Film is often used to represent the natural landscape and increasingly to communicate environmentalist messages Yet behind even today s green movies are ecologically unsustainable production distribution and consumption processes Noting how seemingly immaterial moving images are supported by highly durable resource dependent infrastructures The Cinematic Footprint traces the history of how the hydrocarbon imagination has been central to the development of film as a medium Nadia Bozak s innovative fusion of film studies and environmental studies makes provocative connections between the disappearance of material resources and the emergence of digital media with examples ranging from early cinema to Dziga Vertov s prescient eye from Chris Marker s analog experiments to the digital work of Agnes Varda James Benning and Zacharias Kunuk Combining an analysis of cinema technology with a sensitive consideration of film aesthetics The Cinematic Footprint offers a new perspective on moving images and the natural resources that sustain them