1

UNSUSTAINABLE CINEMA
Global Supply Chains

Seán Cubitt

Struggles over naming our epoch of climate change – Anthropocene?

Capitalocene? – are symptomatic of the growing recognition that ecology and
economy can no longer be separated: that indeed, they have always been impli-
cated in one another. For flm studies, this recognition necessitates adding to
early ecocritical concerns with what flm does, a renewed inquiry into how
it works, what it is made of, and who pays for it. That “who”, in the context
of ecocritique, obviously includes non-humans. Twenty-frst-century cinema
and media are networked. This network is clearly the condition of distribu-
tion, a branch of the industry that has historically included the management of
fnite numbers of physical copies being transported to exhibition venues and
returned to warehouses. Moving DCP (digital content packages) on portable
hard drives is easier on projectionists’ sciatica but does not fundamentally alter
the logistics of moving flms physically from place to place and the associated
security required to protect intellectual property. Security remains a key con-
cern in the delivery of fles via digital networks, and though the restriction on
numbers of copies is relaxed, the costs of shifting them from supplier to viewer
are still real, and the energy and pollution outfall is only shifted from internal
combustion to electricity grids. This chapter explores the geopolitical dimen-
sions of the global flm industry’s supply chain networks at a time when digi-
tal production, distribution and exhibition are placing tremendous strains on
human and non-human alike, asking whether human economies bound to the
physical limitations of the earth can sustain our insatiable hunger for media
entertainment.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003246602-3
20 Seán Cubitt

Then and Now: Setting the Stage for Economic and

Ecological Legacies
Some things have not changed. World War One decimated European flm
industries, and the rising hegemon across the Atlantic was swift to take advan-
tage. Despite the various golden ages of German and Danish silent flm, French
cinema of the Popular Front and the popular success of British studios in the
1940s, Hollywood’s ascendancy in European and global markets became a fact
of cultural life. Giuseppe Richeri shows how network production and distri-
bution has not altered the dominance of US movie product in the European
market, citing 2015 fgures indicating that even in countries with mature cin-
ema industries like Germany, Italy and France, a US title is potentially more
proftable than a European title (2020, 136).
Similar structural imbalances shape markets in Latin America and Austral-
asia, with perhaps only India, among the major economies, enjoying mass pop-
ularity for home-grown flms without resorting to import controls rationing
the numbers of US movies entering the domestic market (e.g., on the Chinese
model: Chow 2020). Graeme Turner and Jinna Tay proposed some years ago
that “these days the answer to the question ‘What is television?’ very much
depends on where you are” (2009, 8), to which Lobato and Lotz responded
“the answer to the question ‘What is Netfix?’ clearly also depends on where
you are” (2020, 133; see also Lobato 2019; McDonald et al. 2021), bearing
out Richeri’s observation on flm availability in the European Union at the
global scale. The answers to our question, “What are flm production and dis-
tribution these days?” similarly depend on geography, which implicates the
environment.
While cinema has migrated to digital, flm production and network distri-
bution environmental costs are not mitigated by the digitization of distribution
and its informal sharing economies (e.g., piracy: Crisp 2015). Making the flm
industry “sustainable” has become the goal of signifcant and admirable institu-
tional and organizational initiatives (wearealbert.org, greeningofstreaming.org,
BFI 2020, green4ema.org), but when it circulates in fnancial, planning, devel-
opment, and policy areas of the industry, the word can simply mean “likely
to survive for a few years”, and “compatible with maintaining proft levels,
business practices and tax base”. As Leerom Medovoi notes, “what corporate
sustainability discourse cannot admit, therefore, and what the word ‘sustain-
ability’ unfortunately helps it to disavow, is the prospect that [ecological] injury
is a necessary and ‘sustaining’ feature of capital accumulation” (2009). To the
extent that it is an industry and therefore bound to cycles of credit, risk and
proftability, cinema fnds itself pitched against the very environments that sus-
tain it. Nonetheless, there remains the imperative voiced by economist Will
Davies, “Anthropocenic utopias are urgently required” (2017, 1), accepting the
argument that any planned utopia is an imposition of present thinking on the
 Unsustainable Cinema: Global Supply Chains 21

future; Davies nonetheless specifes that ecocritical utopianism commits to a

commons protected from exploitation.
Many existing studies of materials and energy, infrastructures, and gover-
nance have investigated the new conditions of flm production and distribution
for two decades or more under the rubric of globalisation (e.g., Miller et al.
2001, 2005). Globalization has been characterised by the neo-liberal corporate
seizure of nation states (Plant 2009) concentrating on the economic to the
exclusion of the ecological, opening the gates for a new mode of ecological
colonization. Raising economics to the dominant driver of policy was in itself
a performative act (Callon 2006; Çalışkan and Callon 2009); the ubiquitous
description of the flm as a “creative industry” presumes the supremacy of eco-
nomic interests. A key premise of this chapter is that “sustainability” (as fgured
by the corporate practices that dominate global economies, including the flm
industry) is a false reconciliation of economics and ecocritique and that Davies’
Anthropocenic utopias can only become feasible if and when the divorce of
ecology from economics is truly overcome. Cinema has as its urgent task not
only to envision those utopias and to outline the devastation resulting from the
lack of them but also to create models for ecological economies beyond sus-
tainability. Of all the technologies that capital promises will avoid the coming
cataclysm, the apparatus of the moving image, though bitterly compromised (as
this chapter must argue), is also the beam of light that we can follow towards a
new common hearth – whose Greek name was oikos, the root of both ecology
and economics.

Physical Distribution
A good deal of ink has been spilt on the impact of streaming services on
broadcast television (see notably Lotz 2014, 2018; Marks et al. 2020), and we
can look forward to more writing on the long-term impact of streaming on
cinema-going once the efects of the COVID-19 pandemic assimilate into
everyday life (see Mila Zuo’s chapter in this collection). The 90–180 minute fea-
ture flm, which emerged in the 1910s, has survived as a cultural form through
the long-term demise of the theatrical exhibition since the 1940s, weathering
the challenges of over-the-air and cable television, rental (and sell-through)
video, and internet streaming; bruised and bloodied it is still the dominant
movie format. The appeal of short-form videos and the escalating production
values of serial drama have whittled down its dominance through the seem-
ingly opposed attractions of distracted and binge viewing. Nonetheless, the
investment in theatrical releases in the months following pandemic lockdowns
indicates that corporations still have faith in feature flms, with spectacular
productions like Eternals (Chloe Zhao), The Last Duel (Ridley Scott), Dune
(Denis Villeneuve), and No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga) following each
other on successive weekends during the last months of 2021. Each of these
22 Seán Cubitt

movies beneftted from distributed production, with second units shooting in

diverse locations and studios, and (what are still called, rather inaccurately)
pre- and post-production teams working simultaneously in globally distributed
networks. How do cinema’s global supply chains, linking location shoots with
ofshore efects houses and metropolitan distribution, stack up in the ecological
economy?
Supply chains look diferent depending not only on where the viewer is
or on the point-of-view of each worker playing a contributory role in the
chain but also on the standpoint of an environment experiencing a flm crew
descending on a location or the view from the position of server farms deliv-
ering “screen trafc” (Acland 2003). Even as the geography of human and
non-human components in the making and movement of flms implies difer-
ential considerations given to metropolitan ecologies and employees compared
to marginalized locations and workers, it also implies temporal diferences. The
duration of viewing on SVOD (streaming video on demand) services, including
the selection of a title, pausing, commenting and recommending, produces data
points that inform future production decisions. Other data prompt decisions on
budgets for visual efects, soundtracks, release dates, and marketing campaigns.
High-bandwidth communication networks enable 24-hour around-the-clock
workshifts across diferent time zones, lengthening the working day, accelerat-
ing production, and enabling further geographical distribution of production
tasks and real-time decisions that are equally driven by accumulated historical
data on tastes and reactions, and by projecting trends into a plannable future.
Such network logistics have transformed the long history of runaway pro-
ductions (Steinhart 2019) and transnational co-productions (Chan 2012). Trend
projections based on accumulated data about prior experience can have last-
ing impacts. Governmental and cultural reactions against the abuse of local
ecologies on location shoots can remove them from the list of potential loca-
tions for years at a time while recovering from that abuse can take even longer
(Law et al. 2007; Cripps and Olarn 2019). Nonetheless, locations continue to
attract producers, as do tax breaks, currency deals, and efciency coefcients;
a hundred less obviously creative determinants may also make a desirable site
for directors unpalatable to producers. Like restoration of damaged local eco-
systems, the operation of supply chains requires labor that extends not only to
non-human work but also to human, technological, and environmental labor
that is not deemed “creative” in standard economic and aesthetic accounting
procedures. As Mezzadra and Neilsen phrase it, when work is reduced, for logis-
tical purposes, to abstract operations, those operations simultaneously reduce
“the complex interactions of space and time that occur between its seeming
moments of cause and efect, input and output, to linear processes” (2019, 6; see
also Nost and Goldstein 2022). Economic operations render human and non-
human labor invisible, much like the contributions of land, air and water to the
making and distribution of flms.
 Unsustainable Cinema: Global Supply Chains 23

Far from immaterial, the physical infrastructures and consumer devices that
contemporary cinema depends on are assembled through extensive ocean-
spanning trade networks of containerized shipping, one of the least regulated
and most polluting of all industries, even as it is one of the most essential parts
of the supply chain. When shipping is disrupted, components and fnished con-
sumer and professional equipment that sustain the flm industry’s global supply
chain cannot circulate or even be produced. Yet, the ecological toll of such
shipping networks is on par with the impacts of digitization (Sekula 1995).
The International Energy Agency’s 2021 report predicts maritime trade’s fuel
consumption will see global growth of 0.3 million barrels a day of bunker
fuel, and the International Maritime Organization’s recent regulation reduc-
ing the sulphur content of maritime diesel will not efect its carbon content
(IEA 2021, 16). Shipping, like aviation, contributes around 3% of global car-
bon emissions. Fierce arguments as to whether air and sea transport should be
covered by national targets or passed on to global bodies like the International
Maritime Organisation – itself in hock to the major shipping companies and
widely accused of greenwashing its unambitious COP26 targets (Container
Management 2021) – contributes to the lack of oversight, especially in interna-
tional waters. The perceived urgency of restoring global trade to pre-pandemic
levels, not least to rebuild supply chains for consumer electronic equipment,
blinds international bodies and governments to the physical challenge of reduc-
ing transport’s environmental costs and encourages the shameful shell game
of “net zero emissions”. Further environmental impacts from spilled fuel and
cargo and cleansing buoyancy tanks, often unreported, are further hidden costs
of the supply chains feeding global cinema.

Unsustainable Networks: Shipping and Satellites

In recent years, streaming services have been charged with signifcant carbon
footprints (Marks et al. 2020; Deneault 2021). Many providers and the telcos
that handle their transmissions have moved to renewable energy and much
more efcient storage and transmission, so that the greatest energy use tends
to be in domestic equipment (routers, peripherals, and screens) with a marked
move towards smaller screens (though it is unclear whether more people shar-
ing a larger screen has less impact than the same number watching small indi-
vidual screens) (The Carbon Trust 2021, 9). The carbon footprint of video
streaming per individual viewer is in the range of 55 grams of carbon per
hour of video streaming but given the huge numbers of people viewing both
long-form (e.g., Netfix) and short-form (e.g., YouTube) video, the total fgures
are more dramatic. As The Guardian reported in October 2021, Netfix fans
“clocked up more than 6bn [6 billion] hours watching the top 10 shows – which
included Squid Game, Stranger Things, Money Heist and Bridgerton – in the frst
28 days after each show was released” (Sweeney 2021). Scaling up for the
24 Seán Cubitt

long-tail economics of targeted viewing, adding in the more than 1 billion

subscribers to streaming services globally, without considering the billions of
hours of video viewed on social media platforms, those 55 grams begin to mul-
tiply towards huge tonnages of carbon, comparable to something in the range
of 147,000 standard gas canisters every hour.
The quantities of materials and energy required to freight ostensibly intan-
gible goods and services are deliberately obscured by the language of “cloud
computing” and “server farms” with their atmospheric and pastoral connota-
tions. Ecologically, a picture is worth considerably more than 1,000 words. The
phrase “A picture of a smiling child” contains six words yet a passport-sized
digital image of the same subject takes the equivalent of 2,000 “words” of
code. A single frame of high-resolution video of a child smiling is exponen-
tially larger and needs far more bandwidth. In so-called “emerging markets”
like Africa, the growth spiral of new formats and new demands for speed and
coverage increases the need for infrastructural media of connection, now
themselves increasingly a monopoly industry (Starosielski 2021). The e-waste
disposal challenge of tens of thousands of kilometres of abandoned cable is only
one result of this monopoly on subsea network infrastructure. The other is
increased competition from near-Earth orbital satellites.
SpaceX’s Starlink project is intended to supply those developing markets
with infrastructures sufcient to meet increasing demand for entertainment
and information media but is also being pitched as a fast and efcient net-
working solution for investment capital from the Global North, which will
include supply chains and logistical services. SpaceX ultimately intends a net-
work of 42,000 geostationary satellites (Mann 2021). A satellite launch only
uses about the same amount of fuel as a trans-Atlantic fight, the SpaceX vehi-
cles carry several satellites per trip and the launch capsules are reusable, so
there is some mitigation of the normal environmental impact of space vehicles.
But satellites have a fnite lifetime, limited by the amount of gas or liquid
fuel they can carry for adjusting their position (critical to their orientation
to incoming and ongoing signals), which is continuously afected by heating,
cooling and the tidal pulls of gravity. Their thermoelectric generators, typi-
cally fuelled by plutonium to power transponders and navigation systems, also
have a fnite lifespan, and though each satellite carries only tiny quantity of
radioactive isotopes, 42,000 satellites use an appreciable amount. Antennae and
transponders, like most electronic components, are made from some common
but also some rare minerals, with all the problems they pose for the lands they
were mined on. If the problems of space debris from decommissioned satellites
are ever solved, that too will have signifcant environmental costs (Undseth
et al. 2020). Extracting, refning, and fabricating advanced technologies from
the resultant metals are all work, and though the forces of gravity and radiation
appear entropic from the standpoint of capital, they too are energies at work
in the supply chain of global cinema. The result of their labor may be a long,
 Unsustainable Cinema: Global Supply Chains 25

drawn-out scattering of molecules through the upper atmosphere and back to

the surface of the Earth decades or centuries hence, with unknown efects, in
orbit or in the air, on the planet’s albedo, the chemistry of the atmosphere, and
the kinds of allergies described in Aarón Lacayo’s chapter in this volume. This
too is work as defned by the laws of thermodynamics.
That we do not have to wait for thousands of years while molecules from
abandoned satellites settle on the ground or ocean is surely clear from the inter-
national trade in waste electronics (Szasz 1994; Grossman 2007; Gabrys 2010).
As the Basel Action Network reports (2002, 2005), much work has been done
on the human and environmental impacts of recycling waste electronics from
the Global North to the Global South. As in production, the post-consumption
disposal of unwanted devices is organized in global supply chains feeding recy-
cling zones throughout the South, from Agbogbloshie to Chittagong (Amuzu
2018; Mah 2021). A major challenge is that the supply to end-users of waste
materials depends on a mixture of formal (governmental or commercially
regulated) and informal brokers. Unregulated waste brokers operate at or
beyond the fringes of the law and are likely to dismiss the claims of work-
ers and local ecologies for protection from the toxins involved in both the
valuable recycled materials and the valueless ones burned or otherwise left to
rot. Extensive eforts to control the informal sector (Baidya et al. 2020) often
break down under the demands for cheap, quick and relatively high-quality
waste (e.g., stripped of unproftable plastics). Not only is the labor of both for-
mal and informal waste industries invisible, but the toxins they scatter are also
tucked away, unseen by the wealthy world unless exposed by a documentary
like Kern Konwiser and Mago Nagasaka’s Still a Black Star (2022, http://www.
stillablackstar.net/). Audiences – ecocritically aware audiences – must draw
out the implications, perceiving the depths of such labor as that produced by
e-waste, on fat screens. Even when “reality is freed to exhibit itself ” (Cavell
1979, 166), its self-presentation implies the work and environmental impacts of
production, distribution, and waste and demands a parallel work of perception
and understanding from its viewers.

Network Transport: The Labor of Digital Special Effects

The link between the work performed by what accountants refer to, embar-
rassingly without irony, as “environmental services” and the labor implicit in
supply chains appears discontinuous partly because of the disjuncture between
scales and times of operation, and partly because the whole purpose of capitalist
supply chains, as Sekula, Orenstein and Mezzadra and Neilsen have variously
proposed, is to hide labor (as well as to minimise the wages paid for it). Films
too are devices for hiding the labor, human and non-human, required to make
them. Contemporary supply chains, notably in the visual efects sector, are
not simply an efcient use of digital networks, although the move to digital
26 Seán Cubitt

flmmaking has certainly improved the relative ease and speed of delivery of
flm services from remote workplaces to Hollywood productions via commer-
cial internet channels. The efects professionals interviewed in Michael Curtin
and Kevin Sanson’s Voices of Labor (2017) repeatedly indicate the power of six
major studios’ efective monopsony in relation to more than 500 signifcant
efects shops around the world, the efects of deregulation of labor, targeted
investment in sunrise industries (including efects and the creative industries
generally), tax rebates and subsidies from national and local governments, and
the efects of purchasing power in fuctuating currencies. Increasingly precar-
ious employment opportunities drive efects artists to migrate to ofshore pro-
duction centres following the work, or to stay in the major production centres
competing in a race to the bottom on price, quality, and speed.
The golden rule of flmmaking “You can have it fast and cheap but it won’t
be good, or good and fast but it won’t be cheap” no longer works when the
market is so severely imbalanced in favour of fast and cheap. As Curtin and
Sanson observe,

Firms bid for work with fxed prices, meaning they enter into a contrac-
tual agreement with producers to deliver the required imagery on a fxed
deadline at a guaranteed price. There are no allowances for the additional
time or resources a frm may require because of production delays or
requested changes.
(2017, 201)

Instead, they overwork existing staf or hire extra staf on short contracts to
complete the work, including tweaks to existing efects plates demanded by
their buyers, without extra cash, in the hopes that completing their contracts
will get them the next job, when they can make good their losses. The result
is increasing precarity not only for workers but also for shops. The major shops
extend the practice by establishing branches globally, wherever subsidies and
talent combine, thus hollowing out any possibility of union organization, while
also sub-contracting to smaller frms for specifc shots or layers. These small
frms then carry the highest fnancial risks and ofer the worst employment
conditions (Curtin et al. 2014; Curtin and Sanson 2016).
This economic deracination of the efects supply chain not only discon-
nects flmmaking from lived spaces and ecologies: there are profound geopo-
litical aesthetics involved. The fnancial structure of Tsui Hark’s 2005 hit Seven
Swords (Qī Jiàn) and its integrated supply chain of visual efects, for example,
drove the subsequently political choice to shoot much of the live action on loca-
tion in Xinjiang (Cubitt 2019). The aesthetics of wuxia (martial arts) movies
includes the diegetic world of jianghu – the “rivers and lakes” world of mar-
tial arts, equivalent to the storyworlds of pirate flms and westerns – that Ste-
phen Teo describes as marginal, illicit, and abstract (2009, 18). Such abstracting
 Unsustainable Cinema: Global Supply Chains 27

of settings from the labor of localities, also characteristic of contemporary

Hollywood’s displaced geographies, removes any impetus for any actual loca-
tion to represent itself rather than, say, Mars, Asgard, or even Boston (imper-
sonated by New York in The Departed [Martin Scorsese, 2006]). This aesthetic
is not just a product of economics – though it certainly is that – nor a standard
practice that ecocriticism can therefore ignore. It is a symptom of a profound
de-localisation that bleeds across contemporary culture, from our collective
ignorance of the provenance of our everyday foods to our cheerful disregard
for the destination of our waste.
The abstraction of aesthetics from human and non-human labor is an inte-
gral part of the abstraction of all human life from its local and planetary ecol-
ogy. Film production has long screened of the outside world as much as it has
created fctional ones. Compositing – layering foregrounds and backgrounds,
only some of which are photographed – began with Méliès’ painted backdrops
in the frst decade of the twentieth century. More recently, Industrial Light
and Magic built a virtual set for the Lucasflm/Disney+ series The Mandalorian,
powered by Epic Games’ aptly named Unreal Engine (Axon 2020), an instal-
lation now being eagerly internationalized (Hopewell 2020; Austin 2021). We
should recall that every screen is not only a display mechanism but also a device
for screening out an exterior world from a viewer’s perception and screening of
the privileged site of viewing from the global supply chain and labor that make
such viewing possible. The obverse of the delocalising of locations promised in
the Dubai Film Commissions slogan “Make it what you want it to be” (Dick-
inson 2020) is the universalisation of the screen itself, not just as an interface
but as a dividing line between humans and their natural and technological
ecologies. It demonstrates not only the sustainability of illusion but also the
illusion of sustainability.
Alienating screens and screen products is not without human cost. Kay
Dickinson (2021) emphasises the participation of governments and higher
education providers in producing the skilled technical and creative workers
that the globalised flm industry requires. This support includes not only skills
training but also attuning attitudes to the requirements of a project-based
(rather than employment-based) model of labor, an entrepreneurship of the self
(Foucault 2010, 226). Readied to consider themselves not as employees at all
but as mini-enterprises ready to compete on quality, speed, price, and fexibil-
ity, such workers are decreasingly likely to organize in the traditions of cultural
sector guilds and trades unions or to dispute capitalist accountancy’s disdain for
the environmental costs of its activities (shifting such costs, if acknowledging
them at all, to marketing departments).
While the impacts of the New International Division of Cultural Labor
(Miller et al. 2005) are perhaps less obviously implicated in environmental con-
cerns than location shooting, they compound the impacts of the runaway flm
model increasingly typical of Hollywood products (as well of the Hong Kong
28 Seán Cubitt

flm industry among others [Yeh and Chao 2018]). The same supply chain logis-
tics that govern the extraction, shipping, and manufacture of electronics and
the shipping of e-waste also govern the efects industry. The globalization of
visual efects is embedded in supply chain capitalism or in Anna Tsing’s (2009)
phrase the “technical architectures of biopolitical control” that, as Ned Rossiter
describes, “register an epochal shift of geopolitical proportions as automation
increasingly takes command” (2021, 132). The articulations of biopolitics and
geopolitics concern not only humans but also the historical specifcity of the
alienation of humans from a planet increasingly composed of visited flm sites
and locations, not of ecologically sustainable co-habitation.
Maintaining systemic competition between suppliers, and between creatives
bargaining for employment on projects secured by suppliers, also maintains
the critical diferences between suppliers that buyers can parley into proft.
Diferences are key sources of wealth, but from the standpoint of major studios,
those diferences must be reduced to numbers, not qualities. Factors such as
tax regimes, transaction and translation costs can be accounted for. It is almost
a given that quality can be dictated at the level of contracts, and that suppliers
are legally obliged to provide the same quality, so that costs become the critical
factor in purchasing. Buyers – the studios – need only concentrate therefore on
price, and on ensuring that suppliers are kept in a position of weakness in order
to maintain buyer control (Skilton 2014). This practice, however, combined
with the brevity of contracts in a project-based industry, leads to the situation
described by Jennifer Loy:

The stresses of a condensed time frame for project delivery, and the
bespoke nature of the props and construction required, driven by man-
agement teams often brought specifcally for a project, mean it is likely
there is little appetite for pre-empting regulatory change by collabora-
tively updating industry practices.
(2020, 46)

The reduction of diference in price is integral to the exclusion of environmen-

tal concerns from both flm industry economics and its aesthetics.

Conclusion: Supply Chain Aesthetics

Films tend to disguise their production under the veneer of entertainment (taken
in the broadest sense to include the spectrum from amusement to profundity
that characterises escapist and utopian, emotional and intellectual, poetic, and
political pleasures of cinema). Similarly, producers externalize the economic
and ecological efects of flm-making from the experience of viewing movies.
Ecocritical examination needs to unearth the hidden dimensions folded into
the paradise garden of a given flm. Jennifer Fay’s analysis of Buster Keaton’s
 Unsustainable Cinema: Global Supply Chains 29

Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928) (2018, 23–58) and Hunter Vaughan’s of Singin’ in the
Rain (Gene Kelley and Stanley Donen, 1952) (2019, 71–90) are exemplary of
studies that approach the materialities of flm not as enclosed in the aesthetics of
formalism that attends only to the audiovisual fabric of the movie and, in some
instances, the viewer’s engagement in it, but as extending to what we know
about a flm when we see it, and what we fnd out about it subsequently. This
form of critique is not solely about interpretation. Film analysis is interminable,
although an ecological frame does lead the inquiry in particular directions.
On the one hand, there is no end to the connections cinema must make to the
world that produces it and the world that receives it. Any one act of analysis is,
on the other hand, fnite; we chose what to attend to and for how long. If we
were to expand the concept of supply chains metaphorically, then the entire
history of the world and its cultures exist, as Stéphane Mallarmé might have
said, to complete themselves in a movie. Restricting ourselves to the geopoliti-
cal economy of global supply chains in the movie industry since the beginning
of this century is already a vast enough topic. The fact that audiences cannot
clearly see or hear supply chains on screen or in the soundtrack should be itself
an object of inquiry.
An audience must begin with what we hear and see, using the skills we have
acquired from flm viewing in various modes (theatres, televisions, handhelds,
etc.) and the traditions of flm criticism to take a step back from the entertain-
ment and our enjoyment of it to see how it operates materially in the here and
now. As we have developed our understanding of the tools of narrative, imag-
ing and scoring for more than a century and learned to analyse continuity and
synchronisation, so we need now to learn to unpick compositing. And as audi-
ences learned to trace the history of studios, directors and stars, now we need to
track the new confguration of transnational flm production and distribution.
Just as special efects inspired fan cultures fascinated by screen illusions, and
continuity yielded up its secrets to close readings of editing practice, so too the
disjunctures of supply chains will become increasingly apparent as we track
locations – often quietly referred to in credit sequences with acknowledgement
to regional flm bodies and government schemes – and pick up on suppliers
of visual and special efects listed on easily accessed professional sites and the
trade press. There will be harder roads to travel where ecological impacts are
concerned; few trade reporters and very few corporate employees are interested
in these aspects of sustainability, not least because the only route to addressing
them, global organization, would wreck the economics of micro-diferences
in working conditions. In this light, it is clear that unionisation and environ-
mental protection are equally at odds with the supply chain strategy of anarchic
competition. Film appreciation and flm aesthetics cannot be separated from
either struggle.
In a time when apocalyptic forces of war, pestilence, and famine tie us ever
more closely to a planet in crisis, this chapter cannot but convey the sense that
30 Seán Cubitt

economies and ecologies are time-critical as well as geographical. Many global

leaders admit their weakness in the face of a system that gives them no leeway
to bring about change. The entrenched power of fossil-based industries, whose
CEOs claim they too are powerless in the face of market forces, overpowers
governments. Commerce itself fails preposterously to plan for its own destruc-
tion (Collier et al. 2021). Capital no longer operates according to the will of
even the world’s 2,153 kleptocrats, who own more wealth than the poorest
60% of the planet’s population (Oxfam 2020). The alienation enacted on and by
screens has to be unpicked, with patient labor, so that we humans do not fnd
ourselves crushed in a pincer movement between two seemingly unstoppable
forces: a cyborg economy out of control and a planet rebelling against market
anarchy. Ecocritical flm studies, like any other niche, are intimately connected
to the economic, political, technical, and ecological forces that give it its object
and sustain its activities. By intervening in the intervals left vulnerable by the
inevitable incompleteness of cinematic illusion on screen and in the experience
of the viewer, we can begin to lever open a cultural and organizational pathway
to ending the catastrophic impasse of the present. We should learn from the
disastrous logistics of the cinematic supply chain how to design intelligent and
collaborative human–technical–ecological logistics of our own.

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