Spira Mirabilis e Bella e Perduta. Ecopoetica del cinema italiano contemporaneo

In his 1990 book Toward a Transpersonal Ecology, developing a new foundation for environmental studies, Warwick Fox proposed to consider the self in an expansive sense through a process of identification with the environment. The shift between an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective referred to a psychologization of ecophilosophy. In this sense, the so called “deep ecology” (Næss 1973) identified an egalitarian and holistic concept of the world, which is based on the recognition of the equal intrinsic dignity of all beings, as well as of their ecological interconnectedness and interdependence. Moving from these theoretical premises, my first claim is that the film world allows us to take a fresh look at ecopoetics of film. How can a film world identify an environmental poetics? How can it suggest an ecocentric perspective? This essay focuses on the cinematic representation of the relationship between human and non-human and, in particular, on the expression of ecopoetics in contemporary Italian cinema. The analysis of the two movies Bella e perduta (Marcello 2015) and Spira Mirabilis (D'Anolfi and Parenti 2016) is proposed in order to identify key aspects of film ecopoetics. For it, the film world represents the hermeneutic horizon through which filmgoers can reflect on their own identity and role within the ecosystem.