At the movies

by Alissa MacMillan

Q: I love films like Don’t Look Up that offer a message about concerns for the environment but wanted to know how effective they are at changing our behaviour and attitude toward the earth.

A: When it comes to impact, “storytelling is still the most powerful tool at our disposal in terms of raising people’s awareness and changing their lifestyles,” says Dr Paolo Saporito, Research Officer at UCC and a scholar in film studies and eco-cinema. “Storytelling works for kids, for adults, and for teenagers.” But what’s especially important is the way those stories are told, he says, and, to have an impact on our climate thinking, “that’s what needs to change.”

The environmental movement only took off in the 1960s and 70s, Saporito notes, so only then did public opinion and the interest of filmmakers on these topics really begin. Looking to a film’s content was the earliest port of call when trying to assess its impact. “One of the first questions academics asked themselves was: are movies and film useful tools to raise public awareness of these issues.” Films like An Inconvenient Truth and The Day After Tomorrow were cited as early attempts but it was hard to tell what kind of influence they were having on audiences.

Research then looked more subtly and noticed that these films, like most, take an “anthropocentric” approach, or “the idea that the human being is kind of a superior being in the world and natural resources are there just to let humans thrive,” Saporito says. If we think in anthropocentric terms, “the exploitation of natural resources is ethically justified by the benefit humans derived from their use.”

Looking back on films that push environmental awareness, researchers found that “the way we tell stories and the way we make films is often embedded in this anthropocentric way of thinking.” They might be addressing environmental issues, but through the narrative and in the way they represent the relationship between the human being and their environments, they support “the view of the world as an object for human disposal.”

Look at most Hollywood films and you’ll notice that once the characters exit the frame, the scene ends. “There is nothing relevant to the narrative in the background,” he says.

Although this approach might have worked before, we are in a different era of capitalism and climate-emergency, Saporito explains. What’s now considered eco-cinema must not only address environmental issues but contend with this separation between the human subject and the world as object.

Saporito points to the Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni as someone who “rethinks our relationship with the environment,” citing films like Red Desert from 1964. Antonioni might think, when the character leaves the frame, “I’ll keep shooting. What really matters is not just the character but what is left when the character leaves the frame – for a few seconds you stare at a tree or the sky or an urban setting where nothing happens.”

As Saporito sees it, these sorts of narratives, where the human is no longer at the centre but part of a complex ecology, are potentially transformative, through “the kind of ethical reflections that these movies trigger with respect to environmental issues.”

A second approach taken in the last several years is to consider film as “an industry that has an impact on the environment.” There has been a lot published on the environmental costs of Hollywood, Saporito says, for example work by Hunter Vaughan, with studies of the fire scene in Gone With the Wind or how much water was used for Singing in the Rain. “It instils in the spectator the idea that these forms of entertainment do not have material consequences, are not linked to material impact on the environment.”

You might also think the turn to digital has helped, using CGI instead of actually blowing things up, and it is better, Saporito notes, but digital has its own shortcomings. “They make you feel that now you can make a movie without having a real impact on the environment.” But using digital technology for filmmaking is especially energy-intensive.

Aside from this, “the move from analogue to digital filmmaking didn’t really change the conception of the anthropocentric conception at the centre of the world that can use any resources available.”

The film industry has recently adopted protocols to make filmmaking more sustainable and promoted initiatives such as Green Screen, a European project aiming to create green filmmaking guidelines and a common certification. As with other sectors, there is the fear of greenwashing, but also a hope for shared parameters to assess environmental impact and carbon footprint.

While Ireland was not part of this consortium, there has been some interest in green filmmaking here, he says, which means using local suppliers, more sustainable catering, reducing travel to shoot a movie, considering materials in props and costumes, and using second-hand.

Of course, beautiful, big budget films call for a high production standard – “the industry has to change but wants profits as well.” He cites Italian eco-filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher whose works “perhaps at a glance don’t seem to be about environmental issues but they are about the relationship between human beings and the environment,” challenging traditional narrative patterns.

“The key will be to find a way to tell stories that could really change our perception of our environment and change the perception of what we are entitled to when it comes to the environment and environmental resources,” Saporito says.

Eco-concerns need to address both making movies and what we’re watching. “Films make us think, make us dream, they shape our imagination. The stories we tell change our way of thinking.”

Direct your eco related queries for Alissa to info@avondhupress.ie (with ‘Alissa’s Eco-advice’ in the subject line)