Larger than Life: Endangered Species across Media in Louis Psihoyos’s Racing Extinction

Alexa WEIK von MOSSNER

Abstract:

The article investigates Racing Extinction as an argumentative eco-documentary that deliberately embraces intermediality as a visual and narrative strategy to draw attention to a pressing environmental issue: anthropogenic species extinction. Scholars, activists, and artists alike have made the argument that storytelling is an important tool in communicating the threat of large-scale biodiversity loss. The article argues that Racing Extinction’s intermedial strategies turn endangered animals into a crossmedia spectacle that is highly entertaining but not without some conceptual and political problems. In this context, it also aims to demonstrate that intermedial ecocriticism can be complemented and enriched in meaningful ways by cognitive approaches in the exploration of mixed ecomedia.

Keywords: extinction, narrative, documentary film, endangered species, intermediality

DOI: 10.24193/ekphrasis.24.2

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