Cosmic fables and outer-space fictions have long been used to explore our relationship to the Earth and how it affects our understanding of what it means to be human. While most outer-space films either promote an expansionist vision of human life (Kubrick, Nolan) or insist on our boundedness and connection to the Earth (Tarkovsky), Claire Denis’ High Life (2018) presents a bleaker scenario in which the voyage into space echoes the kind of loss of Earth we might imagine in conditions of total ecological devastation. Focusing on the ecological and moral dimension of space film, this talk asks how and whether we should imagine fidelity to life in the absence of the Earth’s lifeworld.
Lucas Hollister is an Associate Professor of French at Dartmouth College with research interests in 20th/21st-century French literature, film and popular culture, literary theory, cultural studies, narrative theory, and ecology and ecocriticism.
Co-sponsored by Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies and L.P. Irvin Lecture Fund
