I’m currently working on my first monograph, which reexamines the centrality of settler colonialism and extractive capitalism within North American film cultures. Cinemas of Extraction: Land, Resources, Settler Imaginaries traces the important role of nontheatrical film and video (e.g. amateur and industrial films, documentaries, sponsored media) in shaping white audiences understandings of land, settler identities, and the nonhuman world. Examining films produced and screened by government, industry, and educational institutions in Canada and the United States about environments, I argue that this “cinema of extraction” contributed in complex ways to practices of capitalist world-making—transforming life and geological substances into resources to be extracted, monetized, and transported elsewhere.

As a media form, cinema can help to lay bare the extractive infrastructures of settler societies. Focusing on moving images produced in twentieth-century Canada for domestic and foreign exhibition, I show how this cinema of extraction is entangled with industrial-scale resource extraction on the level of production, narrative, and discourse. As forms of settler cultural production, these moving images also index extractive relationships between colonial governments and Indigenous Peoples, including the theft of Indigenous lands and waterways and settler appropriations of Indigenous knowledges, identities, and lifeways. I look at how Indigenous film and media-makers have reworked colonial archives to critique such practices of extraction and imagine ways of relating otherwise.

Cinemas of Extraction will contribute to film and media studies, as well as the environmental humanities, by mapping continuities between extractive and racial capitalism through their imprints on visual culture and environments.