations as sources of meaning and power, green cultural studies must investigate not only the economic, political, and technological aspects of these relations, but also their ecological aspect, and the role nature has been assigned in their elaboration.; Greenaway's artistic productions have most often been discussed in connection to avant-garde practices, poststructuralism, postmodernism, and Brechtian aesthetics. While drawing from these approaches, I also argue that they pose certain limitations to a productive understanding of the complexities of Greenaway's works, and of their relevance to the urgent ecological predicament of the present age. The main limitation which I see in these theoretical approaches is that they examine cultural productions from a strictly human-centered perspective. Here, I endeavor to adopt an ecocentric, or earth-centered approach to the study of Greenaway's portrayal of artistic, economic, scientific, and religious practices in industrialized cultures. I find that Greenaway's films, in particular, repeatedly thematize the notion that the exploitation of human and nonhuman bodies as natural resources and in the pursuit of profit and power, is a compensatory practice for a misidentified and misunderstood sense of alienation from the biotic community.; Finally, I argue that Greenaway's ambivalence toward representation and his foregrounding of the naked body constitute a search for a post-cinematic mode of expression that is not limited by the frame, riot structured by a linear model of temporality, and that does not reduce the observer to a spatially fixed device for processing visual information. |
