In Spring of 2026, the first stage of NASA’s Artemis mission captured photographs of the Earth from space, a collective earthling selfie that momentarily transcended the squalor and congestion of the daily news cycle. While satellite imagery, Google maps, and weather forecasting technology have made representations of the global scale relatively commonplace, the astronaut photos have a human presence that allows them to capture something of the sublimity of what it means to live on a planet.

The nature of the planetary perspective is epistemologically elusive, being difficult and maybe impossible to reconcile with the phenomenology of lived experience. It is also inherently polysemous, being open to numerous, ramifying, and conflicting interpretations, indicating both mankind’s puniness and its awesome technological power, providing a meta-explanation for the reality of everything while being simultaneously abstract and largely irrelevant to everyday life, suggesting a deep connection between human beings and Earth while also overriding Earth toward the project of discovering new and improved planetary homes. Gayatri Chakrovarty Spivak positions inherent alterity at the center of what she calls “planet-thought”: “The planet is in the species of alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on loan. … If we imagine ourselves as planetary subjects … alterity remains underived from us; it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it pushes us away.”

Cinema is the art of representing the world through an uncanny simulacrum of itself, which may make it a particularly apt medium for capturing the ambivalent and paradoxical alterity that defines the ontology of the planetary imagination. Indeed, one of the first works of narrative cinema, Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon (1902), is structured around visionary depictions of Earth from space that uncannily anticipate the Apollo and Artemis photos while also inspiring a rich filmic legacy of representations of planetarity. The narrative and imagery of such films has helped to shape the popular perception of what it means to live on a planet, and at their best, these films engage the kinds of contradictions, paradoxes, and ambiguities that Spivak and other cultural studies theorists have explored.

This panel will focus on what movies about planets can teach us about what planets are and how to live on them. We accept proposals about movies that foreground telluric-scale events on earth (Armageddon [1998], Don’t Look Up [2021], etc.), movies about space exploration (Apollo 13 [1995], Gravity [2013], The Martian [2015], etc.), or movies set on alien planets (Star Wars, Dune, etc.). Any other approaches to examining the intersection between cinema and planetarity are also welcome.

Please submit a 300-word abstract by September 30, 2026.

View Session

https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22472

Contact Dr. Randy Laist with questions: rlaist@bridgeport.edu.