Film Ecology

Defending the Biosphere — Doughnut Economics and Film Theory and Practice

Susan Hayward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367265519
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000062243
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European Drama

Using the Regenerative economic model – also known as Doughnut Economics – Susan Hayward offers a thought-provoking sketch for a renewed, tentatively revolutionary approach to both film theory and film practice.

This book attempts to answer the questions posed by T.J. Demos (in Against the Anthropocene, 2017): how do we find a way to address planetary harm and the issues it raises within the field of Film Studies? How do we construct a theoretical model that allows us to visualize the ecological transgressions brought about by the growth-model of capitalism which is heavily endorsed by mainstream narrative cinema? By turning to the model set out in Kate Raworth's book Doughnut Economics (2017) and adapting its fundamental principles to a study of narrative cinema, Film Ecology proposes to show how, by using this model, we can usefully plot and investigate films according to criteria that are not genre/star/auteur-led, nor indeed embedded in anthropocentric theoretical models, but principles which are ecologically based. These arguments are brought to life with examples from mainstream narrative films such as The Giant (1956), Mildred Pierce (1945), Erin Brockovich (2000), Wall Street (1987), Hotel Rwanda (2004), and Missing Figures (2016).

This approach will inspire film practitioners, film theorists, critics and analysts, film students and film lovers alike to consider how they might integrate this Doughnut model into their thinking or work as part of their process.

1 Film and ecology, Doughnut Economics, and film theory

Cinema is an industry and as such it is an ecosystem. Furthermore, it is also complicit in ecological issues much like other industries. Indeed, a number of studies have examined the cinematic footprint of filmmaking and, too, film and its relation to ecology. And these two interconnected issues – film as an ecosystem and film as an industry – will be discussed in the first two sections of this chapter. As we come to consider film as an industry and how current ecocriticism has raised some very significant issues in this domain, what does become clear, however, is that there has not, as yet, emerged a theoretical model, per se, that could help us, on the one hand, give critical readings that are not bound by standard approaches and, on the other, offer the possibilities in film practice to structure film narratives according to different models other than the dominant ones in use today. But, as I hope to show, this is where Raworth’s Doughnut Theory comes into play, and I’ll begin to present her model in Section 3 of this chapter.

1.1 Film as an ecosystem: film technology then and now – from celluloid to digital

Originally, cinema came down to the revolution of wheels and reels at the right speed in order to create the illusion of real movement in real time. At first, this was a hand-cranked affair: images were made by capturing light onto film, light sources were primarily natural (until studios were electrified), and screened-images were produced by light shining through the processed film. At the source of film technology, then, it is all about light, both a natural resource and a man-made one. With film in this mode, time is linear and the process is analogue. This cinema of the Celluloid era is a Modernist haptic industrial affair.

Nowadays, we have entered a different technology for filmmaking, the digital – which, while still dependent on light, now pixilates visual information. Thus, information, images, and films can be relayed far more readily to us via satellite, the internet, or compressed onto a hard drive or DVD disc. In this new revolutionary context, images come to us at speed in space and time – virtually and instantaneously. Along with its production and distributive potential, digital film is a borderless visual entity, truly transnational, therefore, even as it is simultaneously embedded in a given, specific culture. Thus, in Film Studies, we could speak more helpfully perhaps of film culture, rather than national cinemas – a concept which allows us to explore film as a convergent, interconnected artefact (much as we do in relation to sculpture and painting).¹

However, we need to remain aware that this digital cinema is a Postmodern, non-haptic, virtual affair. Digital film cannot be seized manually in the way celluloid film can. We can see it, but we cannot grasp it. This inevitably causes a new sort of distance between us as spectator and the object viewed on screen which the plasticity of celluloid film did not produce, because images of the «real» had been recorded onto a physical property. But with the digital, this lack of the physical (proof, if you will) and, therefore, the lack of the haptic, means that a kind of emotive annulling can occur, a detachment from a sense of the real. At its most extreme, used in warfare, this micro-digital-technology can create the sensation that what we are witnessing is an illusion, a special effects moment, a spectacle without consequences. Because it is so minuscule (to the point almost of invisibility²), this technology allows us to install camera probes in bombs, to send drones mounted with cameras that are armed to drop bombs unmanned. In this context we are truly in the domain of Robotic Digital Practices – what we might term weirdly weightless wars. Thus, for example, during the first Iraq War (known also as the Persian Gulf War) of 1991 and again in the 2003 Iraq War, cameras were mounted in the nose cones of Guided Bomb Units, and, as they steered towards their targets, they provided the (in this instance television) audience with images right up until the final moment of the actual bombing. This smart-bomb footage had the peculiar effect of placing the audience-viewer as the projectile itself, on its way to its pre-programmed destination. But, because upon impact all visual connection ceased, so too there was nothing to see: ‘no bodies, no destruction,’ ‘just a wall of static.’³ In short, the smart-bomb offered a bird’s-eye view of a bloodless war, the whole effect being more like a video-game than anything real. In a similar vein of detachment, I would evoke the relaying, by helmet-cam, of the assassination of Osama Bin-Laden in 2011 to the White House ‘Situation Room.’

1 And the question that emanates from the distinction between these two modalities (celluloid and digital) becomes, therefore, «what is their relation to the REAL and to DURATION». A question I leave hanging, because others such as Deleuze (1989), Rodowick (1997), and Marks (2000) have already lengthily debated this issue.

2 Also the digital images produced can be far more easily morphed, intruded into than celluloid film.

3 See Roger Stahl’s excellent talk ‘Through the Crosshairs,’ reproduced as a PDF Transcript by the Media Education Foundation. www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Through-the-Crosshairs-Transcript.pdf (accessed 15 July 2019). In it he demonstrates the collusion between camera technology, film production, and the drone war offensive on terror which works to produce what he calls a ‘weaponised gaze’ of an assenting public.

The interrelationship between war-technology and the film industry is nothing new and dates back almost to the beginning of cinema at the end of the 19th century. Cinematic practice has benefitted from devices designed for warfare starting with the anamorphic lens of World War One (at the beginning of the last century), moving onto the lightweight cameras of World War Two (in the middle of the 20th century); then, the sub-miniature cameras introduced during the Cold War, followed by light, portable TV cameras first used to record events of the Vietnam War; currently, in the so-called war against terrorism we have arrived at nano-sized digital cameras that transmit imMEDIAte information.⁴ But the point is also that this technology of recording and, thereby, of cinema itself are ineluctably linked to violence; both to our ability to perpetrate it and to record and watch it. We watch violence, in both narrative and documentary films, exposing ourselves to the horrors perpetrated on others (at times, to the extent of enjoying being horrified, for example, by slaughter films of any description).

This violence is also linked, as an effect, to our drive to colonise space (first this planet’s, then outer-space). The Cold War is exemplary of this, for, in our drive to conquer space, during the 1960s and 1970s, East and Western blocs sent unmanned, then manned satellites armed with cameras, first, orbiting the planet, then shooting away to the moon, with film being the agent of a new colonisation, insofar as it recorded the images of «one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind».

Indeed, such is the revolution of our camera technology (man’s material product) that no space is without observation. In effect, we have made all space visible, even though we have yet to recognise fully what it is that we see: namely, that we have rendered all space (be it land, underground, oceans, rivers, lakes, air, space, outer-space – our bodies even) a place, not just of exploration, but of exploitation, aggression, conflict, and war, so that nowhere is free from our sight or grasping drive.⁵

4 As we know, the use of satellite imagery and drone-mounted cameras is widespread in numerous domains of ‘observation’ and/or ‘surveillance.’ A recent example of this technology that could give us heart, however, in that it reveals acts of violation of international standards, is the exposure of Israeli spraying of herbicide near Gaza – thereby depriving Palestinian farmers of crops. A study, using video footage and satellite imagery, ‘tracked the drift of herbicides into the Gazan side’ of the Gaza strip and ‘concluded it was killing agricultural crops and causing unpredictable and uncontrollable damage.’ (Miriam Berger, ‘Israeli spraying of herbicide near Gaza harming Palestinian crops, report says,’ The Guardian, 20 July 2019, 35.)

5 It is noteworthy that satellites, since the end of the Cold War in the late 20th century, have increasingly become conduits for military espionage; that, since man’s invasion of space, there is considerably greater débris which can cause collisions to occur; that, as acts of censorship by specific countries wishing to withhold information, interceptive rockets are sent up to bring down their own satellites; that, in the same vein, telecommunication satellites can be blocked by countries wishing to censor access to information by its people. Space is now so militarised we can speak of diplomatic tensions in outer-space (the zone beyond the air space/territorial space surrounding the earth), which technically and legally speaking belongs to no one country! Currently, satellite platforms are for the most part 50/50 military and civil (that is, scientific) in function. The USA leads with some 150 satellites versus the other main countries to have satellites in space, namely, Russia, China, and France with some 15–30 satellites apiece.

This word «grasping» is key in that it directly links to our sense of an inalienable right to «own» the planet (and indeed planets beyond this one). Furthermore, this conquering of space is tightly linked to ideological warfare, namely, the post-war race to prove the superiority of Capitalism over Soviet Communism (and vice versa). But its consequences are deeply linked to ecological matters because at the core of this race, in terms of energy, lies the nuclear. And, in terms of proving the might of one ideology over the other, visual technology was crucial in this struggle. Cameras were used in the former USSR’s first satellite orbit of the earth in 1957, providing images as evidence of Russian superiority over the USA. In the mid-1950s, Wernher Von Braun (a leading Nazi nuclear rocket scientist recruited by the Americans) encouraged the then President Eisenhower to pursue nuclear development and to endorse human moon exploration. At this stage of the race, the Russians had the more powerful rockets. In 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 rocket took the first photography of the never-before-seen dark side of the moon. Thanks to Von Braun, however, Soviet superiority was soon surpassed by the USA whose own nuclear weapon technology led them to design smaller lighter warheads. And they successfully launched their first satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958. This was later followed by the Apollo Program, and Von Braun’s dream to land a man on the moon became reality, in 1969, with Apollo 11.

The effect of this space race was two fold. First, the concept that another planet was «conquerable» was established as fact. This also meant that the pioneering Americans could exploit whatever minerals they found on this new planet to their advantage. Second, the space race very quickly transformed into a star-wars race. Because the Russians had successfully orbited the earth with their rocket-launched satellite (in 1957), this meant that a surprise nuclear attack could easily be launched by the Soviets against the USA (the Bay of Pigs incident, 1961, was a timely reminder of this potential). And so the nuclear arms race became as much a part of the ideological battle as the space race.

On this question of ideological space-race, and to conclude this section, I’d like to briefly pause on a film which stretches these issues into other significant and concomitant domains which, at the same time as these daring exploits were being undertaken in the 1960s, were for their part couched in silence. The film, based on true events and people, is Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, 2016), and the key word is ‘hidden,’ or silenced, bleached out. For, the narrative places two race issues at its core: the space race and the question of race and race relations, or, better put, systemic racism. In terms of the space race, on the surface the film’s narrative appears to overlook the implications of such an undertaking both in terms of the ecological impact and the uses of the scientific knowledge deployed for war-technology (nuclear arms). To all appearances, the narrative presents us with a POV that endorses the Anthropocene: for there is no apparent diegetic questioning as to whether there are any ecological issues at hand, nor whether there are any war implications, nor indeed weaponry developments attached to this technological endeavour (which of course there were). Instead, we repeatedly hear the message coming down from on high, from the White House, that the fight for control of outer-space has to happen, America must win. And it will have its heroes, of course, in particular John Glenn. What is certain also is that, during the era in which this film is set and which the narrative reflects, America was hugely engaged in its nuclear programme and, therefore, was not mentally in a place where it would consider, in ecological terms, the threat the nuclear represented to the planet, which was (and still is) total annihilation – even though America was well aware, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, what the effects of a nuclear fall-out were. But as the next chapter will demonstrate, whilst the nuclear may be the summa of all destructive energies, it is not alone in its damaging of the earth-world.

Back to Hidden Figures. If the nuclear threat is «bleached out», silenced, even so, underneath this seeming normalisation of the scientific process of getting a man onto the moon, what does get exposed in this film is a visualisation of the destructive nature of the Anthropocene imperative at work: first, in the form of a technology that seeks, no matter the cost, to colonise other planets as if that were perfectly normative (a continuum of growth economics, and a belief that progress is all⁶), and, second, a visualisation of White masculinity’s ruthless, individualistic competitive drive. As just one example, one of the White, male scientists deliberately tries to block the brilliant work of one of the African-American women mathematicians, the so-called Black-computers, who manages to resolve a particular problem that ensures a safe re-entry of the astronauts from space. Questions of race in this context become also questions of gender, social inequality, political voice, income, and educat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Film and ecology, Doughnut Economics, and film theory
• 2 Film and the Anthropocene: dirty Capitalism – Mildred Pierce (1945), Tulsa (1949), and Giant (1956)
• 3 Where we are now and where we need to be: from source and sink to take→make→use→re-use – Erin Brockovich (2000), Wall Street (1987), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
• 4 A moral imperative to REVOLT: Hotel Rwanda (2004) and Caphernaüm (2018)
• Bibliography
• Index