Chapter 12: Environmental Film Flashcards
Honeyland (2019)
- Directors Kotevsa and Stefanov
- Documentary about Hatidze Muratova (an apiarist) and her beekeeping
- Muratova addresses bees with ecostewardship
- A man steals Muratova’s knowledge and exhausts wild beehives
- Fly on the wall camera; camera is inconspicuous to avoid interferrence
Green Film Criticism (Ivankhiv, 2008) ?
????
Ecocinema
- emerged 1990s
- focuses on the relationship between cinema, the environment, and more-than-human beings
- films with an environmental focus
- (Ingram, 2000): films with prominent environmental messages
- MacDonald (2014): filmmaking tradition that evokes the illusion of being immersed in nature; ecocinema’s fundamental role is to retrain viewers’ perception and offer alternatives to conventional media-spectatorship and consumerism
- Sheldon (2009): ecocinema is cinema with an ecological consciousness; articulates the relationship of human beings to the physical environment, earth, nature, and animals from a biocentric POV
Econcinema Studies (Coined by ??)
- scholarly specialization within environmental humanities concerned with ecocinema
The Silent World (1956)
- Directed by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle
- one of the 1st works of underwater cinematography where filmmakers used submersible cameras
- Cousteau goes on to be a marine conservationist
- The film has been criticized for its destructive impact on ocean habitats
- Aquatic vandalism
Ecocinema in Vietnam
- Story of Pao (2006) (Director Ngo Quang Hai) is a drama based on a novel about the Hmong of northern Vietnam
What was the first cinematic depiction of a landscape?
- Tables Turned on The Gardener (1895)
- Lumiere Brothers
When does nature documentary become popular?
the mid 20th century
The Vanishing Prairie (1954)
- Director James Algar
- Part of Disney’s True Life Adventures series from 1948-1960
- Documentary about the flora and fauna of the American prairie from Mississippi to Colorado
- Focuses on extinct species that existed before the arrival of European settlers
Plant Cinematography
- Botanical documentary that focuses on plant ecology and conservation
- Kingdom of Plants (2012), David Attenbourough
- Time lapse used to understand the uniqueness of plants
- Frank Percy Smith: Birth of Flower (1911), The Germination of Plants (1911); the 1st cinematographer to capture and opening bud
Arthur Clarence Pillsbury (1912)
Timelapse documentary to advocate protection of Yosemite wildflowers; love of plants, realization of their life struggles and stopping their destruction
James Benning
- One Way Boogie (1977)
- 27 Years Later (2006)
- Address the decline of the filmmaker’s home city and urban ecologies
- Milwaukee, WI
- Derest (2015): utah mid 1800s-late 1900s
- California Trilogy 1999-2002 focuses on the water crisis in California; Sogobi = Earth in Shoshone
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
Directed by Guggenheim
Speciesist Camera
projects ideologies reflecting species hierarchies on more-than-humans during the filmmaking process
Zoomorphic Realism
represents wild or domestic animals as accurately as possible and with minimal modification
Ecocinema film theory
semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, phenomenology, postcolonialism, and narratology
3 Paradoxes of Ecocinema
- dependent on and fascination with environmentally destructive film technology
- Risk of creating illusions of an idealized nature that disengages viewers from actual nature
- Problem of reinforcing passive modes of engaging with these art forms
Boschman and Trono (2019)
- can ecocinema itself or ecocinematic forms of interpretation draw forth changes in human behavior
Ecocinematic Viewing
viewer actively analyzes mainstream films through the lens of ecocritique to reflect on personal experience
Montagist Reply
spectators produce online media that creatively interprets mainstream films from ecological perspectives
Deep Time (Ginn, 2018)
- manifests through places, objects, and practices
- through its ability to compress and elongate time within a narrative, film enables audiences to access deep geological time and the core of the Anthropocene concept
- warps our sense of belonging and our relationship to Earth forces and creatures
What did Fay (2018) say about The Anthropocene?
The Anthropocene is to natural science what cinema is to human culture
- it makes the familiar world strange to us by transcribing the dimensionality of experience into celluloid
International Wildlife Film Festival
- Montana founded in 1977
- oldest eco-film festival
Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC
-Founded in 1993 by Flo Stone
- largest ecofilm festival
Transnational Ecocinema
- ecocinema that appraises films from various cultures and countries
Urban Ecocinema (Murrary and Heum, 2019)
explores the mediation of city habits and urban environments in documentaries and fictional films
