Chapter 12: Environmental Film

Question 1

Honeyland (2019)

Answer 1

• 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

Question 2

Green Film Criticism (Ivankhiv, 2008) ?

Answer 2

????

Question 3

Ecocinema

Answer 3

• 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

Question 4

Econcinema Studies (Coined by ??)

Answer 4

• scholarly specialization within environmental humanities concerned with ecocinema

Question 5

The Silent World (1956)

Answer 5

• 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

Question 6

Ecocinema in Vietnam

Answer 6

• Story of Pao (2006) (Director Ngo Quang Hai) is a drama based on a novel about the Hmong of northern Vietnam

Question 7

What was the first cinematic depiction of a landscape?

Answer 7

• Tables Turned on The Gardener (1895)
• Lumiere Brothers

Question 8

When does nature documentary become popular?

Answer 8

the mid 20th century

Question 9

The Vanishing Prairie (1954)

Answer 9

• 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

Question 10

Plant Cinematography

Answer 10

• 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

Question 11

Arthur Clarence Pillsbury (1912)

Answer 11

Timelapse documentary to advocate protection of Yosemite wildflowers; love of plants, realization of their life struggles and stopping their destruction

Question 12

James Benning

Answer 12

• 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

Question 13

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)

Answer 13

Directed by Guggenheim

Question 14

Speciesist Camera

Answer 14

projects ideologies reflecting species hierarchies on more-than-humans during the filmmaking process

Question 15

Zoomorphic Realism

Answer 15

represents wild or domestic animals as accurately as possible and with minimal modification

Question 16

Ecocinema film theory

Answer 16

semiotics, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, phenomenology, postcolonialism, and narratology

Question 17

3 Paradoxes of Ecocinema

Answer 17

• 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

Question 18

Boschman and Trono (2019)

Answer 18

• can ecocinema itself or ecocinematic forms of interpretation draw forth changes in human behavior

Question 19

Ecocinematic Viewing

Answer 19

viewer actively analyzes mainstream films through the lens of ecocritique to reflect on personal experience

Question 20

Montagist Reply

Answer 20

spectators produce online media that creatively interprets mainstream films from ecological perspectives

Question 21

Deep Time (Ginn, 2018)

Answer 21

• 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

Question 22

What did Fay (2018) say about The Anthropocene?

Answer 22

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

Question 23

International Wildlife Film Festival

Answer 23

• Montana founded in 1977
• oldest eco-film festival

Question 24

Environmental Film Festival in Washington, DC

Answer 24

-Founded in 1993 by Flo Stone
- largest ecofilm festival

Question 25

Transnational Ecocinema

Answer 25

• ecocinema that appraises films from various cultures and countries

Question 26

Urban Ecocinema (Murrary and Heum, 2019)

Answer 26

explores the mediation of city habits and urban environments in documentaries and fictional films