Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change

Building upon meteorological definitions of weather's dynamism and volatility, this book shows how film weather can reveal character interiority, accelerate plot development, inspire stylistic innovation, comprise a momentary attraction, convey the passage of time, and idealize the world at its greatest meaning-making capacity (unlike our weather, film weather always happens “on time,” whether to tumultuous, romantic, violent, suspenseful, or melodramatic ends). Akin to cinema's structuring of ephemera, cinematic weather suggests aesthetic control over what is fleeting, contingent, wildly environmental, and beyond human capacity to tame. Drawing from a variety of films—ranging from The Wizard of Oz to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, from Citizen Kane to In the Mood for Love—and expanding ecocriticism to include atmospheric change, this study casts film weather as a means of artfully and mechanically conquering contingency through contingency, of taming weather through a medium itself ephemeral and enduring; both skies and screens become readable through interpreting changing phenomena.

• Kristi McKim

• Literary and Cultural Studies
• Media Studies

• School of Literature, Media, and Communication