Due to its proximity to the renewal of new art and communication forms and their placement at the vanguard of politically engaged fields, film and media studies has proudly asserted itself as a leading academic voice of sociopolitical commentary. Today, as screen culture is diversified across new technologies and media and moves us beyond the filmic, screen theory remains the chosen arena of innovation for thinkers and activists coming from other fields. There remain those, myself included, who agree with David Rodowick's claim that the real accomplishment of cinema studies “is to have forged more than any other related discipline the methodological and philosophical bases for addressing the most urgent and interesting questions, both aesthetic and cultural, of modernity and visual culture” (2001, 1403). However, the more optimistic among us would like to encourage more focus on adding “ethical” to the important types of questions, and to continue to push film and media studies to engage with the pressing issues of the day, even to have the foresight and honesty to acknowledge what will be the pressing issues to come. Therefore we must now ask: What is the defining problem that civilization is and will be facing in the years to come?

The environment. Climate change, global warming, sea level rise, natural resource use and scarcity, the epic climax of this long slough of humanity's carbon footprint. As Sean Cubitt claims with casual poignancy, ecopolitics is the last master narrative (2005, 9). Identity difference and geopolitical struggle will mean nothing if this planet becomes uninhabitable, which most scientific and critical studies point to in an increasingly near future; we are today starting to reap the harvest of what Marx referred to as “metabolic rift,” a term McKenzie Wark has resurrected to refer to the lasting geological, atmospheric and elemental impact of human industry as we wade out of prehistory and into the endgame era commonly known as the Anthropocene (2015, viii). Awareness of and concern for ecological issues have risen greatly in the past two decades, and the past halfcentury has seen an intellectual and activist evolution from environmentalist writing to ecocriticism, alongside a trending wave of environmentally focused films, media texts and screen studies.

Welcome, readers, to The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory! We cordially invite you to step inside, meander around and explore. Hopefully, as you open this collection, doors will open on both sides of the page, and we will enter into a conversation. We may not always agree, and we may not always even speak the same language, but we are all here because we (1) believe that critical thinking is important; (2) understand the sociocultural importance of screen media in the unfolding of the twenty- first century, and in the formation of the century that preceded it; and (3) are ready to explore new horizons and to carve new folds in the brain that meet the challenge of a world, of media apparatuses, and of social configurations that have changed radically since film theory was canonized some thirty years ago. As you will find central to the concerns of this book, from Francesco Casetti's Introduction essay to Tom Conley's Postface, we have entered into a highly mediated digital era that throws notions of the “filmic” and the “cinematic” largely into question, the traditional boundaries of medium specificity blurred by the convergent nature of this new wonderland of wireless signals, mobile screens and virtual windows. An era, simply put, of screens: screens in our town- squares and on our wrists, in our classrooms and on our dashboards, screens in outer space, underwater and in our pockets — a world of screens that problematizes the conventional notions both of the moving image and of the social function of cultural practice. These pages may not solve such debates, but we aim to equip readers to take part in them.

The contemporary film and media student emerges at a unique moment: the proliferation of digital technology is increasingly turning individuals into daily content providers and empowering global populations through communications networks, while also aiding the transnational flow of a borderless mainstream screen culture and, at the same time, prompting the emergence of local, small nation and counter- cinemas.