{"id":{"repo_id":"oxford-brookes","oai_identifier":"tle:5728125c-aabc-4eb1-82c9-abf8b2493abe:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/oxford-brookes/tle:5728125c-aabc-4eb1-82c9-abf8b2493abe:d6bd9758-527a-46cd-bfe2-c433766e8fca:1","repository":{"repo_id":"oxford-brookes","name":"Oxford Brookes University","base_url":"https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/oai"},"display":{"title":"The mind-game film in the age of the anthropocene : at the limits of productive pathologies","abstract":"This thesis transforms Thomas Elsaesser’s (2021) theory of the mind-game film by extending it to the conditions of the Anthropocene (as crisis imaginary). I argue that the scale, complexity, and contradictions of the anthropocentric era, with its non-human temporalities and ecological catastrophes, render classical mimetic modes of representation inadequate. In contrast, the mind-game narrative – a narrative mode that suspends causal logic and refuses imaginary resolutions – fragments subjectivity and non-mimetic representation by offering a productive framework for articulating the incomprehensibility of planetary crisis. Through close readings of televisual narratives (including Dark [2017-2020], Pantheon [2022-2023], and Severance [2022-Present]), video games (including The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope [2020] and The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe [2022]), and speculative filmic texts (including The House [2022], Aniara [2018], and Last and First Men [2020]), I examine how mind-game narratives manifest an ecological entanglement between human and non-human systems, often depicted within closed temporal loops. Across these symptomatic case studies, Elsaesser’s concept of productive pathologies is rendered obsolete, due to a limitation of how productive a pathological identity can be within an irreversible extinction scenario. The limitation of productive pathologies foregrounds the subject’s disintegration as a response to environmental precarity and the inability for human mastery. Mind-game narratives thus operate as speculative experiments in negativity, performing an ethics of unknowing: at the epistemological level, it is a structural refusal of redemption in the face of planetary collapse, and, ethically, it is an active post-confrontation choice to return to illusion rather than survive a post-Anthropocentric reality. By reframing mind-game phenomena beyond the human scale (species-time), this thesis presents a critical and speculative response to the Anthropocene condition, mapping a transition from the breakdown of an anthropocentric mindset, to posthuman and post-Earth spatio-temporalities.","abstract_html":"This thesis transforms Thomas Elsaesser’s (2021) theory of the mind-game film by extending it to the conditions of the Anthropocene (as crisis imaginary). I argue that the scale, complexity, and contradictions of the anthropocentric era, with its non-human temporalities and ecological catastrophes, render classical mimetic modes of representation inadequate. In contrast, the mind-game narrative – a narrative mode that suspends causal logic and refuses imaginary resolutions – fragments subjectivity and non-mimetic representation by offering a productive framework for articulating the incomprehensibility of planetary crisis. Through close readings of televisual narratives (including Dark [2017-2020], Pantheon [2022-2023], and Severance [2022-Present]), video games (including The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope [2020] and The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe [2022]), and speculative filmic texts (including The House [2022], Aniara [2018], and Last and First Men [2020]), I examine how mind-game narratives manifest an ecological entanglement between human and non-human systems, often depicted within closed temporal loops. Across these symptomatic case studies, Elsaesser’s concept of productive pathologies is rendered obsolete, due to a limitation of how productive a pathological identity can be within an irreversible extinction scenario. The limitation of productive pathologies foregrounds the subject’s disintegration as a response to environmental precarity and the inability for human mastery. Mind-game narratives thus operate as speculative experiments in negativity, performing an ethics of unknowing: at the epistemological level, it is a structural refusal of redemption in the face of planetary collapse, and, ethically, it is an active post-confrontation choice to return to illusion rather than survive a post-Anthropocentric reality. By reframing mind-game phenomena beyond the human scale (species-time), this thesis presents a critical and speculative response to the Anthropocene condition, mapping a transition from the breakdown of an anthropocentric mindset, to posthuman and post-Earth spatio-temporalities.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["de Carli Ball, Maria"],"institution":"Oxford Brookes University","degree_name":null,"degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Buckland, Warren","Russo, Paolo"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":null,"date_issued":"","date_published":null,"updated_at":"2026-07-24T03:41:58Z","subjects":[],"languages":["en"],"rights":["All rights reserved"],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"https://doi.org/10.24384/ex8e-f070","outbound_label":"DOI","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["de Carli Ball, Maria","Buckland, Warren","Russo, Paolo"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["de Carli Ball, Maria"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:publisher","label":"Institution","values":["Oxford Brookes University"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["thesis"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["en"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["All rights reserved"]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["https://doi.org/10.24384/ex8e-f070"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["This thesis transforms Thomas Elsaesser’s (2021) theory of the mind-game film by extending it to the conditions of the Anthropocene (as crisis imaginary). I argue that the scale, complexity, and contradictions of the anthropocentric era, with its non-human temporalities and ecological catastrophes, render classical mimetic modes of representation inadequate. In contrast, the mind-game narrative – a narrative mode that suspends causal logic and refuses imaginary resolutions – fragments subjectivity and non-mimetic representation by offering a productive framework for articulating the incomprehensibility of planetary crisis. Through close readings of televisual narratives (including Dark [2017-2020], Pantheon [2022-2023], and Severance [2022-Present]), video games (including The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope [2020] and The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe [2022]), and speculative filmic texts (including The House [2022], Aniara [2018], and Last and First Men [2020]), I examine how mind-game narratives manifest an ecological entanglement between human and non-human systems, often depicted within closed temporal loops. Across these symptomatic case studies, Elsaesser’s concept of productive pathologies is rendered obsolete, due to a limitation of how productive a pathological identity can be within an irreversible extinction scenario. The limitation of productive pathologies foregrounds the subject’s disintegration as a response to environmental precarity and the inability for human mastery. Mind-game narratives thus operate as speculative experiments in negativity, performing an ethics of unknowing: at the epistemological level, it is a structural refusal of redemption in the face of planetary collapse, and, ethically, it is an active post-confrontation choice to return to illusion rather than survive a post-Anthropocentric reality. By reframing mind-game phenomena beyond the human scale (species-time), this thesis presents a critical and speculative response to the Anthropocene condition, mapping a transition from the breakdown of an anthropocentric mindset, to posthuman and post-Earth spatio-temporalities."]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["The mind-game film in the age of the anthropocene : at the limits of productive pathologies"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["de Carli Ball, Maria","Buckland, Warren","Russo, Paolo"],"dc:creator":["de Carli Ball, Maria"],"dc:description":["This thesis transforms Thomas Elsaesser’s (2021) theory of the mind-game film by extending it to the conditions of the Anthropocene (as crisis imaginary). I argue that the scale, complexity, and contradictions of the anthropocentric era, with its non-human temporalities and ecological catastrophes, render classical mimetic modes of representation inadequate. In contrast, the mind-game narrative – a narrative mode that suspends causal logic and refuses imaginary resolutions – fragments subjectivity and non-mimetic representation by offering a productive framework for articulating the incomprehensibility of planetary crisis. Through close readings of televisual narratives (including Dark [2017-2020], Pantheon [2022-2023], and Severance [2022-Present]), video games (including The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope [2020] and The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe [2022]), and speculative filmic texts (including The House [2022], Aniara [2018], and Last and First Men [2020]), I examine how mind-game narratives manifest an ecological entanglement between human and non-human systems, often depicted within closed temporal loops. Across these symptomatic case studies, Elsaesser’s concept of productive pathologies is rendered obsolete, due to a limitation of how productive a pathological identity can be within an irreversible extinction scenario. The limitation of productive pathologies foregrounds the subject’s disintegration as a response to environmental precarity and the inability for human mastery. Mind-game narratives thus operate as speculative experiments in negativity, performing an ethics of unknowing: at the epistemological level, it is a structural refusal of redemption in the face of planetary collapse, and, ethically, it is an active post-confrontation choice to return to illusion rather than survive a post-Anthropocentric reality. By reframing mind-game phenomena beyond the human scale (species-time), this thesis presents a critical and speculative response to the Anthropocene condition, mapping a transition from the breakdown of an anthropocentric mindset, to posthuman and post-Earth spatio-temporalities."],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["https://doi.org/10.24384/ex8e-f070"],"dc:language":["en"],"dc:publisher":["Oxford Brookes University"],"dc:rights":["All rights reserved"],"dc:title":["The mind-game film in the age of the anthropocene : at the limits of productive pathologies"],"dc:type":["thesis"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-24T03:41:58Z"}