TY - JOUR
AU - Fucile, Frank
AB - Every film is a documentary of its own making.           – Jacques Rivette Danger Movies have so accustomed us to the sublime as a visual aesthetic that we sometimes forget its threatening potential. The romantics who promoted our modern notion of the sublime never doubted the danger and power of nature, but they nevertheless exhorted us to escape the comfort and safety of ideas and representations to boldly engage with the natural world (Cronon 10–11).1 After more than a century of aestheticizing, valorizing, and protecting wilderness spaces, Americans have come to appreciate them as scenery—whether in person or in photography. This sort of appreciation makes love of the environment a form of consumerism (Morton 114). Furthermore, imperialist, sexist, and ableist presumptions still haunt our perception of nature and at times give environmentalism a disturbingly anti-intellectual bent (Morton 93, 136). We see this especially in rugged activities of natural enjoyment like mountain climbing, a hobby that emerged in the romantic period and which continues today as a major tourist industry. The film industry represents the more comfortable side of this monetization of spectacular views, epic adventures, and even capitalist guilt itself. As absurd as it may seem to consider a 1970s action movie as an exemplary target for ecocritical theory, the very absurdity and vapidity of a film like The Eiger Sanction (Clint Eastwood, 1975) make it an ideal text through which to deconstruct our concept of nature, critique our ideas about wilderness, and explore the agency of matter. It is a lesson in ecophobia that ends with the object of study hijacking the class. In many ways an ill-conceived experiment in realism, The Eiger Sanction is above all a film of actual locations with physical stunts. Such engagement with the environment was central to Clint Eastwood’s concept of the film, and his decision to do his own stunts was so important to his self-presentation as a virile hero grappling with the natural environment that he insisted on directing the film when nobody else would and even persisted in its production after a fatal accident early in the shoot (O’Brien 125–27). The very premise of the film stresses that the aesthetic appreciation of mountains, cliffs, and deserts emerges from their danger. Agency If we recognize and, in Eastwood’s case, even court that danger, we must accept the conditions of filmmaking as forces that might question, complicate, or challenge the narrative, intentional, and human aspects of a film. Like the protagonist’s claim that he “probably won’t actually kill” his enemy, The Eiger Sanction only makes sense if we consider its moments of violence through networks of distributed agency (Bennett 22–28). Indeed, the title of the film itself, which credits a mountain for an act of homicide, emphasizes that vital materialism is not a merely theoretical concept but rather an articulation of the world as we can best perceive it. The idea that the Eiger itself is culpable for the deaths that occur on it evokes Bruno Latour’s concept of the actant (75–77) or the deodand of English jurisprudence (Bennett 8–10). Indeed, while shooting The Eiger Sanction’s climax on the north face of the mountain (nicknamed Mordwand, literally German for “murder wall”), a falling boulder killed the expert climber David Knowles (Sykes 304). Of course, Clint Eastwood didn’t actually kill Knowles, and the same impersonal, nonhuman forces that did could have just as easily killed Eastwood himself. Nonetheless, Eastwood’s commitment to filming actual climbing on location obviously placed his cast and crew in mortally dangerous situations in an effort to capture sublime images. Given that The Eiger Sanction virtually does away with sets, characters, and plot, there is good reason to focus on its material ecology. Indeed, for most films—regardless of whether their scripts intend to engage with ecology or environmental issues—this aspect is a crucial opportunity for ecocriticism.2 Focusing on this register not only enables ecocritical analysis of any film regardless of its subject matter, but in this case, it also critiques what Adrian Ivakhiv would call The Eiger Sanction’s “perceptual ecology” (90–91). If the film’s plot primarily consists of a series of spectacular and dangerous situations, its main conflict is matter’s tendency to thwart human ideas and intents—including the capacity of a landscape to kill. Thus, focusing on the material or “documentary” aspects of a film that was very difficult to make and which led to the death of one crewmember will illustrate the agentic, narrative, and critical capacities of matter, demonstrating a process by which the landscapes of a film challenge and resist its script. In its own way, The Eiger Sanction is aware that the bodies and worldviews of its main character and director are threatened by forces beyond their control. Focusing on a film’s material ecology not only decenters humans from their dominant position within the narrative frame, but it also demonstrates how an eco-materialist perspective facilitates engagement with genre films, with non-narrative aspects of film, and even with films generally considered unworthy of critical attention. Through a material critique of such spectacular exploitations of nature, we find opportunities to illuminate the perceptual ecology that underlies the problematic politics of so many action films. Notably, we must recognize that critiques resulting from such an examination are collaborations through which the film critiques itself. Especially in a film like The Eiger Sanction, we discover that the concept and production process invited such a critique to the table. Landscapes The Eiger Sanction is structured in three acts, each dealing with a landscape that causes the featured killing or “sanction.” These settings correspond to genre shifts in the film’s visual style and narrative logic. The first act (0:00–0:40) is an espionage thriller set in an urban landscape of offices, bedrooms, hallways, and streets. Clint Eastwood’s first stunt involves climbing a downspout, and the sanction is completed by throwing the target out a window. The second act (0:40–1:16) combines a revenge western with an action movie training montage and is set in Monument Valley. The actors spend much of their screen time silently climbing rock formations, and the section culminates in the assertion of the deadly power of a massive desert. The third act, filmed on location in the Alps, (1:16–2:08) abruptly switches from a thriller to a mountain climbing movie as the conflict shifts to the question of whether any of the climbers will make it back from the Eiger alive. Ultimately, the Eiger executes its sanction, and only our protagonist survives. Just as good acting, solid stunts, and great cinematography compensate for a shoddy script, The Eiger Sanction invites its landscapes to be stars in their own right. They are not merely picturesque backdrops but deadly environments, and in recognizing the agency of matter, this film undermines the putative ideology of its genre pastiche. Ultimately, the audience discovers that the Eiger itself is the film’s true antagonist—and that secret agents, like all animals, are not masters of the world but at best lucky survivors in it. Eastwood’s compulsion to place himself in scenes that were both visually stunning and potentially deadly demonstrates his commitment to a vision of masculinity rooted in the mythology and iconography of the western, and his choice of Monument Valley as the setting for the middle portion of The Eiger Sanction emphasizes this idea. This landscape had been the “star” of seven of John Ford’s classic westerns, and it still represents the awe and danger of the open frontier (Carmichael 212–13, 226). Undoubtedly The Eiger Sanction privileges landscapes over human characters, and admitting this is the first step toward understanding how awkwardly it fits into any of the genre frameworks it claims. Supposedly a hardboiled variant of the espionage film of its era, The Eiger Sanction initially revels in violence between humans but ultimately conceives of landscapes as mercenary forces in the Cold War (Britton 163–64). By the film’s climax, all personal and political narrative justification has been entirely abandoned to a bare drama of survival. While we might appreciate Clint Eastwood’s recognition of human fragility in this film, his stunts are also aggressive demonstrations of human strength, and his physicality thus personifies the ecophobic worldview typical of both mountain climbing and the western genre. This worldview envisions a landscape of threats that must be conquered and resents not only nonhuman agency but the agency of all others, tending toward sexism, racism, and innumerable other hostilities (Estok 130–33). Because humans are so horrified at our bodies’ vulnerabilities to and dependence on that which is outside ourselves, our narrative forms have always been obsessed with suffering (Estok 131–32). People We might expect a hardboiled 1970s spy movie to be even more aggressively sexist, racist, and ableist than its peers, and perhaps defensively, the pseudonymous author of The Eiger Sanction claimed it was meant to parody Ian Fleming’s James Bond series (Oliver). But whether we take the details of this film to be cartoonish exaggerations or to reveal the idiotic hostility behind the genre’s mindless jingoism, we must understand how they link the film’s ecophobia to a whole constellation of various forms of chauvinism. Even in a film that seems to want to avoid politics altogether, every hint we get of character in this remarkably vapid script signals distrust and contempt for anything beyond the main character’s body and mind. As Estok warns, this is the hallmark of ecophobic culture. What little we get of character stands out as freakishly significant. An ideal vehicle for Clint Eastwood’s brief foray into the espionage genre, Jonathan Hemlock is a contract killer rather than a secret agent. Motivated by an ambition to expand his art collection and coerced by the threat of an IRS audit, Hemlock is no nationalist thug but rather an intellectual. We are introduced to him as a professor of art history, and in a lecture almost directly excerpted from the novel, his attitude is shamelessly elitist and resolutely apolitical (Trevanian 11–13). To carry out his mission, Hemlock returns to his old hobby of mountain climbing, following the romantic invocation to physically engage with nature. This echoes Eastwood’s personal determination to embody his filmic image by performing his own stunts. Yet, this approach also demonstrates a deep continuity between dominant approaches to art and life: As art historian, mountain climber, assassin, and lover (and even as Eastwood the actor/director), Hemlock consistently proceeds from surface visual analysis to conquest. Indeed, if the film’s human protagonist believes in any ideology beyond ecophobia, it is this commitment to surface. Complementing this worldview, almost every other character in the film is a knowing embodiment of politically incorrect stereotype. Early in the film, a sinister albino confined to a dark, sterile office (Thayer David) orders Hemlock to kill. In the film’s second act, a perfidious gay man, Miles Mellough (Jack Cassidy) is the target of Hemlock’s hatred and vengeance. Even a critic in The Wall Street Journal commented on the script’s shameless ableism and homophobia (Joy Gould Boyum qtd in McGilligan 253). The female characters are slightly more interesting than the mere sex objects one might expect from the genre, but they are even more ruthlessly typecast. Hemlock’s first companion is a silent American Indian (Brenda Venus) who trains him by day and sleeps with him by night, a sexualized embodiment of the western landscape with which she is identified. Hemlock’s ultimate love interest is a Black woman literally named Jemima Brown (Vonetta McGee), and even though their relationship is rather egalitarian compared to what we might expect from the genre, similarly juvenile naming jokes from the novel set the film’s tone. In all cases, the script intends provocation, and today we can easily recognize its quasi-parodic irony as trolling. Vice-signaling the problematic politics of the film’s worldview, its dialogue routinely leans on offensive one-liners, the most tame and relevant being a recurring double-entendre that uses “climbing” to refer to sexual conquest. These moments that might have seemed humorous or even edgily progressive to the presumed white male audience of a 1970s espionage thriller indicate a perceptual ecology that positions a variety of feminized characters in contrast to Hemlock’s “natural” virility, demonstrated by his ability to conquer them in the same way he conquers mountains. Yet, as the film drifts toward its conclusion, the forces of nature rebel against human intent in the same manner that landscapes complicated and frustrated Eastwood’s efforts to make this film. Considering each section of the film in succession, a series of spectacular homicides that begin as human–nonhuman collaborations ultimately lead to the sheer effort to mitigate natural catastrophe. 1. Window Sanction The urban espionage section of the film uses a quotidian environment with numerous indoor spaces that are frequently dark or cluttered, in contrast to the wide open landscapes of the next two acts. Eastwood’s first stunt is understated but meaningful: He climbs a downspout to sneak into the second story of a building for his first sanction. Hemlock demonstrates his climbing skills and his ability to collaborate with available materials. After shooting one of his targets while shielding himself behind a door, Hemlock fights with the remaining man amidst the furniture of the room; the man is thrown out the window and dies from the fall. The window sanction’s parkour setup and concluding defenestration introduce gravity as the film’s ultimate antagonist; notably, neither detail appears in the original novel (Trevanian 40–42). Eastwood clearly wanted to emphasize the materiality of his stunts, so this use of mundane sets and objects allows ordinary viewers to directly relate to the drama of climbing and falling. The window sanction questions the category of nature by showing gravity is an omnipresent natural force, even in this “artificial” environment. The scene also offers our first challenge to anthropocentric notions of storytelling: If we are tempted to say that this first casualty to gravity foreshadows the film’s conclusion, this interpretation mistakes physics and biology for plot design. In a film with such a lackluster script, we need not congratulate the filmmakers for realizing that people can climb both buildings and mountains. 2. Desert Sanction In the beginning of the film’s second act, Monument Valley appears in the hazy background, returning Eastwood to the western and returning sometime art history professor Dr. Jonathan Hemlock from the world of aesthetic representation to the lived experience of the natural sublime. This section of the film thus combines gorgeous footage of an iconic landscape with Hemlock’s physical struggle to train for his upcoming climb of the Eiger. The character’s battle with gravity is also Eastwood’s. One of the most visually impressive sequences in the film records the last ascent of the sacred rock formation known as the Totem Pole (Schickel 314).3 The helicopter shot of Eastwood pulling himself onto the top of that iconic feature emphasizes the precarious physicality of the stunt, including what looks like an intentional slip. By showing the height of the maneuver and the potential for error, Eastwood underscores the sublime danger of this landscape that he will weaponize to conclude this section of the film. The plot of this act culminates with Hemlock’s revenge on Miles Mellough.4 Jack Cassidy portrays our hero’s nemesis as comically queer—the antithesis of Eastwood’s cool masculinity. When confronted with his involvement in the murder of Hemlock’s old friend, Mellough responds, “I didn’t actually kill him, you know.” Hemlock’s answer, “I probably won’t actually kill you,” suggests the type of situation that will end their feud. The interchange is highly coded, juxtaposing Cassidy’s flamboyant delivery with Eastwood’s tight-lipped inversion of the same sentence. Their methods are no less gendered. Whereas Mellough orchestrates killings by exposing targets to enemy agents, invoking the Cold War fear that gay intelligence operatives might be compromised, Hemlock exposes his target to the elements. Fuming over Mellough’s treachery, Hemlock comments that his revenge will be “something massive.” The vast desert carries out his sanction. As in his first fight scene, Hemlock only uses a firearm against his preliminary target, and he again manipulates the objects in his environment to ensure success. During a car chase though Monument Valley, Hemlock produces a giant dust cloud and then shoots Mellough’s bodyguard while he drives through it blind.5 Expert maneuvering of shotgun and Ford Bronco in this sequence transform Hemlock into a modern variant of the barbarian cavalry soldier epitomizing the Deleuzian concept of the heterogenous assemblage (De Landa, Assemblage 68–69; War 20). While it is tempting to reflect on Hemlock’s skill, we must equally credit the qualities of the sand in this area and the capabilities of a custom 1975 Ford Bronco.6 This is to say that Hemlock is an effective killer only to the extent that he collaborates with nonhuman matter and only to the extent that nonhuman matter cooperates with him. After this moment, The Eiger Sanction’s casualties will fit less handily into a humanist rubric that presumes the hero’s successful manipulation or conquest of matter. In a morbid reenactment of Blondie’s rivalry with Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Hemlock drives Mellough fifty miles further into the desert and abandons him.7 Here, the notion of Hemlock’s mastery of a landscape supposedly outside the bounds of human culture operates strictly through the western mythology of the white man’s conquest of empty space (Cronon 13–14). The portrayal of Mellough’s insufficient virility is so cruelly homophobic that it exposes the assumptions of that mythology: while the film encourages its audience to perceive Hemlock’s victory as the result of his physical and intellectual superiority, it is really a mere matter of technology and brutality; Hemlock has a gas-powered vehicle and the determination to allow his enemy to die slowly in the sun. Fading from the aerial shot of Miles alone in the desert to an aerial shot of the Alps, the final act of the film leaves Hemlock to battle the Eiger. With the protagonist’s only human nemesis dead, gravity reasserts itself as the force behind the final sanction for which the film is named. 3. Eiger Sanction First as the Man with No Name and then as Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood’s iconicity was always connected to his use of the revolver. By the mid-1970s, the Dirty Harry films were literally advertisements for the Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum. However, in this same period, Eastwood insisted on making an action film with a denouement that was designed specifically not to include a shootout. Instead, The Eiger Sanction contains far more footage of climbing than fights (either with fists or guns), and Hemlock’s progression through his strenuous training establishes his struggle against gravity, which continues on the Eiger. Undoubtedly the most dangerous single landscape featured in the film, the north face of the Eiger is known for its crumbling limestone and had been blamed for forty-one deaths at the time production began (Foote 24). Eastwood decided to get the most difficult shots first, and the last footage David Knowles took was of a limestone rock slide from a climber’s perspective; while the crew packed up their equipment for the day, one last boulder came down the slope, killing Knowles and severely injuring advisor Mike Hoover (Schickel 314–15). Only a few days into the shooting schedule, the climbers, Eastwood, and his crew resolved to complete the film so that something meaningful would come from Knowles’s death (Foote 25). The film’s final sanction occurs on that treacherous north face of Eiger as four men cling to the steep, snowy slope trying to escape from a storm. While the third act begins with the presumption that Hemlock’s target will reveal himself once on the mountain, this expectation is abandoned as the film becomes a pure climbing movie. Instead of providing clues about which of the climbers is the enemy agent, the conversations between them develop a drama of arrogant leadership and foolish thrill-seeking, refocusing dramatic attention on the act of climbing itself. A stereotypically over-ambitious and domineering German leads the climbing team toward what increasingly looks like certain doom. In one of the script’s more interesting jokes, the character is named Freytag, a choice that suggests his obsession with summiting the Eiger and also the audience’s presumption that this effort will be the climax of the film. Significantly, both expectations are disrupted by the power of the peak itself, which prevents climbers and plot alike from reaching their stated goals. As it becomes clear that the weather conditions and their selected route have put these men in mortal danger, the Eiger itself becomes the killer. Instead of sanctioning the other climbers, Hemlock does his best to save their lives, but he is barely able to save even himself. The climbing team’s fall from Eiger is the landscape’s final assertion of its deadly power, and it leaves Hemlock hanging thousands of feet in the air. His last task is to cut his rope and drop to a rescue shaft, surrendering to gravity as a means of escape. Hemlock, who has already failed to climb the Eiger twice, is again beaten by the landscape. Simultaneously, he loses his willingness to kill. When his friend, Ben Bowman (George Kennedy), is revealed to have been his target all along, Hemlock cannot bring himself to carry out the mission; ultimately, he is not as cold and pitiless as the mountain. Surfaces While The Eiger Sanction did make money, it was hardly a hit. In one of the more positive reviews, Roger Ebert described it as a fun movie with a nonsensical plot, noting, “we get wrapped up in the situations and we’re seduced by the photography, and we enjoy the several pretty girls” (qtd. in Foote 27). It is a film that indulges in spectacle, and it exploits the nature of both human beings and landscapes for spectacular purposes. It is a film that goes to great and dangerous lengths to produce something that looks good—a film in which, even more than usual, all other considerations are subordinate to surfaces. It is likely many film scholars today are only aware of The Eiger Sanction’s existence from a scene in Taxi Driver in which the film’s name appears on a marquis in Times Square. Like the pornographic films among which it is advertised, The Eiger Sanction offers a limited set of visual representations of intimacy, excitement, and interaction with a world conveniently simplified for straight, able-bodied men. It is a vision almost exclusively concerned with surface, and yet the film’s effort to stage realistic situations automatically challenges its own putative worldview. That obsession with surface is as evident in the most crassly simplified sexual encounters as it is in mid-century Greenbergian art criticism. Incidentally, Hemlock is a devotee of both, and in a bizarre aside, the novel’s narrator claims the character feels no pleasure from sex—merely release and relief—indicating the extent to which this man’s man is so unfeeling that he has abstracted everything, even his own bodily pleasure (Trevanian 37). The film’s reliance on a tough, emotionless aesthetic appreciates the sensuousness of surfaces from a distance appropriate to the sublime. From this perspective, an encounter with the other is not unlike the explanation in classical physics that “touching” never involves actual contact, though according to quantum theory, all objects touch both self and other as they constantly produce and explore the infinite possibilities of radical alterity (Barad 209, 212–14). Karen Barad reminds us the inhuman that permeates our bodies is precisely what allows us to feel the other (219). As a mountain climber, Hemlock quite literally clings to the surface of things, and his recurring double-entendre of “climbing” indicates the cold calculation with which he approaches, examines, and conquers the objects of his desire. All of the film’s various forms of chauvinism are of a piece; each is a mere component to a virulent ecophobia that is ultimately challenged by the basic forces of nature. Most significantly, the film’s key antagonist is gravity itself—a force that threatened even the very possibility of making the film—something about which both Hemlock and Eastwood are fully aware . Deserts and mountains are romantic features of the natural sublime because of their indifference to human life and their capacity to both threaten and define the bodies that engage with them. In many of Clint Eastwood’s most iconic moments, his tough, blank face might be described as “like a rock,” his stern indifference as “a force of nature,” embodying the western mythology of stoic virility mimicking sublime terrain (Beard 47–48). Yet, this comparative trope is actually the opposite of identification; it asserts an ecophobic resistance not only to the nonhuman but potentially to anything outside the self. Nevertheless, survival and existence depend on constant interaction and collaboration with infinite populations of others—whether at the atomic, the interpersonal, or the cosmic level. Fittingly, at the end of The Eiger Sanction, Eastwood neither emulates nor conquers the landscape. His agency is reduced to self-preservation, and he controls little of the denouement other than his own emotions. This gestures to the critique of heroic ultra-masculinity that always troubles Eastwood’s iconic characters (Beard 15–16), but more simply it expresses the same blank relief at completing the task at hand that Eastwood the director must have felt. The Eiger Sanction forces us to consider the dynamic collaboration between humans and nonhuman forces with which the film is concerned and through which it was formed. In a movie whose characters are almost entirely stereotypes, landscapes like Monument Valley and the Eiger are arguably more important than character. Thus, The Eiger Sanction is an oddly posthumanist film. In the end, Hemlock fails either to conquer the mountain or to execute his last sanction, and when asked if he killed the three climbers on Eiger, his speechless expression is perplexed rather than smug. He is as powerless to answer the question as he was on the mountain itself. The film’s final helicopter shot moves away from him and settles on the Eiger as the credits roll. Endnotes 1 Because the environmental perspective I am critiquing is an outgrowth of romanticism, my working definition of the sublime is drawn largely from Wordsworth, who famously used the example of a mountain to explain the concept, and from Burke, who emphasized the significance of terror, danger, and power to his notion of the sublime. 2 Adrian Ivakhiv identifies three ecologies of cinema pertaining to what he calls “the film-earth relationship”: material ecologies, social ecologies, and perceptual ecologies. While my approach does not intend to follow his model, I find the distinction between material and perceptual ecologies useful to explaining how the ideas of a film’s characters and producers might be challenged by the landscapes, the production process, and ultimately the artifact of the film itself. 3 Climbing had officially been banned on all rock formations on Navaho Nation Lands since 1971, but Universal Studios negotiated this final ascent with the Nation for a substantial fee and the promise to completely clear the Totem Pole of all climbing hardware (Navaho Tribe). 4 In many revenge films, notably spaghetti westerns, the putative vendetta that spurs the (anti)hero to action serves as a mere excuse to enable the audience’s enjoyment of disproportionate violence. As in Sergio Leone’s westerns or the 1970s and 80s vigilante genre that evolved from Dirty Harry, the initial trauma is often so distant and so vaguely sketched that it is a mere detail compared to the (anti)hero’s righteous violence. In Unforgiven, Eastwood attempts to critique this plotline with mixed results (Beard 34–35, 47–53). In The Eiger Sanction, the man Mellough betrays is only ever referred to in a photograph, making the audience’s investment in the vendetta little more than a technicality. 5 According to IMDB Trivia, Dan Howard, who played the bodyguard, actually could not see though the dust on his windshield while driving in this scene. 6 Assemblage theory distributes agency and allows us to appreciate collaborations between humans and matter by emphasizing the emergent properties of the assemblage rather than merely dwelling on human intent or skill. To demonstrate this, Manuel De Landa describes “tracking the phylum” of an evolving set of materials as a counterpoint to the traditional, anthropocentric narrative of firearms design (War 28–31). 7 Whereas Sergio Leone’s positioning of Blondie (Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) in the desert was played for comedic effect, Eastwood’s return to the desert in The Eiger Sanction is presented as a solemn vendetta. Similarly, gravity had been a minor antagonist in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly through Tuco and Blondie’s hanging setups, but as with death by exposure, Leone played these near-hangings as dark comedy. Works Cited Barad Karen. “ On Touching—The Inhuman That Therefore I Am .” Differences , 23. 3 ( 2012 ): 206 – 33 . Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS WorldCat Beard William. Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood . U of Alberta P , 2000 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Bennett Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP , 2010 . Britton Wesley. Beyond Bond: Spies in Fiction and Film. Praeger , 2005 . Burke Edmund. “From A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.” The Sublime Reader . Ed. Clewis Robert R. . Bloomsbury Academic , 2019 . 78 – 90 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Carmichael Deborah A. “The Living Presence of Monument Valley in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939).” The Landscape of Hollywood Westerns: Ecocriticism in an American Film Genre . Ed. Carmichael Deborah A. . U of Utah P , 2006 . 212 – 28 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Cronon William. “ The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature .” Environmental History, 1.1 ( 1996 ): 7 – 28 . OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat De Landa Manuel. Assemblage Theory. Edinburgh UP , 2016 . De Landa Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Zone , 1991 . Estok Simon C. “Painful Material Realities, Tragedy, Ecophobia.” Material Ecocriticism. Ed. Iovino Serenella Oppermann Serpil . Indiana UP , 2014 . 130 – 40 . Foote John H. Clint Eastwood: Evolution of a Filmmaker . Praeger , 2008 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Ivakhiv Adrian. “An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image: Cinema as Anthrobiogeomorphic Machine.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice. Ed. Rust Stephen Monani Salma Cubitt Sean , Routledge , 2013 . 87 – 105 . Latour Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy . Trans. Porter Catherine , Harvard UP , 2004 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC McGilligan Patrick. Clint: The Life and the Legend. HarperCollins , 1999 . Morton Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Harvard UP , 2007 . Navajo Tribe , Parks & Recreation Department, Director Charles S. Damon. Letter to Rock Climbers . 12 May 1971 . American Alpine Club, m.americanalpineclub.org/clubhouse/desert-pioneers/12.html. O’Brien Daniel. Clint Eastwood: Film-Maker . BT Bastford , 1996 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Oliver Mary. “Rodney Whitaker, a.k.a. Trevanian, 74; Author wrote ‘Eiger Sanction.’” Los Angeles Times, 19 Dec. 2005 , www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-dec-19-me-whitaker19-story.html. Schickel Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography . Knopf , 1996 . Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Sykes Ian. “ In Memoriam: Dave Knowles 1947-1974 .” Alpine Journal , 1975 : 304 . www.alpinejournal.org.uk/Contents/Contents_1975_files/AJ%201975%20294-304%20In%20Memoriam.pdf. OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Taxi Driver. Directed by Martin Scorsese, performances by Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, and Cybill Shepherd. Columbia Pictures, 1976 . The Eiger Sanction. Directed by Clint Eastwood, performances by Clint Eastwood, George Kennedy, Vonetta McGee, Thayer David, and Jack Cassidy, Universal Pictures, 1975 . The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly [Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo]. Directed by Sergio Leone, performances by Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef, United Artists, 1967 . Trevanian (Rodney William Whitaker). The Eiger Sanction. Avon, 1973 . Wordsworth William. “The Sublime and the Beautiful.” The Sublime Reader. Ed. Clewis Robert R. , Bloomsbury Academic , 2019 . 177 – 83 . © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - “I probably won’t actually kill you”: The Eiger Sanction as Eco-Materialist Introduction
JO - ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isaa079
DA - 2020-10-05
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/i-probably-won-t-actually-kill-you-the-eiger-sanction-as-eco-bccV1YT00x
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -