[Commlist] CFP: “Flying Through the Capitalocene: Hollywood, Aviation and Climate Breakdown" Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media

*Call for Papers*

*/Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media/*

*“Flying Through the Capitalocene: Hollywood, Aviation and Climate*

*Breakdown”*

*Editor: Dr Aidan Power (University of Exeter)*

*
*

The histories of American cinema and flight go largely hand in hand, 
with less than a decade separating the first film screenings and the 
Wright Brothers’ first successful flight in 1903. Both technologies have 
long been emblematic of human progress, take people on journeys, 
diminish distances, and are defiantly modern in scope, yet both meet 
with a reckoning when confronted with climate breakdown, as the 
industries that sustain them are forced to justify their outsized carbon 
footprints. This issue of /Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media 
/posits that from a vantage point high in a plane we can glimpse the 
breadth of modern US history, one recorded on-screen by an everdutiful 
Hollywood culture industry.


Aerial cinematography, which first appeared in /Wilbur Wright and His 
Flying Machine/ (1909) would revolutionise human perspective and play a 
significant role in two world wars, while a 1927 recording of Charles 
Lindbergh’s inaugural transatlantic flight to Paris was one of the very 
first sound films. That same year /Wings/—a celebration of US air power 
directed by a World War I pilot (William A. Wellman)—won Best Picture at 
the inaugural Academy Awards. A generation of flight films extolled 
American exceptionalism during the Second World War, the Cold War, and 
latterly the space race, while another era still sought to make sense of 
the nation both before and after 9/11. Nor has this relationship cooled: 
as recently as 2022, /Top Gun: Maverick/ was widely credited with saving 
a Covid-hit film industry, while simultaneously raising all kinds of 
questions about the carbon output of both aviation and film production, 
as well as the US Military’s continued influence over Hollywood output. 
And yet curiously, while academic studies of aviation and cinema exist, 
none perhaps having had more impact than Paul Virilio’s /War and Cinema: 
The Logistics of Perception/, scholarship has been slow to place this 
relationship within the wider contexts of climate breakdown, a gap that 
this issue seeks to address.


There is a certain synchronicity at play when we consider /Top Gun/’s 
links with the US military, for Virilio’s work helps shed light on the 
ways that the film industry’s vertical reorientation arose in large part 
due to the same military’s need for aerial surveillance during the First 
World War. In fact, the connection goes back further still, with Luke 
McKernan raising the possibility that the Wright brothers never filmed 
their inaugural flight because they wanted to sell their secret 
invention to the US military. An unintended consequence of their 
decision, however, as Kevin L. Ferguson notes, was that it made it even 
harder for the world to believe such a feat were possible, and it should 
not surprise us therefore, that from there on out, the presence of 
filmmakers at major aviation events was considered crucial. In turn, as 
Robert Wohl points out, director/pilots including Wellman, and latterly 
Howard Hawks and Howard Hughes soon after popularised the aviation film 
within Hollywood itself.


While environmental scholars remain divided over when the 
Anthropocene—the human-made epoch in which we unequally reside—began, we 
could, should we so choose, date its Great Acceleration to a precise 
date: 16 July 1945, when the first atomic explosion was carried out by 
the US army as part of the Manhattan Project in the New Mexico desert. 
Or perhaps fast forward a month, and consider the events of 6 August 
1945, when the US Airforce dropped the first atomic bomb from the Enola 
Gay on Hiroshima, instantly killing 70,000 people. From this vantage 
point at least, it all began, and was filmed from a plane. It follows 
then that all the time an alternative history was being constructed in 
plain sight, one where the omnipresent spectre of onscreen flight 
naturalised contemporaneous discourses and inadvertently prefigured an 
environmentally degraded future. Such is in keeping with Jennifer Fay’s 
pioneering work on cinema history and climate breakdown, which argues 
that cinema estranges us from our conception of the world and in so 
doing is, and always has been, the aesthetic practice of the 
Anthropocene. The entire history of Hollywood it follows can be seen as 
an inadvertent documenter of the deleterious impact of human activity on 
the planet. As the cultural wing of US capital moreover, it can be seen 
more profitably still as documenter of the Capitalocene, a term with 
origins in the work of Andreas Malm and Jason Moore. Descriptions 
matter, as Moore reminds us in "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, 
History, and the Crisis of Capitalism", when observing that while “the 
Anthropocene sounds the alarm […] it cannot explain how these alarming 
changes came about”. As a whole host of scholars have pointed out, the 
climate crisis accordingly necessitates a ruthless reinterrogation of 
history, as well as of the assumptions that underpin conceptualisations 
of historical progress. An aim of this issue therefore is to consider 
American cinema in its entirety from pre-Hollywood to the current day. 
Planes are useful for sharpening the focus of what is potentially 
unwieldy subject matter, not least because they provide a readily 
identifiable symbol of the planetary phenomenon/hyperobject that is the 
climate crisis, while also serving as microcosmic spaces for modelling 
behaviours and systems of control, most obviously when it comes to 
segregating passengers by class, race, or gender.


In material terms, some 120 years after the Wright Brothers first took 
flight, aviation, like Hollywood itself, remains a defiantly modernist 
phenomenon that shapes our everyday lives, one that, despite piecemeal 
attempts to mitigate its carbon impact, contributes hugely to planetary 
breakdown. Returning to this history and uncovering alternate histories 
then remains hugely important, as for example, Paula Amad’s 
deconstruction of modernist masculinist myths in the article “Affective 
Cinaereality: Women and Aviation in Silent Cinema” reminds us. Moreover, 
as Farai Chipato and David Chandler note with a nod to Donna Haraway, in 
their recent monograph /Race in the Anthropocene: Coloniality, Disavowal 
and the Black Horizon/, “taking the world-making ontological violence of 
coloniality into account means ‘staying with the trouble’ of modernity 
rather than wishing modernity away or hoping that alternative worlds can 
be conjured from within this one”. Doing so opens up possibilities too, 
not least if we conceptually broaden the scope of flight itself, and 
take into account, for example, Michelle D. Commander’s observation in 
/Afro-Atlantic Flight: Speculative Returns and the Black Fantastic/, 
that “flight is transcendence over one’s reality—an escape predicated on 
imagination and the incessant longing to be free”.


Flight moreover has always been an intensely cinematic event; witness to 
give but some examples the fall of Saigon, the Hindenburg disaster, or 
Amelia Earhart landing in Southampton. Crucially, such high-profile 
instances of flight are also intensely dialectical, serving as sites of 
hope and fear that emphasise gaps between mobility and stasis, private 
and public, and coloniser and colonised that crystallise hegemonic 
assumptions at key moments in human history, assumptions that everywhere 
are being resuscitated, respawned, regurgitated and ultimately, 
reinforced in an epoch where large tracts of the earth are becoming 
uninhabitable, and flight in all its manifestations becomes ever more 
stratified.


We see it in the ghoulish spectacle of a planeful of dogs being 
evacuated from Kabul airport, while below helpless Afghans look on. We 
observe it in celebrity vanity flights into orbit funded by billionaire 
robber barons, whose carbon footprints outstrip those of entire nations. 
Or, most gruesomely, we see it play out in the US-funded Israeli 
genocide of the Palestinian people, a death from above that seeks to 
destroy a whole population while scorching the very earth that sustains 
them in a simultaneous act of ecocide. That such barbarism could happen 
in plain sight should horrify us, but it should not surprise us, for the 
inability or outright refusal of Western media to present the world as 
it really is has long been obvious.


As the cultural wing of US hegemony, Hollywood, which literally 
enshrined white supremacy into its production code, has, with some 
notable exceptions, historically towed the line. Again, returning to the 
air is clarifying. Exemplary is the opening scene of /Raiders of the 
Lost Ark/, where archaeologist/thief Indiana Jones steals a native 
artefact from a Peruvian temple before fleeing an enraged local tribe in 
a float plane. As the rising aircraft belches fumes into the air, its 
famous passenger’s mobility is juxtaposed against the natives’ stasis, 
his technological mastery trumping their primitive spears. The resultant 
and by now iconic superimposition of a map over a shot of the plane 
flying through clouds follows, a visual leitmotif that reinforces Jones’ 
mastery of the air and by proxy naturalises both US hegemony and the 
white supremacist tenets that America and Hollywood were built upon, and 
that are today everywhere evident in interrelated neofascist clampdowns 
on civil rights protests and climate activism. In such contexts it 
follows that flight, and who has access to it, will become more than 
ever a matter of life and death.


Returning to the sky, this issue of Alphaville will seek to make 
explicit such connections and unpack interrelated histories of flight, 
Hollywood, and climate breakdown. In so doing, it aims to consider not 
only how such histories shape our present moment, but also explore how 
they might offer salutary lessons for, and potentially modes of 
resistance to, the turbulent futures that lie in store.


*Potential topics could include (but are by no means restricted to):*


The interconnected histories of flight and Hollywood

Early cinema, flight and environmental degradation

The US Military Complex, Hollywood, flight and climate breakdown

Genocide and Ecocide from above: How the culture industry defends the 
indefensible

Drones and resistance: disrupting supply chains in the Capitalocene

Intersections between film and aviation industries

 From Airplane! to Con Air to Snakes on a Plan to Zero Hour. Rethinking 
genre in the Capitalocene

Dromology, flight, and compressed time in the Capitalocene

Technological advancements in aerial cinematography and shooting a 
burning planet

White flight and the privatisation of space

Evacuation: Saigon, Kabul, and Hollywood cultural memory

Onscreen aviation labour practices and organising as mode of resistance

Ecofeminist resistance and cinematic flight

Race, flight, resistance: from Tulsa to Oakland

“Get off my plane!” Revisiting 1990s flight narratives in the era of 
climate breakdown


*Publication Details*


*If you are interested in contributing to this issue, please send a 
300-word abstract along with a brief biography to Aidan Power 
((a.power3 /at/ exeter.ac.uk)) by November 10^th  2025*

*
*

Full-length articles: 5,500-7,000 words, including notes but excluding 
references

Video essay: Approx. 3–15 mins, plus accompanying text 500–1,000 words

Articles and video essays will be subject to full peer review. 
Guidelines here: https://www.alphavillejournal.com/Guidelines.html

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*Abstracts Due:* 10 November 2025

*Acceptance Notifications:* 20 November 2025

*Full Articles Due:* 15 May 2026


Alphaville is a non-profit diamond open-access journal, and it requests 
no fee from authors or readers.

Visit us at https://www.alphavillejournal.com

/
/



​Dr Aidan Power

Lecturer in Film and Television

University of Exeter

he/him

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/

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