ECO 
ARTHOUSE


A Film Lecture Series

Led by Tony McKibbin
Co-organised with Sigrid Schmeisser
Our purpose is to look at the environment through a filmic lens, to see how film can teach us to view ecological questions as also aesthetic ones. While eco-documentaries including An Inconvenient Truth and The End of Line have their place, they also potentially displace the pertinence of subjects in the contexts of objects. They become about what we have done and what science can do, and this can also cover Hollywood’s approach to environmental cinema, with heroes setting right wrongs that have been created by human negligence. (The Day After Tomorrow for example).  However, observational and essayistic documentaries (Workingman’s Death; Our Daily Bread) are more inclined to dissolve the relationship between subject and object, and less likely to see the narrative focus as one of problems seeking scientific and heroic resolution. Equally, fiction films that resist problem/solution models like Stalker, Red Desert and Safe enquire into the nature of the human as readily as the resources we are stripping from the planet, as if wondering whether with better inner resources we might be able to counter the exploitation of our environment. Perhaps if we did less to the planet we might not need to do more for it, as though our need for action and consumption, to travel the world and purchase numerous items that are made out of it, then demands a counter-response that is still a product of the scientist thinking that helped get us into the mess in the first place. If most of the problems have been created by the science that developed in the wake of the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and that led to the agricultural and industrial revolutions etc thereafter, perhaps science, for all its wonders, isn’t best placed to grasp the magnitude of the situation. 

Can film, along with the other arts, with their range of possibilities, allow us to understand what needs to be comprehended rather than merely what needs to be done? 
Join us for a course that will take a film each week and debate its usefulness in thinking through some of these things, and where healthy discussion will be a vital aspect of the class.

Led by film & literature critic Tony McKibbin
Co-organised with designer & researcher Sigrid Schmeisser (MA Geo-Design).



An Inconvenient
Truth


Fearing the worst, power point style. Al Gore guides us through the terrible consequences of various lifestyle choices and relies on the facts and figures to tell us what needs to be done. Here he looks at amongst other things the surface of the earth and how we are impacting upon it.

Director
Davis Guggenheim, US

Writer
Starring
Al Gore

Release date
May 24, 2006
07.11.2024
 

The End of the Line 


As natural resources have dwindled, the eco doc has proliferated, with Rupert Murray’s film wondering how we can stop the continuing depletion of our oceans. Going easy on blue fin tuna would be a useful start. 

The film is based on Charles Clover’s book »The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat«


Director
Rupert Murray, UK

Writer
Charles Clover, environmental journalist, UK

Release date
2009 21.11.2024


Darwin’s Nightmare


Lake Victoria is the biggest in Africa, but what for many years would be cause for celebration is now cause for alarm: after the introduction of Nile fish into the lake numerous problems have arisen. 

Director
Writer
Hubert Sauper, AT

Release date
2004

 05.12.2024


The Forgotten Space


Voracious global capitalism leaves much in its wake and many left behind or exploited as Noël Burch and Alan Sekula look chiefly at the huge crates that move across continents. They interview various people who are without work or without time, often unemployed or exhausted.

Director
Noël Burch, US
Allan Sekula, US

Release date
2010 09.01.2025


Matter 
out of Place


Matter out of Place muses over what happens to  the various items that we consume and the planetary resources we utilise. »Where do objects go when they no longer have any use?« a character asks in Werner Herzog’s Stroszek. Nickolaus Geyrhalter replies: to places they don’t belong as he points his perplexed camera at places near and far: to burning rubbish in the Maldives, to a waste plant in Austria; the coast off Greece, to a music festival in the Nevada Desert.

Director
Nikolaus Geyrhalter, AT

Release date
2022 23.01.2025


Workingman’s Death


From back-breaking slog as workers carry sulphur down from the mouth of a volcano, to others working in the slimmest of mine shafts, Michael Glawogger shows the days of hard labour in our supposed post-industrial world are for from over for many. 

Director
Writer
Michael Glawogger, AT

Release date
2005 06.02.2025


The Day After Tomorrow 


The can-do spirit of the American action film meets ecological disaster as director Roland Emmerich wonders if the final catastrophe would be bad box-office, asking us to believe instead in the forces of good with white smiles and strong will power.  

Director
Roland Emmerich, DE

Writers
Roland Emmerich, DE
Jeffrey Nachmanoff

Starring
Dennis Quaid
Jake Gyllenhaal
Emmy Rossum

Release date
2004 20.02.2025


The Planet of 
the Apes I 


The film’s closing image would have been an initial surprise but has now become iconic: Charlton Heston realising that the planet he is on is none other than earth and that there isn’t much left of civilisation but a collapsed Statue of Liberty. 

Director
Franklin J. Schaffner, (1920–1989), US

Writers
Michael Wilson
Rod Serling
Pierre Boulle

Starring
Charlton Heston
Roddy McDowall
Kim Hunter

Release date
1968 06.03.2025


Walkabout  


A couple of youngsters are caught in the Outback and, left to their own resources,
will almost certainly die, no matter the beauty and tranquillity around them. But an aboriginal boy is on the walkabout of the title and director Nicolas Roeg shows the desert in all its ferocious beauty. 

Director
Nicolas Roeg, UK (1928–2018)

Writers
Edward Bond
Ronald G. Payne
Nicolas Roeg

Starring
Jenny Agutter
David Gulpilil
Luc Roeg

Release date
1971 20.03.2025