Eco-Cinema:
Filming the Ethics and Aesthetics of Waste
(HONORS 211 A)
The effect of modern culture on the environment and on our bodies is everywhere evident. We have reached an age when human advances in science and industrialism are damaging the planet's basic life support systems, generating waste that the environment can no longer tolerate. To add injury to insult, the human mind that made such advances possible in the first place turns out to have a mouth through which it is fed. And it is eating garbage.
The paradoxes of the present age have become the subject of a 21st century film and media movement ranging from CNN sponsored television programs on renewable energy, to animated allegories produced by PIXAR, through science-fiction fantasies of future catastrophe and documentary filmmakers who take their own bodies as "visible evidence" of environmental and physical crisis. We will pay particular attention to films that forcibly demonstrate the unraveling of certainty in the visible field and play with cinematic techniques-editing tempos, camera angles, lighting, framing devices, time-lapse photography, extreme close or long shots, mobile or still cameras, etc.-in order to question conventional models of perception and knowledge.
The paradoxes of the present age have become the subject of a 21st century film and media movement ranging from CNN sponsored television programs on renewable energy, to animated allegories produced by PIXAR, through science-fiction fantasies of future catastrophe and documentary filmmakers who take their own bodies as "visible evidence" of environmental and physical crisis. We will pay particular attention to films that forcibly demonstrate the unraveling of certainty in the visible field and play with cinematic techniques-editing tempos, camera angles, lighting, framing devices, time-lapse photography, extreme close or long shots, mobile or still cameras, etc.-in order to question conventional models of perception and knowledge.
I have always loved the movies. I don't think there's been a month where I didn't watch at least one or two movies. And going to the theater to watch a movie on the big screen is without a doubt my favorite pastime. So when I found that there was a cinema class under the Honors course listing, I immediately signed up. It was only later that I realized that it was "Eco-Cinema".
While initially it seemed like the class was going to be terrible, I ended up really loving it. It's true that the readings we had to do were really tedious and time consuming, but the documentaries we watched were all spectacular and I loved analyzing them all. The great part of the class was that even though we focused on documentaries about environmental issues, throughout that was weaved the history of cinema and really great film-making techniques as well. Really, Professor Bean should be awarded because it was the first time the class had been taught and I think she really pulled it off well. Her love for cinema really came off and I couldn't help but feeling the love as well. What she did really well was offering a wide variety of environmental topics; it wasn't just about deforestation or climate change. Ultimately that made it so everyone could find something in the class that interested them, and this made it easy when it came time for the final project, which was to shoot our own documentaries.
I absolutely love film-making, having done some in high school, but I had never made a documentary and the ideas I was grasping with seemed like they could never come together. But with help from Professor Bean, I was able to assemble my thoughts into something I'm really proud of (and a film that went on to win "Best Original Concept", "Best Direction", and "Audience Favorite" in our class).
While initially it seemed like the class was going to be terrible, I ended up really loving it. It's true that the readings we had to do were really tedious and time consuming, but the documentaries we watched were all spectacular and I loved analyzing them all. The great part of the class was that even though we focused on documentaries about environmental issues, throughout that was weaved the history of cinema and really great film-making techniques as well. Really, Professor Bean should be awarded because it was the first time the class had been taught and I think she really pulled it off well. Her love for cinema really came off and I couldn't help but feeling the love as well. What she did really well was offering a wide variety of environmental topics; it wasn't just about deforestation or climate change. Ultimately that made it so everyone could find something in the class that interested them, and this made it easy when it came time for the final project, which was to shoot our own documentaries.
I absolutely love film-making, having done some in high school, but I had never made a documentary and the ideas I was grasping with seemed like they could never come together. But with help from Professor Bean, I was able to assemble my thoughts into something I'm really proud of (and a film that went on to win "Best Original Concept", "Best Direction", and "Audience Favorite" in our class).
Unfortunately, the audio isn't available due to copyright issues. If you'd like to see the film with audio, please let me know and I'll get you a copy!
Eco-Cinema is a VLPA course however, and as such I got to do a lot of a kind of writing that I had never really done before. In addition, Professor Bean had us do some extensive research using the databases available through UW, and this really was the greatest thing I took away from the class because I know it is really going to be helpful in the future. Here are the writing assignments: the Historiography Project, and the Script Treatment/Proposal for the film above. I've also included the graded versions with Professor Bean's annotations.
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