American psychologist Jerome J. Gibson's ecological theory of visual perception helps us to think about the perceptual gesture in cinema outside inferential and gestalt theories. It allows us to turn back from the experience of cinema projection to the “act of filming” as a founding environmental perception. This ecological approach to perception informs the emergence of an ecological consciousness in the practice of structural filmmakers of the 1960s-1970s (Kurt Kren, Michael Snow, Chris Welsby, Tony Hill), and interrogates the non-human turn in the post-structural experimental practices of mountaineering filmmaker Robert Schaller.