Canary in a Coal mine Carbon Cinema and Three Ecologies of Energy

Coal has played a crucial role in energy supply for our modern times, including the development of film and media industries. Choosing the site of mines and mining as a central way of articulating energy regimes, this article addresses three levels of carbon energy as encountered in historical and contemporary coalmining films. By following the black gold from modernity to the contemporary age increasingly marked by the Anthropocene, I will propose a three-folded entangled pharmacology of carbon energy. Inspired by an ecological approach to cinema and Guattari’s ethic-aesthetic ecosophy, a material ecological approach will look at the carbon rock in the earth crust as well as the atmospheric carbon cycle; at another level the socio-economic ecosystems surrounding coal mining are addressed in terms of labor politics and exploitation; and thirdly I will investigate the mental ecologies of coal mining and carbon cycles in relation to our consciousness of emancipatory struggles of rights and recognition but ultimately of a consciousness of the earth, life and death.