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).