Cinematic Encounters with Disaster: Hollywood and Beyond

This thesis considers the expansion of disaster as a cinematic cultural imaginary at the present historical juncture. It includes and moves beyond the dominant reference point of Hollywood’s disaster movie genre, exploring independent films, documentaries, and films from different regions globally. Conceiving of disaster as intersubjective encounter between humans and nonhuman forces, it analyses the techniques utilised to visualise such encounters and investigates how subjective dispositions are posited in human protagonists. It asks how the aesthetic sensibilities of different approaches to film style make possible the representation and imagination of disaster in distinct, ethically charged ways.