Course Description

Climate change is one of the most important and challenging problems of our times. How is cinema involved? This course introduces students to environmental cinema and to ecocritical approaches to film studies. Beginning with explicit representations of climate change in eco-documentaries and recent post-apocalyptic fantasies, we will interrogate cinema’s broader relationship to the environment through questions of film materiality, resource extraction, and climate control. Additional topics include extinction, weather, waste, infrastructure, toxicity, nonhuman life, and the Anthropocene. Each week, we will watch and discuss a film – from genres spanning science fiction, documentaries, anime, eco-thrillers, and propaganda – alongside key theoretical debates about energy and natural resources (oil, water, coal, electricity), the politics and ethics of visualization, and the materiality of analog and digital cinema. Filmmakers include Werner Herzog, Jia Zhangke, Bong Joon Ho, and Agnès Varda, while written texts are taken from Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Rob Nixon, Anna Tsing, and others.