FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

ELEMENTS AND ATMOSPHERES

ADAM O’BRIEN

SHORT CUTS
SHORT CUTS
INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES
 OTHER SELECT TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES

THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells

THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOOD’S PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald
SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska
EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie
READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas
DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane
THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau
COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street
MISE-EN-SCÈNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION John Gibbs
NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius
ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells
WOMEN’S CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler
BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay
FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen
AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael O’Pray
PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell
NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight
EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember
MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay
MELODRAMA: GENRE, STYLE, SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler
FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe
FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECIATION Andrew Klevan
NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis
THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith
TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary
FILM NOIR: FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY Mark Bould
DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward
THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krämer
ITALIAN NEO-REALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel
WAR CINEMA: HOLLYWOOD ON THE FRONT LINE Guy Westwell
FILM GENRE: FROM ICONOGRAPHY TO IDEOLOGY Barry Keith Grant
ROMANTIC COMEDY: BOY MEETS GIRL MEETS GENRE Tamar Jeffers McDonald
SPECTATORSHIP: THE POWER OF LOOKING ON Michele Aaron
SHAKESPEARE ON FILM: SUCH THINGS THAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF Carolyn Jess-Cooke
CRIME FILMS: INVESTIGATING THE SCENE Kirsten Moana Thompson
THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: A NEW LOOK Naomi Greene
CINEMA AND HISTORY: THE TELLING OF STORIES Mike Chopra-Gant
GERMAN EXPRESSIONIST CINEMA: THE WORLD OF LIGHT AND SHADOW Ian Roberts
FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: TAKING MOVIES SERIOUSLY Daniel Shaw
CONTEMPORARY BRITISH CINEMA: FROM HERITAGE TO HORROR James Leggott
RELIGION AND FILM: CINEMA AND THE RE-CREATION OF THE WORLD S. Brent Plate
FANTASY CINEMA: IMPOSSIBLE WORLDS ON SCREEN David Butler
FILM VIOLENCE: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY, GENRE James Kendrick
NEW KOREAN CINEMA: BREAKING THE WAVES Darcy Paquet
FILM AUTHORSHIP: AUTEURS AND OTHER MYTHS C. Paul Sellors
THE VAMPIRE FILM: UNDEAD CINEMA Jeffrey Weinstock
HERITAGE FILM: NATION, GENRE AND REPRESENTATION Belén Vidal
QUEER CINEMA: SCHOOLGIRLS, VAMPIRES AND GAY COWBOYS Barbara Mennel
ACTION MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF STRIKING BACK Harvey O’Brien
BOLLYWOOD: GODS, GLAMOUR AND GOSSIP Kush Varia
THE SPORTS FILM: GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Bruce Babington
THE HEIST FILM: STEALING WITH STYLE Daryl Lee
INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND FILM: SPACE, VISION, POWER Sean Carter and Klaus Dodds
FILM THEORY: CREATING A CINEMATIC GRAMMAR Felicity Colman
BIO-PICS: A LIFE IN PICTURES Ellen Cheshire
THE GANGSTER FILM: FATAL SUCCESS IN AMERICAN CINEMA Ron Wilson
FILM PROGRAMMING: CURATING FOR CINEMAS, FESTIVALS, ARCHIVES Peter Bosma
POSTMODERNISM AND FILM: RETHINKING HOLLYWOOD’S AESTHETICS Catherine Constable
THE ROAD MOVIE: IN SEARCH OF MEANING Neil Archer
PRISON MOVIES: CINEMA BEHIND BARS Kevin Kehrwald
THE CHILDREN’S FILM: GENRE, NATION, AND NARRATIVE Noel Brown
SILENT CINEMA: BEFORE THE PICTURES GOT SMALL Lawrence Napper
TRASH CINEMA: THE LURE OF THE LOW Guy Barefoot
F I L M A N D T H E N AT U R A L
ENVIRONMENT

E L E M E N T S A N D AT M O S P H E R E S

ADAM O’BRIEN

WA L L F L OWE R
L O N D O N a n d N E W YO R K
A Wallflower Press book
Published by
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
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cup.columbia.edu

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All rights reserved.
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Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America

Cover image: Still the Water (2014) © Soda Pictures

 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1 Film Studies and the Natural Environment 7

2 Film Narrative and the Natural Environment 31

3 Film Genre and the Natural Environment 52

4 National Cinemas and the Natural Environment 73

Conclusion 96

Filmography 104

Bibliography 108

)NDEX 

v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wrote this book since joining the Department of Film, Theatre & Television
at the University of Reading, and can only hope that it reflects some of
the qualities which have made this such an ideal place for sharing and
exploring ideas about cinema. At Reading, Lisa Purse, John Gibbs, Tamara
Courage and Stefan Solomon deserve particular thanks. Michael Malay
(Bristol) offered some typically astute suggestions, Alastair Phillips
(Warwick) recommended an excellent book at an opportune moment, and
Yoram Allon (Commissioning Editor at Wallflower Press) was patient and
encouraging from start to finish.
I am doubly fortunate to have a loving family surrounded by more loving
family, and am grateful for how much they all support my work. Roddy,
Joseph and Ruth are the distractions one could hope for, and Rebecca con-
tinues to know and help me in countless ways.

vii
INTRODUCTION

Is Titanic (1997) a film about nature? We might instinctively say that it is,
on the grounds that the film’s drama is based on a catastrophe suffered at
sea, instigated by a force beyond human, social influence. Until we recall
that Titanic places a heavy emphasis on the culpability of certain people,
and wonder whether that makes it a work less about nature. But would the
film’s meanings, effects and pleasures be the same had the disaster been
distinctively man-made (a declaration of war, for example)? And if Titanic
seems to be positing nature as an antagonist, distinct from social phe-
nomena such as capitalism, class and technology, does that mean that the
iceberg represents nature? What about the wind which blows against Jack
(Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) as they stand at the bow of
the ship, and which enables Rose’s fantasy of flying? How can one natural
feature take meaningful priority over another? Where does nature begin
and end?
Raymond Williams suggests that since nature is a word ‘which carries,
over a very long period, many of the major variations of human thought […]
it is necessary to be especially aware of its difficulty’ (2014: 189). ‘Nature’,
‘natural’ and related terms have received much interrogation, and rightly
so; understanding the divide between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ is an
activity of huge political, ethical, scientific and philosophical complexity.
Likewise ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, ‘environment’ and ‘landscape’, ‘local’
and ‘global’, ‘object’ and ‘organism’, among others. The language and

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images we use to conjure up worldly phenomena not traceable to human

design is fraught with shortcomings, oversights and contradictions. Kate
Soper gives a sense of this in her excellent introduction to the topic, What
is Nature?:

Nature is both machine and organism, passive matter and vital-

ist agency. It is represented as both savage and noble, polluted
and wholesome, lewd and innocent, carnal and pure, chaotic and
ordered. Conceived as a feminine principle, nature is equally lover,
mother and virago; a source of sensual delight, a nurturing bosom,
a site of treacherous violation. Sublime and pastoral, indifferent to
human purposes and willing servant of them, nature awes as she
consoles, strikes terror as she pacifies, presents herself as both
the best of friends and the worst of foes. (1995: 71)

Soper brings some order to the confusion by proposing three conceptual

versions of nature: the ‘metaphysical’ (how humankind distinguishes itself
from an ‘other’), the ‘realist’ (structures and processes, subject to scien-
tific study, which influence the planet) and the ‘lay’ (observable features of
the non-urban and non-industrial world, familiar and available to common
experience). Throughout this book, I will largely be following Soper’s third
concept, and have settled upon the term ‘natural environment’ to more
clearly distinguish the topic from philosophical explorations of naturality.
In other contexts, I have sometimes avoided using the terms ‘nature’ and
‘the environment’, nervous of how they, taken together, can conjure up
a certain warm-blanket complacency; but this book is not a work of eco-
critical theory, and its terms are designed to be accessible and far reach-
ing. As Soper explains, ‘talk of the countryside and its “natural” flora and
fauna may be loose, but it still makes discriminations that we would want
to observe’ (1995: 20).
There are other reasons for what may be considered a naïve definition
of nature. Taking seriously the work of creative artists – composers, poets,
painters, novelists, sculptors, playwrights, photographers, filmmakers –
often involves acknowledging that something has turned their attention
away from human forms and subjects; something has allowed them to
re-contextualise human experience in a manner which we find arresting
and enlightening. ‘Insofar as nature is something and not nothing, then it

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

must be something encountered in a particular way, at a finite place, for

somebody’ (Mules 2014: 18) – or, I would add, for a work of art. But such
encounters are not simply a case of biophilic or nature-loving impulses.
The stance taken up by any given artist may be one of awe, fear, hubris,
naivety, irony, curiosity or any number of alternatives; Titanic, for example,
could be said to answer to almost all of these. There is not a genre or mode
of natural-environment art, but rather a common urge amongst a great
many (deeply dissimilar) artists to acknowledge the world as something
more than a stage for social transactions.
These are big ideas with which to begin a short book. But they are ideas
which have been, until recently, surprisingly muted in academic film stud-
ies, and so deserve to be set out boldly and starkly. Much has been written
about the medium’s crucial engagement with key aspects of modernity
– such as urbanisation, mechanised warfare and global capitalism – to
the extent that film is thought to be tied absolutely to twentieth-century
concerns. But filmmakers, like other artists, are invariably interested in the
way humankind understands its relationship with the non-human world;
and film, like other art forms, brings with it particular affordances in this
regard.
For example, the movement in time of snow and rain, birds and beasts,
streams and waterfalls, is something that painters and poets, unlike
filmmakers, struggle to communicate or represent. On the other hand,
a filmmaker will find it difficult to deploy metaphor or invoke subjective
impressions of the natural world – which is one reason why nature writ-
ing is deeply resistant to film adaptation. Derek Bousé has written that
‘film and television are about movement, action and dynamism; nature is
generally not’ (2000: 4). This is a simplistic reduction of all three, but still
a useful reminder of the potentially awkward fit between the tendencies of
moving-image media and some important qualities of the natural world.
Of course all artistic media could be said to produce their own ‘awk-
ward fit’ with non-human nature, and given the centuries-long traditions
of environmental imagining in literary, theatrical, musical and fine arts, it
is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that cinema came too late
to the party, or that it is doomed to repeat the conventions of, for exam-
ple, landscape painting, the Romantic sublime, pastoralism or wilderness
discourse. These extant modes are not irrelevant to cinema, but they have
not determined the trajectory of its environmental imagination. To properly

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appreciate the subject of film and the natural environment, such terms are
useful, but not necessarily more useful than neorealism, film noir, mise-en-
scène and montage. A painting of an iceberg is one thing; an establishing
shot of an iceberg, however graphically similar, is quite another thing. Jack
and Rose on the bow of the Titanic comes to us by way of this medium’s
forms, conventions and mysteries.
This volume stems from the belief that nature is of profound interest
to a great many filmmakers and film scholars, even if it is not always pri-
oritised as a subject in and of itself. Throughout the book, I will discuss
genres and national cinemas, theories and theorists, directors and crit-
ics, many of which will already be familiar to readers who have engaged
with film studies to some extent. I will not be focusing my attention on
an overlooked body of work, but rather an overlooked approach or strand
of thinking. I will not be limiting the discussion to films which thematise
nature, and will deliberately cast a broad geographical and historical net.
There are still some necessary limits, however. I will focus on fictional
narrative cinema, not only because this is likely to be of the most immedi-
ate interest to the greatest number of readers, but also because experi-
mental and documentary cinema both have relatively distinct traditions
of environment-engaged scholarship dedicated to them. (Animal studies
is another related field to which I cannot quite do justice in this book.)
Concentrating on films which explicitly set out to creatively tell stories
will also lend the overall a discussion a greater consistency and coher-
ence, allowing key ideas and motifs to recur and develop as the book
progresses. The subtitle, Elements and Atmospheres, is an attempt to
capture the book’s dual focus, alluding to both interpretive analysis and
environmental subjects.
Chapter 1 takes a brief tour through three key sub-categories of the
discipline – film theory, film history and film criticism – and suggests
a number of ways in which the natural environment has already been a
present, if not central, concern in film studies. Chapter 2 revisits some of
the most important constituents of film narrative, such as point of view,
causality and characterisation, and teases out the sometimes subtle ways
in which film storytelling can draw on natural phenomena. The subject of
Chapter 3 is film genre; more specifically, how the natural environment
often plays an important role in establishing and developing the horizons
of a given genre’s ‘world’, and how this manifests itself in the example of

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

film noir. And Chapter 4 turns to the question of national cinemas, focus-
ing on Japanese film as an example of how and when an environmental
focus might reveal important continuities (and discontinuities) in a par-
ticular country’s body of work.
This is not a polemical book. Instead, each chapter occupies and dem-
onstrates a position – or series of positions – from which readers may want
to explore further the topic of cinema and nature. That said, this is not
simply an exercise; I write in the genuine belief that environmental ques-
tions still have a great deal more to contribute to film studies, and that
there are strong ethical and intellectual reasons for attending more closely
to the natural environments of narrative cinema. To this end, certain recur-
ring questions animate the book as a whole; they are implicit touchstones,
oriented towards whichever film we are faced with:

– Why does this film in particular seem to demand an environ-

mentally informed analysis or interpretation? And in responding to
that demand, are we simply describing and summarising the film’s
features – its images, themes and narrative – or are we genuinely
working towards an enriched understanding of its form and mean-
ing?

– Has this film invoked or explored the natural environment in ways

which are distinctive to, or deeply characteristic of, the medium?

– How does all this come to fruition in particular details, moments

and sequences?

To return to the example of Titanic, we could say that the iceberg collision is
an unavoidable reason for reading the film as one concerned with nature,
but also that it poses a challenge of how to move towards something more
nuanced than crude nature/technology binaries. One way to confront this
challenge is to explore the particular use it makes of cinema’s most distinc-
tive capabilities – such as the manipulation of duration, regular shifts in
scale, sound/image dynamics and star presence. This would then enable
us, for example, to think about the famous ‘king of the world’ moment in
more refined terms. Why do we not see Jack’s point of view? Does he (or
the film’s viewer) know where in the world he is at this moment? What

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are the implications of him howling like a wild animal, whilst proclaiming
himself king? And why does Rose process the same experience quite dif-
ferently, as one of flight?
In response to my opening question, then, the following book is not
an attempt to find which films are ‘about’ nature, but rather an invitation
to consider how some films negotiate a compelling relationship with their
environmental subjects and objects. ‘If the language of nature is mute’,
wrote Theodor Adorno, ‘art seeks to make this muteness eloquent’ (1997:
106). Cinema has demonstrated a capacity for such eloquence in a great
many ways and means, and the following chapters have been written in an
attempt to do some justice to that wealth and diversity.

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1 FILM STUDIES AND THE NATUR AL ENVIRONMENT

This chapter is an introduction to the existing body of work, within film

studies, that addresses the medium’s relationship with the natural envi-
ronment. I will begin by offering an overview of the particular subfield of
ecocritical film studies, before surveying some of the less direct engage-
ments with environmental subject matter in film theory, film history and
film criticism, to indicate how these disciplinary approaches can – and
often do – incorporate a considered awareness of the natural world. What
follows is not an evaluative or critical engagement with the work in ques-
tion, but rather a journey through some important and illuminating writers,
writings and themes. Nadia Bozak writes that ‘cinema is, and always has
been, environmentally determined and determining’ (2011: 4), but ques-
tions of environmental form and meaning have, until recently, emerged
rather sporadically in English-language film studies; I hope the following
summaries will help interested readers to follow the threads.

Environmental film studies

While the mid-twentieth century saw the beginnings of what we might call
mainstream environmentalism, it was some decades after this before ques-
tions of environmental engagement became firmly entrenched in arts and
humanities scholarship. Disciplines which traditionally seemed to have a
strong human focus – history, economics, literature – have been enriched

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by an increasingly sophisticated exploration of humans’ embeddedness

in the non-human world. For every subfield (such as environmental his-
tory or eco-philosophy) there are of course many important predecessors
stretching back decades and even centuries, but the widespread and sus-
tained concern with environmental questions has been a relatively recent
trend, of which film studies can be said to be a part. Researchers interested
in exploring cinema’s relationship with the natural world will find them-
selves mainly consulting work written since the start of the twenty-first
century.
One strand of this work has been concerned with cinema’s relative con-
tribution to environmentalism as a political and ethical cause. Some writers
on this subject proceed from the understanding that humans’ relationship
to their natural surroundings is a matter of urgent concern, and that film can
and does play an influential role in the maintenance of that relationship.
Questions of responsibility, stewardship, sustainability and representa-
tion are likely to predominate in this work, more so than film-theoretical or
aesthetic concerns (although the distinction is by no means absolute). In
part because of its widespread influence, American cinema has been the
subject of a considerable amount of this kind of study; see, for example, the
work of David Ingram (2000) and Pat Brereton (2005; 2015), while Robin L.
Murray and Joseph K. Heumann (2009; 2012) have thoroughly chronicled
environmental trends and cycles in popular film. Chinese cinema has also
been an area of focus (Lu and Mi 2009), not least because that country has
experienced, and initiated, particularly extreme environmental transforma-
tions during its recent accelerated modernisation.
Some of the principles and key methodological traits of the environ-
mentalist approach are clearly evident in a piece by Roberto Forns-Broggi,
‘Ecocinema and “Good Life” in Latin America’ (2013), which describes and
praises two documentaries about environmental injustice in Latin America,
When Clouds Clear (2008) and The Devil Operation (2010). The first feature
we might notice in this essay is the use of the term ‘ecocinema’ in the
title, a move based on the idea that a vast body of work can be delineated,
one which ‘reflects a consciousness about both fruitful and problematic
relations with natural life’ (2013: 185). The case studies are discussed as
exemplars of a broader wave of environmentally and politically progressive
work emerging from Ecuador and Bolivia in recent years, in and beyond
cinema. Where the films are evaluated by Forns-Broggi, it is primarily in

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

terms of their instrumentality, their usefulness to a cause. No mention is

made of the films’ aesthetic strategies or their textual qualities, and the
author’s points of reference are predominantly works of ‘green’ cultural
studies rather than film theory or criticism.
This is not to say that politically-charged writing on film and the envi-
ronment is necessarily carried out in isolation from the ‘conventional’
concerns of film studies (narrative, mise-en-scène, technology, reception),
but Forns-Broggi’s writing can certainly be said to occupy one end of a
spectrum; his primary interests are political rather than aesthetic. Another
notable feature of his essay is its tendency to place the films in a media –
rather than an exclusively filmic – context. An increasing amount of work
relevant to environmental film studies is similarly oriented towards media;
the reasons behind this shift are of course many and complex, and for a
more thorough understanding, readers are encouraged to explore collec-
tions such as Ecosee: Image, Rhetoric, Nature, Greening the Media (Drobin
and Morey 2009) and Ecomedia: Key Issues (Rust et al. 2016).
If one strand of scholarship on film and the environment can be said
to explore cinema’s role in a socio-political struggle toward greater eco-
logical responsibility, a slightly different approach is adopted by writers
such as Nadia Bozak, Adrian Ivakhiv, Sean Cubitt, Kristi McKim and Scott
MacDonald, and is perhaps best represented by an excellent collection
of essays edited by Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, Screening Nature:
Cinema Beyond the Human (2013). Such work is by no means apolitical,
but the question it raises is not so much how film can be produced and
circulated in environmentally progressive ways, but rather how best we
might respond to film’s particular and distinctive engagement with the
natural environment. In the same way that important patterns and insights
can be found in the medium’s relationship with the female body, histori-
cal narrative, childhood, national identity and domesticity, for example, so
the natural environment has been a privileged subject of film which war-
rants close critical attention. Such an approach will typically avoid treating
case studies primarily as rhetorical or ideological texts, and will more likely
attend to the aesthetic particulars of exemplary work.
This broadly describes the way in which Nadia Bozak writes about
Werner Herzog (2011), Adrian Ivakhiv writes about Andrei Tarkovsky (2013),
Guinevere Narraway writes about Rose Lowder (2013), and Kristi McKim
writes about Woody Allen (2013). McKim, for example, does not argue that

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Allen’s films provide any kind of social purpose with regard to how they
envision and narrate characters’ relationship with their environment; how-
ever, she does make a very convincing case that the director of Manhattan
(1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Match Point (2005) is unusually
and consistently thoughtful when it comes to the deployment of weather
– particularly rain – in his films. Drawing on interviews with Allen, and her
own close textual analysis, McKim demonstrates how Allen’s characters
invariably seek shelter from the rain, complementing the inwardness and
self-reflection they tend to practise (2013: 117). She is writing in the context
of a broader study of weather in cinema, one which tends to emphasise
matters of style, narrative and interpretation ahead of environmental
politics, but also one which nevertheless hopes to model ‘a perceptual
sensitivity towards the atmosphere that could have political implications
for our current and future ecosystems’ (2013: 4).
Nadia Bozak could be said to adopt a reverse approach. In The
Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (2011) she takes
as her starting point film’s material entanglement with natural resources
such as sunlight and fossil fuels, and moves from this precondition of the
medium towards imaginative interpretations of a range of films and sty-
listic tropes. Bozak’s approach, for example, allows her to compare how
celluloid cinema and digital video provide different opportunities for film-
makers to document resource-driven wars; she also contemplates the long
take as a gesture which makes ‘the consumptive foundations of cinema
conspicuous’ (2011: 132). Bozak’s examples are wonderfully various, and
make a very strong (but non-prescriptive) case for cinema’s inextricable
relationship with natural energy and resources.
This is a common line of thinking within contemporary ecocritical writ-
ing; film is not (only) a recorder of natural subjects, but is itself closely
bound up in ecological networks. While Bozak argues this with reference
to film’s direct reliance on material resources, others have made the argu-
ment using somewhat more abstract, philosophical terms. Sean Cubitt, for
example, turns to Aristotle’s conceptions of ‘physis’ (nature) and ‘techne’
(artistic craft) to argue for the ecological necessity of mediating images:
‘Nature communicates with us as surely as we with it,’ he writes, ‘but
to do so it must mediate’ (2005: 134). In Ecologies of the Moving Image
(2013), Adrian Ivakhiv draws on Sean Cubitt (as well as A. N. Whitehead,
C. S. Pierce, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari) to argue that the cinema-

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

viewing experience is a particularly complex coming together of various

ecological processes, in which we confront ‘a world that is seemingly
objective and material at one end, subjective and experiential at the
other, and interperceptual in the middle: a world of subjects, objects and
things in between’ (2013: 11). Ivakhiv’s theoretical apparatus is intricate
and sometimes forbidding, but his work is valuable not least because of
its ability to remind us of how uncannily ‘natural’ a film world can feel –
alive, navigable, texturally rich, present to us but independent of us. His
concluding thoughts on the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Terrence Malick
are especially illuminating; according to Ivakhiv, these filmmakers ‘craft
a mixture of total control and maximum release’ (2013: 324), making the
most of film’s ability to let environmental phenomena transpire before it,
without denying the medium’s special propensity for sculpting new worlds
from our existing one.
As already mentioned, many of these writers have been directly or
indirectly influenced by an ‘environmental turn’ in the arts and humani-
ties since around the turn of the twenty-first century, their research
and analysis part of a broader movement known as ecocriticism. It is
important to acknowledge, however, that writers in previous decades
did of course raise insightful and perceptive questions about film and
the environment, even if they did so in somewhat more isolated circum-
stances. Leo Braudy’s ‘The Genre of Nature’, is one example; in an exten-
sive survey of popular films of the 1980s and 1990s, he argues that ‘the
myths, metaphors and motifs of nature stand out, sometimes in shadows
and shadings, but often in bold relief’ (1998: 279). Braudy is perfectly
aware of how complex and how historically contingent the idea of nature
is, but nevertheless finds that it is a demonstrably important concern in
a great many Hollywood films, from Splash (1984) and Predator (1987)
to Terminator 2 (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993). Writing more as a genre
theorist than an environmental theorist, Braudy bypasses the knotty ethi-
cal and philosophical questions about the relative validity of nature as a
concept, and instead turns his attention to observable patterns in what
we might call Hollywood’s discourse of nature. He observes, for example,
the ‘profoundly divided and even contradictory themes of nature as power
and nature as victim’ (1998: 296), and also the tendency for Hollywood
films to characterise water as a source of energy and righteousness for
their heroes. There is little attention to aesthetic detail in Braudy’s essay;

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rather it is a valuable thematic overview of popular cinema and its mobili-

sation of naturalness as an idea.
‘Landscape in the Cinema’ (1993), an essay by P. Adams Sitney, also
warrants attention as an important forerunner in environmental film stud-
ies. The piece begins by noting that considerations of landscape and
natural beauty have been awarded virtually no attention in critical writ-
ing on cinema. Sitney is ostensibly focused on the tradition of landscape
spectacle, rather than broader conceptions of environment and ecology,
but his far-reaching explorations of film history and technology, encom-
passing narrative and avant-garde cinema, makes for a very rich resource
– not an argument or theory, but a sharply intelligent guide to the many
techniques by which filmmakers ‘share their surprise and excitement at
the disjunctions and the meshings of the rhythms of the world and the
temporality of the medium’ (1993: 125). While bemoaning the general lack
of attention to environmental film aesthetics, Sitney does point out that
‘some of the first apologists for the cinema as an art made a point of the
power and beauty of natural surroundings in film’ (1993: 103), reminding
us that early theorists of film were perhaps more attuned to the medium’s
environmental affinities than those writing in many subsequent decades.
As we switch our attention from environmental film studies to the broader
church of film theory, those ‘first apologists’ prove to be an appropriate
point of departure.

Film theory

Robert Stam describes film theory as ‘an evolving body of concepts

designed to account for the cinema in all its dimensions’ (2000: 6). When
film theorists develop a particular account of the medium, they may choose
to place their emphasis on one of its strongest tendencies, something that
is not necessarily an absolutely defining feature, but is nevertheless suit-
ably far-reaching. Examples of this include details of film technique (the
cut, the long take), of film viewership (cognitive processes, psychoana-
lytic patterns of reception), or of film technology (CGI, camera mobility).
Another path for film theory is an account of the medium by way of par-
ticular subjects to which it has been drawn, and for which it seems to have
developed a peculiar and distinctive affinity; crowds, trains and human
faces, for example, have been written about in such terms, as ‘ingredients’

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

with which film can somehow achieve its most essential capabilities – or
at least subjects whose appearance in a film warrants special scrutiny and
reflection. It is in this sense that the natural environment can be consid-
ered a concern for film theory.
A good place to begin reflecting on this is with early film theory, a body
of work rich in examples of writers attempting to isolate and articulate the
quintessential characteristics, and effects, of cinema. One of the most
widely quoted responses to cinema in its very first years, ‘On a Visit to
the Kingdom of Shadows’, was written by Maxim Gorky in 1896. In it, the
Russian writer is particularly taken by the medium’s unsettling combina-
tion of movement and silence, as well as its colourlessness. Early on in the
piece, Gorky describes the ‘Kingdom’ thus: ‘Everything there – the earth,
the trees, the people, the water and the air – is dipped in monotonous
grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and
the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow’ (qtd.
in Harding and Popple 1996: 5). The inclusiveness of Gorky’s description
is striking; the films he witnessed seem to have offered up entire worlds,
made up of the same ‘stuff’ as ours, but all the more unsettling for that. He
registers the fact that nature will inevitably be a part of almost any audio-
visual record of a place and time, in ways that might well stretch beyond
the intentions of the filmmaker, but also that such a record will have a
simultaneous magical, supernatural quality to it. Gorky was not a film
theorist in the sense we generally use the term, but he was writing at a time
when almost any account of film viewing had a kind of proto-theoretical
currency. And he was one of many writers to describe the medium in dis-
tinctively non-anthropocentric terms.
Most famously, this was (loosely) theorised in France around the term
‘photogénie’, defined by Jean Epstein as ‘any aspect of things, being or
souls whose moral character is enhanced by filmic reproduction’ (1981:
20). Sometimes the illustrative examples provided by writers such as
Epstein and Louis Delluc were of natural features such as hills and trees,
but this was certainly not a crucial factor. Rather the emphasis fell on pho-
togénie being achieved through non-theatrical terms; assuming we are
alive to cinema’s capacity for revealing the energy and power in things we
habitually take for granted, so their thinking went, drama is of secondary
importance. Photogénie tells us that cinema’s propensity is for showing
us the world with a directness that precedes, or transcends, narrative,

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morality and aesthetic beauty. Whatever the relative merits or problems of

such an account, the ability of film to grant a kind of prominence or agency
to the non-human constituents of a textual world is certainly a recurring
concern in this period.
However, an alternative current sought to celebrate and articulate not
the medium’s deep relationship with the material world, but rather its dis-
tinctiveness from that world. Hugo Münsterberg, an eminent psychologist
fascinated with the nature of this emerging art, insisted on film’s freedom
from physical reality:

The photoplay tells us the human story by overcoming the forms of

the outer world, namely space, time, and causality, and by adjust-
ing the events to the forms of the inner world, namely attention,
memory, imagination, and emotion. (2002: 129)

Here, we find an early iteration of what would later be understood as for-

malist film theory, a tradition which focuses not on cinema’s contract with
physical reality, but on its potential for manipulating and reforming that
reality into a self-enclosed work.
Sergei Eisenstein, perhaps the most influential theorist of film’s first
fifty years, was dissatisfied with the notion that the filmed world is, in itself,
an important aesthetic or philosophical phenomenon. For Eisenstein (and
other Soviet writers), meaning was not to be found in images so much as
between them, in the act of editing. At times, Eisenstein’s writing is so rigor-
ously focused on what we might call the mechanics of montage – camera
angles, graphic design, the strategic deployment of visual stimuli – that one
could be forgiven for assuming that this would come at the cost of sensitive
attention to the profilmic world (an assumption perhaps compounded by the
tendency to place Eisenstein’s ideas in opposition to those of André Bazin
– see below). It would be more accurate to say that Eisenstein imagined
cinema – and art more generally – as a site of productive conflict between
nature and imagination, ‘between organic inertia and creative tendency’
(1949: 46), though one might be tempted to ask whether ‘organic inertia’ is
an oxymoron. His later writings in particular show Eisenstein making room
in his theorising for a film’s environmental dynamics.
In Nonindifferent Nature (1987), first published in 1964, Eisenstein
develops a complex account of how landscape provides films with what

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

he calls a musical element. It was not uncommon in the early twentieth

century to characterise natural landscape as a kind of transformative ingre-
dient in film images – Ricciotto Canudo’s ‘Reflections on the Seventh Art’
applauds Swedish cinema for introducing the ‘ideal counterpoint’ of the
natural elements (1993: 292)– but Eisenstein’s writing is unusual for the
fact that he develops such ideas in a formalist manner. In other words,
nature is not a subject to be revealed or redeemed by photographic repre-
sentation, but rather a condition to which film form should aspire, through
its crafting of an ‘organic’ structure:

It is obvious that a work of this type has a very particular effect

on the perceiver, not only because it is raised to the same level
as natural phenomena but also because the law of its structuring
is also the law governing those who perceive the work, for they
too are part of organic nature. The perceiver feels organically tied,
merged, and united with a work of this type, just as he feels himself
one with and merged with the organic environment and nature sur-
rounding him. (1987: 12)

Eisenstein’s late writing is often difficult to interpret or to apply to other

work, and his seemingly unquestioning belief in the wholeness and stabil-
ity of organic structure has not dated especially well. But his basic position
– namely that images of nature can be used strategically for the achieve-
ment of particular formal effects – is a useful counterpoint to the more
pervasive idea of cinema as a realistic communicator of the natural world.
As mentioned, Eisenstein’s formalist approach to the medium is often
contrasted with André Bazin’s championing of cinematic realism; Bazin
himself identified the distinction between ‘those who put their faith in the
image and those who put their faith in reality’ (1967: 24). There are many
reasons to suppose that this second school of thinking is more tempera-
mentally attuned to environmental particulars and complexities in film.
Reviewing the position of Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer (another important
theorist of film realism), V. F. Perkins paraphrased their general position
in the following terms: ‘a sonnet or a sonata created a world which might
reflect the subjective vision of its maker; film recorded the world which
existed objectively’ (1972: 29). It would be very misleading to suggest
that such writers thought of the world in primarily environmental or eco-

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logical terms, and Bazin’s work in particular has strong social and religious
impulses which have little to do with what we have come to understand as
environmentalism. However, by suggesting that film as a medium offers
us unequalled opportunities for ‘passing through the continuum of physi-
cal existence’ (Kracauer 1960: 64), realist writers remind us that cinema’s
recording function tends to allow for a more horizontal or mutually inform-
ing relationship between the human and the non-human world, when
compared to literature and painting.
Here, for example, is Bazin on Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946):

In the admirable final episode of the partisans surrounded in the

marshlands, the muddy waters of the Po Delta, the reeds stretching
away to the horizon, just sufficiently tall to hide the man crouch-
ing down in the little flat-bottomed boat, the lapping of the waves
against the wood, all occupy a place of equal importance with
the men. This dramatic role played by the marsh is due in great
measure to deliberately intended qualities in the photography.
This is why the horizon is always at the same height. Maintaining
the same proportions between water and sky in every shot brings
out one of the basic characteristics of this landscape. It is the exact
equivalent, under conditions imposed by the screen, of the inner
feeling men experience who are living between the sky and the
water and whose lives are at the mercy of an infinitesimal shift of
angle in relation to the horizon. (1971: 37)

Bazin admired Rossellini enormously, but he is not here crediting the

director with having designed or consciously orchestrated the reeds or the
lapping waves. Rather, he is crediting Rossellini with allowing cinema to
‘bring out’ natural phenomena which existed in reality, and now exist mean-
ingfully in the film. Such sequences were valuable to Bazin because they
exemplified how the ‘conditions imposed by the screen’ could be extra-
ordinarily inclusive. As the passage above demonstrates, this theorising
was still carried out in distinctly humanistic terms; Bazin’s judgement ulti-
mately returns to the question of human perception and human experience,
but it is nevertheless an expanded experience, and one which is simply
unintelligible without reference to the natural world. ‘Cinema, he felt,
allows us to examine the world without interiorizing it’ (Andrew 1978: 114).

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Fig. 1: Characteristics
of the landscape:
Paisan (1946)

This ability to examine the world at one remove, as it were, was a vital
quality of cinema for Bazin, and was the result of the medium’s mechanical
character, what he called ‘the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the
first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative
intervention of man’ (1967: 13). Developments in digital technology have
complicated claims such as this, introducing myriad ‘creative interventions’
which would seem to disrupt Bazin’s claim for cinema as a kind of disinter-
ested witness of the world. But this sea change in film technology is by no
means an abandonment or betrayal of the medium’s potential for commu-
nicating the natural world. Yes, the language surrounding digital capabili-
ties emphasises manipulation and simulation, and cinema can perhaps no
longer lay claim to a particularly non-anthropocentric vision, at least not
on the grounds for which it did throughout many decades. (It is interest-
ing to reflect on what claims Bazin would make of the sequence in Paisan
had Rossellini digitally inserted its reeds and lapping waves.) But it would
be a mistake to dwell too long on certain ontological properties, however
fundamental they have been for some theorists, and lose sight of all those
other qualities and techniques at cinema’s disposal – such as movement in
time, sound/image combinations and flexibility of scale. As it turned away
from photo-based indexicality, the medium by no means became less able
to register and imagine environmental details and experiences.
In Supercinema (2013), William Brown argues the case for digital cine-
ma’s tendency towards non-anthropocentric models and visions. Because
it doesn’t give the impression of a world viewed from a single position, as

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analogue cinema has tended to, digital filmmaking is able to unbalance

relations between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ (to borrow terms normally applied
to landscape painting). Watching digital cinema, Brown suggests, ‘we can
at times neither distinguish between nor separate space from that which
fills it’ (2013: 53); such technology helps us to ‘understand that we only
exist in relation with the world’ (2013: 154).
Although she makes less bold claims for the philosophical and ethical
value of digital film, Kristen Whissel (2014) focuses on certain CGI motifs,
or ‘emblems’, and finds in them a capacity for filming the world in new
ways. One of these emblems is verticality, the opening up of a severely
underexplored dimension. ‘Before the digital effects advances of the late
1980s and early 1990s,’ writes Whissel, ‘cinematic being-in-the-world
remained, for the most part, anchored on the terrestrial plane of existence’
(2014: 13), but recent developments have allowed filmmakers to engage
different dimensions and trajectories. She takes as an example Wo hu
cang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000), and describes the
range and complexity of physical action amongst tall trees as a genuinely
novel opportunity for the medium. Such moments are not necessarily typi-
cal of digital practices, but then neither was Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934)
or Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan or Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005)
typical of photographic film. Like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, each of
these used film technologies and qualities to document and to imagine
meetings between people and their environments.
As writers on digital cinema often argue, worrying over the relative
artificiality of a film’s constitutive technology is invariably a fruitless and
short-sighted task, simplifying as it does the ‘frequently hybrid nature of
indexicality’ in both pre-digital and digital filmmaking (Purse 2013: 5).
Film theory can help remind us of the medium’s particular capacity for
documenting and representing the natural environment, but this is best
accompanied by a recognition of an individual film’s meaningful details,
as well as an awareness of the film-historical conditions out of which that
film arose.

Film history

Rather than privileging a particular property of film as a medium (theory), or

focusing in detail on exemplary works of film art (criticism), the discipline

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

of film history tends to weave together industrial, aesthetic, technologi-

cal and sociocultural factors, formulating questions about why something
happened – or appeared – the way in which it did. That ‘something’ could
be all manner of things; a film review, a portable sound recorder, a cycle of
popular disaster films, the career of a costume designer. Alternatively, film
can be understood and interrogated as a document of history (evidence
of social norms and expectations), as much as a subject of history in its
own right (images and materials worthy of reflective reconstruction and
investigation). Most commonly, the discipline of film history develops a
combination of the two. As Francesco Casetti writes, ‘film was not only the
perfect translator of the last century but also an active agent determining
how its turbulent decades would unfold’ (2008: 2).
Because nature is so often thought of as a constant, eternal backdrop
against which historical fluctuations take place, and because cinema’s
lifespan has covered a period in which key historical dynamics are seen
as moves ‘away from nature’ (communication technology, urbanisation,
mass-media entertainment, industrial-scale agriculture), environmen-
tal questions have gathered little momentum in studies of film history.
Landscape has perhaps been the main conceptual toolkit for those looking
to historicise environmental dynamics in film; far-reaching images of the
natural world, from Stagecoach (1939) to Takhte siah (Blackboards, 2000),
can be validly interpreted as historically specific environmental representa-
tions. Such readings are often enabled by the fact that many cultures have
traditions of landscape representation stretching back beyond cinema, to
precedents in painting and literature (French impressionist painting, for
example, has been exhaustively studied as an historically determined
environmental vision). When we watch a Chinese film such as Huang tudi
(Yellow Earth, 1984) or Sanxia haoren (Still Life, 2006), it may seem clear
that these films’ striking treatment of landscape is something embedded
in far-reaching debates and traditions – about art history, national history
and natural history. But it is nevertheless important to remain alive to the
details of the films’ own distinctive methods, such as the simple fact that,
in the opening moments of Yellow Earth, the sound of wind precedes the
appearance of the eponymous earth. As Helen Hok-Sze Leung notes, the
combination of this sound with a folk tune creates a very specific rhetorical
effect, a point of departure for subsequent images of vast, desolate terrain
– and an influencing factor in how we interpret those images (2003: 192).

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Sometimes, it is necessary to consider very specific and localised

circumstances which have shaped a film’s environmental content; not
just broad traditions and cultures, but particular regions or events or
individuals. For example, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) was released
seven years before the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union, and
that film’s extraordinary vision of a depopulated but eerily animate ‘zone’
has had a considerable influence on how the real-life ‘zone of alienation’
surrounding the power plant is understood and represented – right up to
the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl (GSC, 2007). Films as
diverse as Zemlya (Earth, 1930), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and
Loong Boonmee raleuk chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,
2010) similarly invite studies that situate their treatment of the natural
environment in specific socio-historical contexts, and in relation to con-
temporaneous thinking on wilderness, wildness, stewardship, material
consumption, technology, biology and ethics.
Film history, of course, does not necessarily take an individual film as its
starting point. Sometimes, an environmental approach can be taken to the
study of industrial trends or filmmaking technologies. Nicole Starosielski’s
writing on ‘underwater cinema’, for example, explores how the early twen-
tieth-century films of John Ernest Williamson, such as Thirty Leagues Under
the Sea (1914), were enabled by naval technology, and Starosielski argues
that submarine filming throughout film history has tended to involve the
sharing of resources and footage, because of the sheer ‘strenuousness
and precariousness of production in underwater environments’ (2013:
151). Here and elsewhere in environmental histories of film, physical diffi-
culty and logistical effort become important parts of the historical account.
A guiding question might be phrased as: What labour was necessary/
affordable/desirable in order for environmental details to have appeared
as they do in a certain film or group of films? In Hollywood Cinema and the
Real Los Angeles, Mark Shiel traces the financially motivated development
in studio architecture away from glass and steel, and towards concrete – a
shift which seriously compromised filmmakers’ ability to incorporate natu-
ral light (2012: 162). Film history is populated with many ‘sub-plots’ such
as this, in which environmental spectacle and scope and fidelity can best
be understood in relation to complex networks of economy and ambition.
A different approach would be to take as a case study a recognised
‘chapter’ of film history, and ask to what extent its coherence or its achieve-

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ments have anything to do with environmental dynamics – whether these

be understood in terms of production, reception, technology, narrative or
aesthetics. In the same way that a feminist approach can challenge our
understanding and evaluation of, for example, the French New Wave, so
would an ecocritical approach challenge us to ask what was going on in
those films with regard to the natural environment. Such an exercise would
probably not completely overhaul the conventional narrative of that period;
Bazinian realism, cinephilia and modernist reflexivity would remain as
defining features of the New Wave. But there is still scope to explore the
episodes of pastoral parody in Pierrot le Fou (1965) and Weekend (1967) to
ask what particular locations attracted New Wave filmmakers away from
Paris, and to reflect on why Antoine Doinel finds himself at the beach (of
all places), frozen in time, at the end of Les quatre cent coups (The 400
Blows, 1959).
This famous climactic image is taken up by Lúcia Nagib in World
Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (2011), and connected to other moments
in film history which Nagib sees as similarly charged with aesthetic-revo-
lutionary purpose. She identifies a trans-historical – but still historically
informed – tradition of ‘physical cinema’, in which bold and original films
demonstrate their ambition through an unusually intense engagement (in
the form of running) with the profilmic landscape:

Performed in reality, in vast wintry landscapes, burning deserts or

Arctic sea ice, these races invariably take the upper hand over the
diegesis and impose their own narrative, one related to the char-
acters’ recognizing, experiencing, demarcating and taking posses-
sion of a territory, and, in doing so, taking possession of a people
and its culture. (2011: 12)

To think about film history environmentally does not necessarily require a

rigorous focus on a specific region, culture, period or ecosystem. Tracing
motifs or narrative details across geographical and historical boundaries
can be similarly revealing.
Andrew Higson combines a number of the historical approaches dis-
cussed here in his influential article about British realist cinema of the
late 1950s and early 1960s, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and
Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’ (1984). Like Nagib, he takes as his

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starting point a certain gesture or motif that seems to reappear in a number

of films (in this case, a long shot of an industrial town from a nearby hill),
but Higson’s examples are from a historically coherent and popularly
known cycle of films, namely British ‘kitchen sink’ realist dramas, such as
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and A Taste of Honey (1961)
(albeit with selected references back to documentary films of the 1930s
and 1940s). As a film historian, Higson is particularly interested in the
relationship between the visual cliché of the long shot and the critical
discourse surrounding the films, much of which was based on claims for a
kind of realist integrity.
Higson’s essay is not focused on environmental ethics or aesthetics
as such, but it asks how a film’s way of looking at the physical world can
be embedded in a particular cultural and critical context – an instructive
approach for environmental film studies. The discussion begins by positing
a distinction between (narrative) space and (real, historical) place, sug-
gesting that the convention of the landscape or townscape shot exposes a
tension within the films between storytelling and realist ambitions. Higson
tries to communicate quite how hackneyed the convention is by way of a
persistent use of capitals – The Long Shot of That Town from That Hill – and
suggests that such images cannot help but function as visually pleasurable
spectacle, corrupting the film’s realist credentials. The belief that land-
scape images (in and beyond cinema) impair narrative, and that they may
even carry with them a reactionary political undertow, is quite a popular one
among art historians and political geographers. What marks out Higson’s
work here is the particular contradictions he identifies in the ‘kitchen sink’
films between what he calls ‘moral realism’ and ‘the sympathetic gaze of
the bourgeoisie’ (1984: 4, 17). He writes of how ‘the real historical land-
scape, local and concrete, legitimates and authenticates’ the films’ moral
impulses (1984: 5); it is as if the films want to be true to the particularity of
a given physical environment, whilst also striving for some kind of trans-
cendence. The pull between mimetic specificity and far-reaching allegory
is a consistent theme in studies of nature on film, and Higson successfully
identifies a very historically precise articulation of that tension.
The challenge of reconciling geography and storytelling is another of
the chief concerns on display in ‘Space, Place, Spectacle’ (and is a theme
we shall return to in Chapter 2). For example, Higson recounts a moment
in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in which two characters meet at

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

the castle which overlooks Nottingham. The moment is perfectly plausible

in terms of narrative, but is also a rather conspicuous display, on the part
of the film, of the city; the overt references to this spectacle in the film’s
dialogue (one character chides the other one for dreamily admiring the
view) are, according to Higson, attempts by the film to reintegrate the envi-
ronment into the narrative. While Saturday Night and Sunday Morning may
or may not hold our interest as a dramatic film, it is, according to Higson,
vividly indicative of a moment in British film history in which films were
supposed to have been closely tied to certain, real, physical places: ‘The
machinery of criticism, promotion and selling, and the dominant historical
memory of these films, endlessly stresses the detail of location, but this
detail is a product of moral demands rather than structural (narrative)
demands’ (1984: 8).
In these terms there is a trade-off between geographical validity and
formal fluency, and one which Higson acknowledges was unlikely to satisfy
those critics (a relatively small group in the Britain of 1962) who were much
more interested in the aesthetic than the social project of a film, critics
more concerned that ‘the problem of the relationship between character
and environment be worked through at the level of narrative and mise-en-
scène (1984: 16). Higson quotes a particularly damning survey of ‘kitchen
sink’ filmmaking, published in Movie and written by V. F. Perkins, who
would go on to profoundly influence a great many writers of long-form, sus-
tained film criticism – work focused on a film’s expressive achievements,
and not its realist or sociological credentials. What would this alterna-
tive approach look for, and find, in a film’s environmental subjects and
meanings?

Film criticism

While film theory reaches towards arguments and insights that are poten-
tially applicable to the medium at large, film criticism instead takes an
individual film (or a select group of films) as its subject matter. Film criti-
cism rarely attends very closely or imaginatively to non-human environ-
ments; evaluations of performance and narrative interest tend to dominate
such writing, and if natural environments attract attention, it will often be
either as plot details or items of spectacle. But Alex Clayton and Andrew
Klevan write that the best criticism ‘deepens our interest in individual

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films, reveals new meanings and perspectives, expands our sense of the
medium, confronts our assumptions about value, and sharpens our capac-
ity to discriminate’ (2011: 1), and a sensitivity to a filmed environment is
often a hallmark of such work. A work of film criticism is unlikely to begin
by asking whether Titanic is a film about nature. But it might well find,
through a sustained engagement with that film’s design and development,
with its most compelling and fully achieved sequences, that nature does
indeed matter to that film. As Clayton and Klevan’s terms suggest, it is not
the case that criticism lacks the ambition or reach of theory, but rather that
it is more methodologically inclined to allow films themselves to actively
influence the terms of our interpretation and analysis.
A number of the most important and influential writers in the tradition
of film criticism have, at one time or another, found themselves engag-
ing with work that requires some sort of ‘environmental orientation’. It
is perhaps not surprising that the expansion referred to by Clayton and
Klevan often involves a revitalised awareness of the non-human world –
what Christian Keathley, paraphrasing Bazin, calls the ‘festival of concrete
details’ (2006: 69). Sometimes this can take the form of a fleeting, intensi-
fied attention to seemingly incidental details in the filmed environment,
such as moving clouds or intensely coloured flora, and this is often a fea-
ture of so-called cinephilic film criticism. For example, when Kent Jones, in
his remarkable study of L’Argent (1983), describes one particular transi-
tion as a ‘sudden – and altogether shocking – entry of greenery, earth and
air into the momentum’ of the work (1999: 76), no claim is being for the
film’s environmental character at large. But the author’s responsiveness to
the fullness of the story world is vital to his understanding of its meaning,
and to his judgement of the director’s priorities and distinctiveness; of
a later sequence, Jones writes: ‘The lyricism of nature, the leaves in the
trees – an old gig in cinema, usually overlit, overly precious. Bresson films
it with such delicacy that it might be the first time you’ve ever seen it in a
film’ (1999: 83).
Stanley Cavell, a philosopher who has been an influential figure in
long-form film criticism, does something slightly different with his observa-
tion of a moonlit stream ‘shattered by stars’ (2005: 137) in a brief sequence
of Frank Capra’s romantic comedy, It Happened One Night (1934). Here,
Cavell connects this moment to a brief exchange of dialogue which takes
place the following day, during which Peter Warne (Clark Gable) dreamily

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

describes ‘those nights when you and the moon and the water all become
one’. As Cavell notes, these words in themselves have little aesthetic or
philosophical interest, but when placed in the context of the film’s images
(and when we recall the important and somewhat mysterious fact that
Warne did not seem to consciously register the beauty of the previous
night’s setting), the moment takes on an intensified complexity, enabling
Cavell to situate the film in Shakespearean and American transcendental
traditions. The stream, and the reverie it seems to prompt, does not have
a major bearing on Cavell’s interpretation of It Happened One Night, but
the passage in question is still an excellent example of how an open and
generous critical reading will often find that a film’s world is not limited to
human drama. (It is also an important reminder that telling features of a
film’s environmentality can be found in dialogue.)
At other times, such observations are more fully built in to a devel-
oped and sustained interpretation. ‘Sunny Skies’, Shigehiko Hasumi’s
celebrated article on weather (and conversations about weather) in the
films of Yasujirō Ozu, finds that, with ‘an almost cruel consistency, Ozu
ignores the seasons’ (1997: 120). For a writer who knows the work of Ozu
extensively and intimately, and one who is also familiar with Japanese
weather, the curious inertia of atmospheric conditions (why no rain?) in
films such as Banshun (Late Spring, 1949) and Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo
Story, 1953) becomes an important part of the films’ aesthetic deliberate-
ness. The relentless sunlight in Ozu’s films is, for Shigehiko, evidence of

Fig. 2: A moonlit
stream ‘shattered by
stars’: It Happened
One Night (1934)

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his departure from Japanese aesthetic ideals, and helps to explain the
unusual and deeply affecting ‘excess of clarity’ in his films (1997: 121).
Addressed as it is to a filmmaker’s body of work, ‘Sunny Skies’ could
be classified as a work of auteurist criticism. Studying a director’s priori-
ties and techniques across a range of films is one way to appreciate that
the presence and distinctiveness of environmental details in cinema is
not inevitable or incidental, and that it can be closely tied to a filmmaker’s
vision. Sometimes this takes the form of a director’s persistent interest in a
particular element (for example, water in the films of Lucretia Martel), a par-
ticular location (beaches in the films of Eric Rohmer), a particular technique
(Terrence Malick’s travelling Steadicam shots), or a particular genre (the
road movies of Wim Wenders). Daniel Morgan’s writing on the later films
of Jean-Luc Godard is a rare case of auteurist criticism in which the film-
maker in question overtly engages, through his or her work, in theoretically
informed debates about nature and perception (2013: 69–119). As Morgan
explores in considerable detail, Godard became interested in nature as a
type of iconography, rather than a pure or pre-intellectualised subject. His
shots of landscapes and seascapes are not, according to Morgan, affec-
tive windows on the world, but pointers to a lineage of philosophical and
cultural references, from Lucretius and Schiller to Marx and Shakespeare.
It is by no means the case that every director’s oeuvre can be fruit-
fully explored in ecocritical terms. The films of Kathryn Bigelow, Terence
Davis, John Woo and Jacques Tati, for example, would not necessarily
repay close attention to environmental conditions of the kind explored
in this book. But those, it would seem, are exceptional cases. Hungarian
film critic Yvette Bíró wrote that the ‘dialogue between man and world is
uninterruptable’ (2008: 19), and the vast majority of celebrated filmmakers
continue that dialogue by engaging – to a greater or lesser extent – with
the rhythms, materials and connotations of the natural world.
‘“Cocoon of Fire”’: Awakening to Love in Murnau’s Sunrise’ (2012),
an article by George Toles published in Film International, is an excellent
example of how imaginative and precise interpretation can deepen our
understanding of a film’s creative treatment of nature. Sunrise: A Song of
Two Humans (1927) is one of the most celebrated of all silent features,
and is often understood as a particularly successful marriage of American
melodrama and German Expressionism. Toles is more than aware of the
film’s important industrial and film-historical context, but focuses his own

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analysis on questions of structure and temporality. More specifically, he

claims that viewers of Sunrise ‘feel the rhythmic balance of night and day
as a deep mystery which the still new medium of motion pictures is able
and eager to explore’, and something which persists ‘with or without syn-
chronized human accompaniment’ (2012: 9). The idea of ‘synchronisation’
is a useful one, reminding us of how human drama, when filmed, can be
set against contrasting or complementary natural processes. Many films
make some attempt to connect their narrative structures to seasonal cycles
– perhaps none more diligently than Bom yeoreum gaeul gyeoul geurigo
bom (Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, 2003) – but Toles finds in
Sunrise something other than a straightforward alignment between action
and environment.
This is partly achieved by him discovering how fully and seriously
Murnau seems to regard the idea of spiritual and emotional awakening,
as encapsulated in the metaphor of a loving woman’s face as a rising sun.
Ecocritical writing on film and fiction often treats with (justifiable) caution
the offhand way in which some creative artists indulge in pathetic fallacy,
or what Toles describes as ‘the unseemly, primitive obtrusiveness of literal
correspondences’ (2012: 10) between emotional currents and worldly phe-
nomena; such moments are even more likely to be deemed problematic
when the convention links a forgiving wife with the ever-dependable and
life-giving sun. But Toles convincingly argues that Murnau has integrated
this image-idea so completely into Sunrise (‘all the images of Murnau’s
film are wondrously coordinated with this endpoint’ (2012: 13)), that the
film transcends facile Romanticism.
This reading is enabled by the fact that Toles is not seeking in Sunrise
a biocentric view of the world, nor one governed by the ambitions of real-
ism. Human experience remains at the centre of this interpretation, but
it is what might be thought of as an expanded, situated humanism: ‘We
must participate in the dawn […] for the dawn to be made real. Each day’s
experiential task is to unlearn as fully as possible what we think we know
so we will be in a position to reimagine it’ (2012: 14). The almost euphoric
tone here is buttressed by a historical discussion of Murnau’s changing
relationship with Expressionism, a mode which conventionally empha-
sised the painful discontinuities between individuals and their world.
Toles shows that, in Sunrise, Murnau seems to have inverted the logic of
Expressionism, transforming his vision of human experience ‘from private

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chaos to an unforced attunement with natural process’ (2012: 16). As a

work of criticism, his essay thus establishes a very interesting framework
through which to understand the pressing significance of the natural world
in Sunrise; but this would only get us so far were it not accompanied by a
detailed treatment of the film’s images and sounds (this ‘silent film’ has a
synchronised score).
There are many points at which Toles’ careful attention to the film’s
textual details fulfils this promise. For example, he observes that, during a
brief chase sequence through forest terrain, Murnau chooses not to visu-
ally emphasise the potentially intimidating environment. He also draws
our attention to a moment at which the film’s reunited lovers see before
them, in a shared vision of happiness, images of a bright and sunny
meadow. For Toles, Murnau is fully aware that this glimpse of ‘dimestore
picturesque’ is a ‘touchingly insufficient container for the depth of feeling
they have arrived at’ (2012: 25); Murnau’s own environmental imagination
is thus delicately distinguished from that of his protagonists, and indeed
the gap separating those two worldviews is crucial to the film’s power.
Throughout, Toles demonstrates how film criticism can help us under-
stand a film’s environmental poetics as something shaped by and answer-
able to its other dramatic and expressive elements. Watching and listening
to the non-human world in Sunrise is, for Toles, a means towards a better
understanding of the film. And if this kind of account can along the way

Fig. 3: The ‘dimestore

picturesque’ shared
by husband and wife:
Sunrise: A Song of
Two Humans (1927)

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

give rise to useful observations about German and American film history,
and the broader capacities of cinema, so much the better. But the last-
ing impression of this essay is of someone who has reached the climax of
Sunrise and has found no other way of doing justice to its profundity than
to describe its world in as full a form as possible; sound, image, narrative,
bodies, elements, atmosphere:

Late in Sunrise, the farmer leans forward in one of the lantern-lit

nocturnal rescue boats sent out to find his missing wife, and he
repeatedly calls out her name. His voice is replaced by a French
horn, and the watery surfaces in their soft, vagrant, rippling mirror
state seem to attend to the lament and form nebulous images in
reply. The bulrushes, to be sure, randomly carry the loosely bound
body of the unconscious wife forward in the slow current. She
cannot hear the calling voice and the lake is as impersonal in its
renewed calm as it was in its previous storm fury. Nevertheless, the
fact that the searching husband’s voice is musical (not limited to a
human’s desperate call) links without strain the husband’s needs
with the separate (but not entirely separate) music of the becalmed
lake. The moonlit surface of the water does not register his agita-
tion; it cannot care whether the body it carries stays afloat or sinks.
But the water’s own rhythm in the vast night is somehow in accord
with everything that rests upon it, that floats or sails in its element.
The sky, the boats on their rescue mission, the light from various
sources, the distant shore, are all dreamy collaborators ‘facing
each other’, as it were, while making their separate arrangements.
They make a common music in the midst of missed and fugitive
connections. All that comes into view in the water, every sound that
the music conjures for our imaginations in the flickering darkness,
can be taken as a reply to the man’s act of searching. He does not
immediately discover what he seeks but the lake is not merely for-
saking him to his own anxious mood, or mocking him by refusing
to partake of that mood, or positing ‘emptiness’ in the act of with-
holding. Just as the community joins him in his effort to retrieve his
lost spouse from the lake (however dim the prospect of success),
the lake too ‘joins up’ with him. It is not only where he is; for a time
it becomes who he is. What can we say about the farmer now? He

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is a man in a boat holding a lantern, given over entirely to looking

at the water for signs. His past does not supply residual defini-
tion, a residual something to fall back on or to carry us beyond
the search’s end. He is wholly the incomplete being struggling to
see anything that might confirm his hope of lingering life (his own
and his wife’s) in the mist-shrouded ebb and flow. His fate seems
overwhelmingly tied to what the lake, for good or ill, brings to light.
He belongs, as much as a medieval knight to his quest, to the act
of pursuing the watery trail. (2012: 16)

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2 FILM NARR ATIVE AND THE NATUR AL ENVIRONMENT

Chapter 1 outlined how an environmental perspective can contribute

to and complement some key methods of film study. This necessarily
encompassed questions of theory, history, style, technology, authorship,
ideology and narrative. Partly because it is such a vital framework for most
people’s conscious and sub-conscious engagement with films, and partly
because it is often thought of as a quintessentially human capacity, narra-
tive requires further consideration. This chapter will ask what it means to
recognise the natural environment not just as an ingredient of a film’s story
world, but as an important part of its storytelling technique.

Narrative and nature

A narrative is a deliberately ordered series of causally linked events, each

one happening in space and time. Depending on the medium in question,
both an author and a narrator can have a determining influence on what
we understand of that space and time. And human characters within a nar-
rative will respond to and act upon their spatial and temporal constraints.
Even when we begin with this relatively straightforward description of nar-
rative, there are already a number of ways that the natural environment
could be said to play a part:

31
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1. The space in which the narrative events happen is, to a greater or

lesser extent, a natural space, understood as relatively untouched by
human design – such as the forest in a fairy tale. This is what is nor-
mally meant by a natural ‘setting’.
2. The actions and attitudes of characters are, to a greater or lesser
extent, motivated by environmental features and processes – such as
the scaling of a mountain, or the onset of a drought.
3. The author and/or narrator creatively emphasises certain aspects or
properties of the natural environment – such as when a playwright
specifies that a scene take place at sunset, or when a film’s soundtrack
stresses the presence of nearby wildlife.

It should be clear that, in any engaging and sophisticated narrative, these

are deeply connected to one another.
For example, a famous and distressing scene in Shakespeare’s King
Lear begins with Lear shouting at the powerful storm in which he is
engulfed: ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!’ (3.2.1). A wind-
swept heath is the setting for the action, but these conditions also dictate
the action to a large extent, compounding Lear’s distress and prompting
him (along with the Fool and Kent) to retreat to a shelter at the scene’s
end. Shakespeare’s language, meanwhile, does not just present us with a
generic ‘storm’; we are reminded, through the consciousness of Lear, that
the storm is a compendium of different elemental forces – ‘Sulphurous
and Thought-executing Fires’ (3.2.4); ‘all-shaking Thunder’ (3.2.5) – and
that such tumultuous natural processes can leave us confused about the
relationship between man and world. Lear early on seems to recognise,
and perhaps even take solace in, the absolute indifference of the storm to
his personal troubles, but at a later moment cannot resist the temptation
of seeing the environment as a collaborator with his own daughters against
him. The heath and the storm (do we distinguish between the two?) can be
seen as basic ingredients of this scene, its fundamental coordinates, but
Shakespeare obviously takes these and capitalises on their dramatic and
expressive potential. Setting is one thing, an important consideration in
studies of narrative; the aesthetic treatment of that setting, the means by
which it becomes part of meaningful narration, is altogether more com-
plex. A brief summary of King Lear could tell us that a key scene is set in
a fierce storm on exposed terrain, but much closer study is needed if we

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are to properly understand how and why that storm becomes a ‘horrible
Pleasure’ for the play’s main character (3.2.19).
Unless we define these terms very broadly, King Lear does not offer
us evidence or documentation of a natural environment, but rather pro-
vocative thoughts about our relationship to that environment. Film, as we
have seen in the writing of some early theorists, has the potential to docu-
ment and narrate simultaneously, and this is one of its most distinctive
characteristics as a medium. But before venturing into specific film stories
and their environmental characteristics, it is useful to consider the ways in
which far-reaching and culturally influential narrative blueprints – myths,
genres and modes – have their own built-in tendencies for ‘managing’ the
natural world in particular ways.
A good example of this is the utopian mode, which encompasses a
great many individual narrative works, the majority which will share certain
basic presumptions about nature – its plenty, but also its importance as
a human resource. (In so-called ‘ecotopian’ narrative, such presumptions
are brought to the forefront of the work.) Greg Garrard’s introductory book,
Ecocriticism (2004) suggests four other modes or large-scale metaphors
which tend to form the basis of cultural reflections on the environment:
pastoral, wilderness, apocalypse and dwelling. Each of these has a com-
plex lineage and contains many sub-varieties and contradictions, but they
all warrant our attention as very basic and pervasive visions of the environ-
ment; as a beautiful place to which we can flee (pastoral), as an untamed
and uncivilised force (wilderness), a perpetually looming catastrophe
(apocalypse), and as an achieved harmony between the social and the
ecological (dwelling). These foundational ideas are built upon, populated
and illustrated by storytellers and artists – sometimes more creatively than
others. Most of us would be able to recall novels and films and plays and
songs and paintings which answer to these rough characterisations.
Reflecting on these structural patterns helps us remember just quite
how formulaic cultural representations tend to be in their narrative render-
ings of nature. But such an approach is also in danger of obscuring our
sense of the variety within a particular mode; to dwell on ‘grand narratives’
of environmental representation might mean we miss the ways in which
narrative artists selectively emphasise certain natural features and forces
for certain creative ends. Take, for example, the narrative role played by
particular natural elements. Earth, wind, fire and water do not have fixed

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sets of associations or meanings, but each one does have distinctive

material qualities which lend it certain narrative potential. Water, for exam-
ple, is reflective, and so is more likely to invoke or accompany moments
of contemplation than, for example, wind. We tend to imagine earth and
stone as the taken-for-granted underpinnings of our comings and goings;
fire, meanwhile, is more likely to speak to us of disruption and chaos. Add
to these examples the range of plants, animals and geographic features
on which a storyteller might draw, and it soon becomes clear how a narra-
tive’s environmental character should be understood not just in terms of
its genre or mode, but how that mode is ‘fleshed out’ with details.

Film narrative and nature

As we move towards the case of environmental storytelling in cinema, a

very useful starting point is the work of Charles and Mirella Jona Affron
in Sets in Motion: Art Direction and Film Narrative (1995). The book offers
a framework for the interpretation and analysis of set design in film, and
although the authors focus almost entirely on deliberately designed and
constructed sets (rather than found locations), their terms are pertinent for
a much wider variety of work. In summary, Affron and Affron suggest that
the narrative role of set design can be understood on a five-point scale,
running from transparency to opacity: set as denotation (simply establish-
ing time and place); set as punctuation (making occasional claims on the
attention of audiences); set as embellishment (narratively and rhetorically
prominent); set as artifice (mannered, defamiliarising décor) and set as
narrative (single-locale films). This is a very productive guide for thinking
about the variety of relationships which can emerge in a film between story
and space, particularly a film conceived for and shot in studio conditions.
Similar claims can be made about the use of natural environments in film;
for example, the ‘punctuative’ role of the hunting grounds in La règle du
jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939), or the ‘embellishing’ role of many outdoor
spaces in Brokeback Mountain (2005).
But it is important to note those ways in which the Affrons’ model does
not quite translate to natural environments, points at which the applica-
tion breaks down. The specific sets which feature as many of the examples
in Sets in Motion (offices, bedrooms, staircases) can normally be under-
stood as relatively isolated elements, whereas environmental features are

34
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more likely to ‘bleed’ from one scene or sequence to another. The opacity
which is attributed to some sets, in which ‘design is rendered specific and
legible through the invention of the patently unreal’ (1995: 39), is difficult
to transpose to natural features; would the materials themselves be visibly
artificial (an effect used in Zabriskie Point (1970)), or would the attention
awarded to them in the film be deliberately excessive or baroque (a claim
we could make of Barry Lyndon (1975))? But perhaps most significantly,
there is the simple fact that as viewers of Brokeback Mountain and Barry
Lyndon, Staroye i novoye (The General Line, 1929) and Daughters of the
Dust (1993), we tend to believe that the physical environments on screen
are not created by artists, however carefully they have been woven into a
story’s design.
Of all the narrative arts, film is perhaps the best able to retain some
sense of a world beyond the control of the artist(s) involved. Joseph
Conrad’s Congo River or Willa Cather’s Great Plains are undeniably charged
by their connections to actual environments, but the Amazon basin in
Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982) or the Zagros mountains in Samira
Makhmalbaf’s Blackboards (2000) have an altogether different level of
independence and specificity. We may know that such environments only
appear to us by way of selective cinematography and editing, but there
is nevertheless a sense with film that physical places are non-negotiable
pre-requisites for narrative action – more than points of reference or vivid
embellishments. Whether or not the film’s action is ostensibly set in a real-
world place (the Peruvian Amazon, the Iranian borderlands), and whether
or not this specificity really matters, a film story is visibly, audibly and
inescapably somewhere.
In practice, we know that films often have us believe one place to be
another (so-called ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ are a case in point). What we shall
explore in this chapter, however, is not the veracity of films as documents
of particular environments, but rather the ways in which a film’s narrative
emerges in part from its embeddedness in an environment. I will of course
concentrate on those films where the non-human world accrues a special
significance or intensity, and make no claims for this approach to film
study being universally applicable; we would be unlikely to understand
Citizen Kane (1941) and Chung Hing sam lam (Chungking Express, 1994)
more fully, for example, if we forcibly interpreted them as environmental
stories. But a great many film narratives do make considerable use of

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environmental qualities and associations, and it is important to reflect on

some of the key terms we employ when discussing and interpreting these
tendencies.
It is no surprise, for example, that many writers and viewers reach for the
term ‘landscape’ when describing and interpreting filmed environments.
Although it slips between referring to a place and to an image of that place,
the word itself seems more precise than ‘nature’, and more responsive
to the fact that film offers us framed images (rather than abstract ideas).
It is also a word more adept than ‘nature’ at registering an intermingling
of human and non-human qualities, and can be freely used to describe
urban and non-urban sites. Crucially, ‘landscape’ does of course bring
with it fine-art connotations, and so its use points to processes of looking
and interpreting, of aesthetic interpretation. Nobody seriously thinks that
‘nature’ reaches us, in a film, unmediated – and landscape as an idea suc-
cessfully acknowledges the impurities of representation. As W. J. T. Mitchell
writes of landscape painting, it is best understood as a ‘representation of
something that is already a representation in its own right’ (2002: 14).
But landscape can also be said to sit rather uncomfortably with our
understanding (and expectations) of film narrative. This is the premise of
a very useful and much-cited essay by Martin Lefebvre, ‘Between Setting
and Landscape in the Cinema’ (2006). Setting, as Lefebvre explains, is a
feature of virtually every imaginable narrative, whether or not it is specified
or emphasised. Landscape, meanwhile, is a kind of ‘anti-setting’, a way of
looking at the world that has nothing to do with temporal developments,
complications or resolutions (the stuff of narrative); Lefebvre’s key term
here is ‘space freed from eventhood’ (2006: 22). He explains that cinema
spectatorship often requires us to choose between spectacle and narrative
(noting that classical conventions invariably promote the latter), and that
to enter into a mode of landscape spectatorship is to automatically move
out of narrative engagement. This is the point at which setting becomes
landscape.
Take, for example, Force Majeure (2014). This film chronicles an
unhappy skiing holiday, in which marital tensions come to the fore after
a husband and father, Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) prioritises his own
safety during a mechanically controlled avalanche. He then refuses to
acknowledge the fact that he momentarily abandoned his family, a refusal
which sparks the growing resentment and incredulity of his wife, Ebba

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

(Lisa Loven Kongsli). It is a rigorously structured film, in which long and

tense dialogue-heavy scenes are sometimes punctuated by ‘landscape
intermissions’ – unpeopled long shots of the ski resort’s mountainous
surroundings (accompanied by a Vivaldi motif). To watch Force Majeure
is to experience something very much in accordance with Lefebvre’s
model, as conventional staples of film narrative (changing human rela-
tionships filmed at relatively close quarters) invite one mode of audience
engagement, while occasional interruptions prompt a switch to a kind of
a-temporal landscape spectatorship.
However, and as Lefebvre is very much aware, interesting films are
unlikely to recycle these distinctions uncritically, and the crucial scene
in Force Majeure is a case in point. Tomas, Ebba and their two children
are eating a meal together on the deck of the ski resort’s restaurant; the
scene is filmed in a single, static take, with the family and other diners in
the middle distance, and the snowy mountains in the distance. When the
controlled avalanche begins, Tomas tries to reassure his family that they
have nothing to worry about, but the powerful drift does indeed reach the
building, prompting considerable panic and fear. The danger is short-lived,
though, and the family soon return to their table, shaken but physically
unscathed. How do the terms of setting and landscape help us understand
this short but striking sequence? Firstly, we should note that the surround-
ings are given no independent recognition through establishing shots or
any other means; the mountains are very much a backdrop, and are initially
treated as such by the characters (whose attention is at first focused on the
food). And yet, we could actually characterise the camera’s position as one
set to a ‘landscape mode’; it frames the mountains in a visually coherent
and pleasing manner, and makes no adjustment or accommodation for the
human characters and actions (even in the extreme shift from mundane
table talk to mortal fear). The mountains constitute a setting inasmuch as
they ‘host’ the narrative events (the leisurely meal, the threatening ava-
lanche), but they also hold sway over those events, and of course become
a narrative agent very quickly. It would be difficult to describe them as a
mere setting, but neither is their visual power dependent on a lack of nar-
rative context, a freedom from eventhood. They are not clearly a cinematic
landscape either.
Tomas’s first reaction to the avalanche is to film it on his phone, a
recording which will resurface much later in the narrative. We may or may

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Fig. 4: Landscape and narrative: Force Majeure (2014)

not choose to interpret this as a reflexive gesture; at the very least, it

is a characterising gesture, contributing to our understanding of Tomas
as a rather ineffective and opportunistic man, as well as a husband and
father not terribly well attuned to the needs of his family. This leads us on
to another important facet of environmentality in film narratives – how
characters’ own distinctive relationships with their natural surroundings
inform our understanding (and evaluation) of them. Because ecocriti-
cism as an approach has been understandably wary of readings which
explore environmental qualities purely as tools for embellishing anthro-
pocentric narratives, this is a relatively underexplored area, but the very
particular manner with which a character looks at, moves in, controls,
submits to, talks about – and even ignores – an environment can be very
significant indeed. Karin (Ingrid Bergman) in Stromboli (1950), Ron (Rock
Hudson) in All That Heaven Allows (1955), Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) in
Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond, 1985); these are people whose navigation of
material surroundings is absolutely central to what we know and think of
them.
The same is true of the characters at the heart of The Wind (1928),
Local Hero (1983) and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008),
explored in this chapter. As many readers will already know, very little con-
nects these films by way of style and tone, ambition and execution, con-
texts and points of reference. I am of course keen to demonstrate the broad

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applicability of environmental approaches to film narrative (across periods,

cultural traditions, genres, etc), but this choice of case studies is not wil-
fully random. I have chosen films which tend not to ‘look at’ environmental
surroundings in the way we might associate with important landscape film-
makers, from John Ford and Andrei Tarkovsky to Patrick Keiller and Theo
Angelopoulos. The non-human world becomes narratively interesting in
these film not because we see it with unusual regularity or duration, but
because it is woven into patterns of behaviour, action and perspective with
what seems to me a special degree of care and imagination.

The Wind

Some film narratives are momentarily guided or complicated by environ-

mental conditions; a ravine might prove to be an insurmountable barrier,
for example, or a dense forest could offer temporary shelter and rejuvena-
tion. These same conditions will invariably influence not only the patterns
of action and causality (preventing or hastening a particular action, say),
but also the less verifiable qualities of atmosphere, tone, association and
expectation. So, for example, a forest setting is not only a material place
with certain narrative affordances, but also a textual element which can
trigger interpretive comparisons with fairy tales or Shakespearean comedy.
It has both practical and associative implications for the narrative.
The Wind is a valuable case study for discussions of environmental
narrative because it is so rich on both these counts; its story is directly
built upon the immediate dangers and opportunities afforded by natu-
ral conditions, but the film is also very much about how those features
are bound up with individual psychology and cultural behavior (most
crucially regarding gender). The film tells the story of Letty (Lillian Gish),
an orphan who travels from Virginia to Texas to stay with her cousin, and
whose experience there is fundamentally shaped by the environment. The
wind (which, of course, cannot be filmed as such) daunts, disturbs and
threatens Letty, but her ordeal is not a personal or private experience; the
manner in which the heroine responds to the unfamiliar climate very much
governs her social interactions and, ultimately, her fate.
The natural environment is so overwhelmingly important in The Wind –
from the introductory intertitle which tells of ‘nature’s vastness’ and ‘fierce
elements’, right through to the extraordinary final image of a married

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Fig. 5: Hiding from the elements: The Wind (1928)

couple in defiant embrace on a windswept threshold – that this aspect of

the film almost seems to leave no opportunity for developed commentary.
But we shall focus on a particular aspect of the film’s narrative, namely the
extent to which qualities of the natural environment reach us (the audi-
ence) through an individual’s consciousness.
Point of view, one of the key dynamics in any narrative, can take on a
new kind of significance and complexity in narratives which privilege envi-
ronmental conditions. In Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of
View, George Wilson writes about viewers’ ‘epistemic distance’ from a film,
describing the implicit contract between film and audience which states
that many common-sense assumptions will apply to a film world, but that
some will not:

a spectator who is to achieve even a rudimentary understanding of

a segment of film narrative must draw nonstop upon the incredible
diversity of perceptual knowledge that we ordinarily and untenden-
tiously assume we have about actual things and processes. This
knowledge includes, of course, our more trustworthy beliefs about
the nature and operation of the extracinematic world. (1986: 4)

This common-sense basis on which narratives are built (and from which fan-
tasy narratives depart more than realist narratives, for example) becomes

40
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a somewhat troubled notion with a film such as The Wind, because this
is a work concerned with extraordinary and exceptional ‘operations’ of
the world, namely extreme weather. The environmental characteristics of
the diegesis (which in many films would constitute the ‘nature’ described
by Wilson) are in The Wind relatively unfamiliar to most film viewers and
– more importantly – are unfamiliar to the film’s central character, Letty.
As the film develops, the heroine becomes increasingly distressed by the
environment, in concert with her increasing distress about her personal
situation. And it becomes difficult to know whether to interpret the violent
climate as a kind of poetic exteriorisation of Letty’s psychological trauma
or an indifferent and coincidental material phenomenon which compounds
her trauma. Had Letty arrived in the region with a companion, or had the
film begun with scenes of her elsewhere (back home in Virginia, described
in one intertitle as ‘thick with wild violets’), this effect would be lessened;
we would have a firmer grasp on the relative objectivity of the film’s envi-
ronmental mise-en-scène. As it stands, The Wind is in fact rather playful
with the question of whether we see Letty’s projections and premonitions,
or simply a vivid rendering of where she is.
This question is posed very early on, in the film’s first scene. Letty is
alone on a train; her pale beauty and incongruously prim manner attract
the attention of a fellow passenger, cattle trader Wirt Roddy (Montagu
Love). When Letty is taken aback by a gust of wind through the train
window, Roddy steps in with ostentatious gallantry, brushes her down,
and takes the opportunity to sit beside her. As a conversation develops,
Letty glances out of the window at the enveloping dust storm, prompting
the first shot in the film from Letty’s point of view, and she says – as if in
passing, to fill a potentially awkward silence – that she wishes the wind
would stop. Roddy takes the opportunity to playfully intimidate her, invok-
ing local ‘injun’ folklore and describing how women are liable to ‘go crazy’
amongst the never-ending winds. To Letty’s left is a window onto a strange
and threatening new land, and to her right is a cynical and intimidating
older man, so she understandably grows anxious. And when Letty next
looks out at the storm, and we see a second point-of-view shot, some-
thing has changed; graphically, the image is virtually identical to the first,
but this character’s view of the environment has now been fundamentally
conjoined with threats and mysteries of a different order. Letty physically
recoils. She now sees not only unwelcoming conditions, but intuits the

41
SHORT CUTS

prospect of social and sexual violence. Accordingly, audiences of The Wind

are from the beginning made uncertain about how to ‘place’ its images and
sequences of ferocious weather – as a context for, or as a projection of,
Letty’s ordeal. This strategy is capitalised on most fully in a climactic rape
sequence, when an intense storm and a male attacker come together in
both a metaphorical and a literal sense.
It would be quite misleading, though, to suggest that Victor Sjöström’s
film is somehow dominated by the experiential perspective of Letty, or that
the world we see is her world. To use the terms offered by David Bordwell
and Kristin Thompson, The Wind does not consistently provide us ‘deep’
access to Letty and her ‘inner images’ (2001: 73). One sequence in par-
ticular in fact denies us that access at a point in the narrative when Letty’s
subjective experience is of considerable interest and importance. Shortly
after reluctantly marrying a cattle farmer, Lige (Lars Hanson), Letty is about
to be left alone in an isolated shack (her new home), while Lige joins an
expedition of cattlemen braving the intense wind (they are venturing out
to find ways of preventing imminent famine). Deeply fearful of being home
alone with the incessant wind, Letty asks Lige to let her join them. The
two ride out to join the party, but before long it becomes clear that Letty is
physically incapable of staying the course. She soon loses control of her
horse, and has to ride on Lige’s, clutching him for support and protection;
later she falls to the ground, and is escorted back home by Lige’s friend.
These are crucial experiences for Letty. Afraid of the psychological threat
posed by the wind, she attempts to ‘take it on’ physically, and fails.
But the film presents these moments as events rather than personal
experiences. Put very simply, almost all of the exterior action described
above is staged and filmed in long-shot or medium-shot set ups. When
Letty falls from the horse, or when she seems to plead with Lige to let her
remain with the riding party, these moments are not given the slightest
subjective inflection. For much of the sequence, we can barely see her
face. Indeed, many of the actors’ gestures and movements are harder to
identify and interpret because of the extreme dust storm. And for a handful
of minutes, we seem to be watching footage of people struggling to carry
out physical actions (mounting and dismounting horses, keeping hold of
their headwear), a sensation which would no doubt be borne out by details
of on-location struggles. This is not the place or the time for a carefully
managed close up!

42
 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Fig. 6: A record of
people struggling:
The Wind (1928)

However much we sense a temporary suspension of narrative, prompted

by extraordinarily vivid images of bodies in an extreme environment, it is
important to remember that this effect still has narrative implications. We
are, for a time, less closely aligned with Letty’s experience of the wind, and
more likely to see the weather as a kind of objective circumstance suffered
by everyone in the story. The extent to which environmental experience is
a shared experience is a vital question posed by The Wind.

Local Hero

The premise of Local Hero is built on a relatively schematic opposition

between environmental values; that of a small, rural community versus a
large, profit-driven (and foreign) oil corporation. But it weaves from this
a surprisingly ironic and nuanced reflection on questions of nature, cul-
ture, locality and resource. Mac MacIntyre (Peter Riegert) is a young and
ambitious employee at a large Texan oil firm, sent by the company’s Chief
Executive, Felix Happer (Burt Lancaster) to a small Scottish town, Ferness.
Mac’s mission is to buy up the town, freeing access to the off-shore oil. It is
perhaps no surprise that Mac’s venture does not go entirely to plan, under-
mined, in part, by his growing affection for Ferness and its community. But
Local Hero does not just stage a victory for the proverbial small guy against
greed, and in fact could be described as having a rather despondent politi-
cal message. What makes the film’s environmental narrative so interesting
is rather its insistence that there is no ‘real’ or ‘raw’ nature untouched by

43
SHORT CUTS

human interest or mediation – instead there is a range of more or less

harmful and absurd perspectives through which people understand their
physical and atmospheric surroundings.
Unlike The Wind, which follows an unprepared individual as she con-
fronts and is transformed by the brute elemental force of an unfamiliar
environment, an environment which has a relatively coherent character
and agency, Local Hero leaves open the question of determinacy. Yes,
Ferness changes and affects Mac, but it is difficult to point to moments or
details when this change takes place, or to confidently interpret the depth
of these effects. Rather than stage moments of communion or conflict
between person and place, Local Hero shows us the messy variety of ways,
from farce to transcendence, in which someone might grow to understand
their surroundings in non-anthropocentric terms. Everybody seems to
have a stake in Ferness, and finds in this environment their own set of
properties and connotations.
Local Hero has fun playing these worldviews off against one another,
not least in a scene shortly after Mac arrives in Scotland. Before visiting
Ferness itself, Mac stops off at the Aberdeen headquarters of Knox Oil and
Gas, accompanied by Danny Oldsen (Peter Capaldi), a local Knox employee
and Mac’s appointed guide. Two enthusiastic engineers, working in a kind
of aquatic laboratory, show Mac and Danny a scale model of Ferness, and
demonstrate with comic ease how the built community will be replaced
by a refinery – all it takes is removing one item, and slotting in another
(an irony apparently lost on the engineers). But the demonstration is inter-
rupted by a female laboratory assistant, Marina (Jenny Seagrove), who has
come to fix a fault in the pool. She strips down to her swimwear, and dives
athletically into the water, distracting the visitors (in particular Danny) from
their business. This intervention is more than facile titillation, though;
combined with the already absurdist quality of the scene, Marina’s pres-
ence has more surreal than erotic currency. Bill Forsyth’s direction does
not invite us to dwell on the philosophical oddness or complexity of this
moment (throughout, his style is very unobtrusive), in which onlookers are
shifting their gaze between a plastic model and a living women sharing the
same body of water. By the end of Local Hero, audiences are encouraged
to suppose that Marina may well be a mermaid, but this is not something
which triumphs over the instrumentalist worldview expounded by the engi-
neers. It is just another way of being there.

44
 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Fig. 7: Ferness as a
model: Local Hero
(1983)

How is this variability manifest in the structure and content of the film’s
narrative? As was the case with Letty and the opening of The Wind, it is a
significant storytelling decision not to grant audiences of Local Hero access
to Ferness before Mac arrives. The opening credits of the film establish an
urban-Texas setting in a very straightforward manner (big and busy roads,
local-radio weather reports, etc), and one could well imagine an equiva-
lent, mirroring sequence showing us ‘everyday’ Ferness. The decision to
withhold the town’s appearance until Mac actually arrives there is partly
about aligning our perspective with that of the main protagonist, then.
But we can be more specific than this; Local Hero forgoes the opportunity
to establish rural Scotland as an environment which suffers intrusion, as
a ‘garden’ into which an environmentally disruptive ‘machine’ enters (to
borrow the terms of Leo Marx). Instead, the locality emerges to Mac and
the viewer in a series of impressions.
This effect is made possible by the fact that Mac is something of a
cipher or an empty vessel. Brief sequences of him at home or interacting
with friends and colleagues give us not very much other than the vague
impression of a financially successful young man who would like to be
even more so. Although he is the film’s central character, we credit Mac
with little agency or creative ambition, little insight or imagination (and
audiences are likely to have few strong associations with the actor’s other
roles). As a result, those moments in which Mac is fleetingly awakened to
the richness of this new place – when, for example, he gets distracted from
his deal-making by a pleasant sunset, or when he walks bare-foot along
the beach – lead to very little.

45
SHORT CUTS

Mac is not a man whose experiences are likely to be transformed or

enlarged by details of place, and in this respect his character could be use-
fully contrasted with that of Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller) in Michael Powell
and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945). Like Mac, Joan is
established as a focused, materialistic and city-based person who heads
to rural Scotland with a plan – a plan which inevitably unravels. (The films
even illustrate this in similarly symbolic moments; Joan loses her printed
itinerary to the ocean, while Mac leaves his watch in a rock pool.) Joan is all
set to marry a rich older man, but the weather forces her to delay a boat trip
to the island of Kiloran on which her fiancé waits, across the water from
the Isle of Mull. Unlike the brutal and unforgiving wind suffered by Letty
in The Wind, the weather here has a playful and conspiratorial agency,
encouraging Joan’s union with Torquil MacNeil (Roger Livesey). She is at
times stubborn and proud, but always seems open (or potentially open)
to the people and places, customs and legends, of Mull. Mac in Local Hero
is more indifferent, and although his mission becomes confused and way-
laid, his loosening grip on authority lacks a concomitant awakening. It is
an interesting feature of the film that Mac’s worldview, his relationship to
the place he has come to, is not reinvigorated to the extent we might hope
or expect.
But we should not mistake this for a paucity of environmental imagina-
tion on the part of Local Hero. Instead, the film places Mac in a fascinating
binary relationship with Felix Happer. As the man in charge of a large Texan
oil firm, a firm vigorously expanding into apparently pristine areas, Happer
is a capitalist in whom we would expect to find little sympathy for non-
human concerns. But he is, rather incongruously, a dedicated astronomer,

Fig. 8: Mac’s watch

succumbs to
the ocean:
Local Hero (1983)

46
 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

a man with little or no apparent concern for business, and a perfect dra-
matic foil to Mac’s perfunctoriness. The film introduces Happer by way of a
scene in which the company’s board meet to discuss the Scottish drilling
initiative. One man is explaining the proposals as he points to a map of
the Scottish coast. Happer is present, but asleep. We of course cannot
say whether he is dreaming of Scotland, but there is a definite sense that
plans and maps are somehow ill-suited to Happer’s philosophy, and that
he understands and envisions his world in ways fundamentally different
to those around him. When briefing Mac on his overseas trip, Happer
instructs him to watch the sky (telling him to look up, when Mac surely
should, from a strategic point of view, look down). And in a surreal parody
of malevolent Bond villains, Happer’s luxurious office is equipped with a
private planetarium, unveiled at the flick of a switch; an extraordinarily
peculiar combination of wealth, power and awestruck humility.
Perhaps the most interesting of these character quirks is the fact that
Happer does not seem to operate on a day-to-day or present-tense time
scale, and instead talks of the past and the future, as if tuned into cycles
completely removed from ongoing social developments and transactions.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once speculated about how enthralled people would
be if the stars only appeared one night in every thousand years (2003: 37),
and Happer gives us a little of that sense – as if he has not quite been
socialised. We are used to seeing film characters ignore environmental
despoliation through ignorance or greed, but it is unusual to see such a
character adopt such a vast perspective, a worldview in which astronomi-
cal mysteries dwarf the relative trivialities of one planet’s cleanliness. The
fact that he has achieved the luxurious position from which to think like
this by way of relentless and profit-driven natural-resource extraction only
adds to the story’s many ironies.
The film’s resolution, in which Happer commits to building at Ferness
a research facility concerned with space and oceanic exploration, is an
attempt to square some of its circles. It is an interesting note on which to
end Local Hero, but by no means normalises Happer’s genuinely strange
environmental ethics. He is not the film’s main character, but the combina-
tion of oddness and power he exerts over Mac (and in turn the film) is vital.
Mac, as I have claimed, is something of a blank slate, and his attempts to
see in Ferness what Happer wants him to see are pathetic. Neither man is
a reassuring guide to the world.

47
SHORT CUTS

The Headless Woman

The Wind, as we saw, is a story of one lonely woman’s exposure to an

extreme and terrifying environment. The Headless Woman is almost the
opposite; it is about a woman, Verónica (María Onetto), surrounded to the
point of suffocation by family members, acquaintances, and the various
conveniences of modern life. In The Wind, doors and windows are pre-
carious, under siege from natural forces which threaten to overwhelm
the characters at any given moment; people in The Headless Woman
navigate comfortable and familiar homes, commenting on and observing
the weather from locations of comfort and safety. Nature in this film is not
an immediate threat, nor does it have a directly causal role in the narra-
tive, but it becomes important in oblique and indirect ways. The Headless
Woman challenges us to think about what kinds of agency and significance
environmental details can take on in a film when they don’t announce
themselves in the form of spectacular weather or determining landscape.
The story is not a complex one. In the film’s third sequence, Verónica
is driving her car, gets distracted by the ringing of her mobile phone,
and accidentally hits someone or something in the road. Too shocked or
scared to leave her car and investigate, Verónica (like the film’s audience)
remains suspended in uncertainty about the consequences of her colli-
sion – did she strike an animal or a child? From this point on, The Headless
Woman includes very little narrative activity. Verónica is dazed and uncom-
municative, although the reactions of other people suggest that this isn’t
out of character for her. The attempts of her husband and his cousin to
cover up the crime, if indeed one has been committed, only take the form
of phone conversations, to which we have little visual or aural access.
Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden, 2005), a film with similar formal and
thematic interests to The Headless Woman, develops a very suspenseful
narrative from a comparable premise; a white, privileged family is unable
and unwilling to confront their culpability in violent but dimly understood
events. Haneke extracts the tension from this situation and explores its
web of implications, but Martel instead uses the situation as a prompt to
observe the routine actions and exchanges of a social milieu. Instead of a
plot, the film develops a kind of pressurised quotidian.
This pressure is only partly caused by Verónica’s road accident and its
aftermath. There is also a string of details concerning the characters’ mate-

48
 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

rial environment – more specifically, the technological management of

that environment – whose relation to Verónica’s predicament are obscure
but undeniable. The film begins with young boys playing in and around a
barren canal; shortly after Verónica’s accident, a rainstorm hits the local
town; women gossip about, and attend, a newly opened swimming pool
that may have been contaminated by an adjacent vet surgery; heat and
water supplies malfunction; a major sewage pipe is blocked by an uni-
dentified dead body; a labouring gardener discovers remnants of a foun-
tain or pool besides Verónica’s house. These details tend not to progress
the narrative as such, but almost all are experienced or learned about by
Verónica, and their cumulative effect on her – and on her inability to ‘move
on’ – is profound. Sophie Mayer even claims that the film’s entire diegsis
is ‘framed, structured and delimited by the municipal pipes’ (2014: 199).
One of the narrative’s crucial sequences in this respect occurs roughly
two-thirds through the film. At this point, Verónica has seemed to be
gradually improving; her bemusement and dislocation from the world have
started to ease, and she appears to be enjoying a brief trip with family
members. Sitting in the back of a car, possibly asleep, the head of a young
woman gently resting on her shoulder, Verónica has reached some sort of
peace. But the formal organisation of the scene (including the sound of the
radio, the light, the landscape rolling by) recollects that moment earlier on
when Verónica suffered her collision, and sure enough she is once again
rudely awakened from her distracted contentment. As the car drives along-
side the canal, a small gathering of emergency-service vehicles and per-

Fig. 9: Verónica’s garden: The Headless Woman (2008)

49
SHORT CUTS

sonnel comes into view; the four women in the car look on, and the camera
is gradually re-positioned to leave only Verónica in the frame, gazing out
the car window at the search party and the canal, presumably wondering
about her own possible involvement in the situation. They drive close by,
and learn from another onlooker that the sewer has been blocked – prob-
ably by a dead body.
In the narrative design of The Headless Woman, this is an important
sequence. Verónica and the audience learn that some sort of accidental
killing has probably occurred in this area (which looks to our eyes almost
identical to the site of Verónica’s original collision; she herself will know
more than us about the proximity). There are few diegetic facts that Martel
establishes as clearly as this, and few scenes in the film in which Verónica
becomes visibly aware of, or reacts to, new information or circumstances.
In turn, we are able to see very clearly how Verónica and those close to
her are willing and able to remain blind to and detached from difficulties
beyond their comfort zone. The women decide to close the car windows
as they drive by, to escape the stench. Because the camera remains, as
it does for so much of the film, in the vicinity of Verónica, we do not see
the sewer or what blocks it, just as we did not see who or what was struck
down by her own car. Both scenes stage a dynamic relationship between
violence and myopia, but the second time round this failure to witness is
given a more tangible, environmental resonance. The stench and dirt of the
event render it conveniently inaccessible and out of bounds for Verónica
and her family.
It is not uncommon for narratives to locate acts of death and violence
in unpleasant conditions – sites of ugliness, of refuse, of discomfort or of
bland anonymity. I would suggest that The Headless Woman adds another
degree of environmental complexity to this convention by locating its crime
scene in a network of causes and effects. In studies of narrative, the term
‘network’ is usually applied to stories in which a variety of characters and
locales intersect in complex and sometimes ingenuous ways. In Martel’s
film, there is a stronger sense of material connections, albeit stubbornly
mysterious ones. Is this the same infrastructure which supports the appar-
ently polluted swimming pool, or the drinking water of the girl suffering
from hepatitis, or the fountain in Verónica’s own garden? By keeping in
play these possibilities, The Headless Woman ensures that Verónica’s cul-
pability is inescapable but unlocatable.

50
 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

María Onetto’s performance in the film as Verónica has been likened

to the roles played by Monica Vitti in the films of Michelangelo Antonioni;
both women are alienated, beautiful, almost ethereal witnesses of events
and experiences. John Orr characterises the ‘plight of Vitti’ in ways which
certainly chime with The Headless Woman: ‘a crucial member of the nuclear
family, openly prosperous, endures breakdown through the breakdown of
technologies which help to make their families prosperous’ (1998: 46).
But the contrasts are revealing. Vitti’s performances, especially as Vittoria
in L’Eclisse (1962), show us a woman confronting a series of seemingly
disconnected human actions and material spaces; sometimes these
abstracted phenomena seem to delight Vitti’s women, and sometimes
they are terrifying. In L’Eclisse, the expensive sports car of Vittoria’s male
suitor is stolen by a drunk man and driven to a reservoir. When, the follow-
ing morning, the car and corpse are dredged up, Vittoria seems disturbed
by the accident and the behaviour of onlookers, but she is in attendance
as a kind of existentially removed visitor, with no stake in the actions and
repercussions of an event like this. Verónica only wishes she could be so
disinterested. In The Headless Woman, the public discovery of a dead body
is not a metaphysical event, but something physically entangled with the
world and its workings.

51
3 FILM GENRE AND THE NATUR AL ENVIRONMENT

Genres could be said to enable and encourage a patterned emphasis on

certain formal and narrative features. Sometimes this emphasis falls on, or
incorporates, non-human agency and contexts – as in disaster movies and
westerns. In these films, there is a strong likelihood of characters having
to deal with the fact that human control and design has important limits.
However, bringing an environmental alertness to studies of film genre
need not – and should not – be a case of focusing exclusively on those
categories of film where apparently natural settings gain prominence, or
when nature is oriented against human life in sharp binary terms. This
chapter will consider how a number of familiar genres operate according
to certain environmental parameters and expectations, even when nature
does not seem to be thematically or narratively central; it will then explore
in detail the example of film noir.

Tangible genres

A disaster film such as Aftershock (2012) unsurprisingly makes non-human

agency a spectacular and dominating presence; a domestic melodrama,
such as This Happy Breed (1944), unsurprisingly, does not. But what of a
film such as Force Majeure (briefly discussed in Chapter 2), in which the
framework of a domestic melodrama – marital discord, pathos, sexual pol-

52
 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

itics – is momentarily injected with disaster-film iconography? Or indeed

The Big Lebowski (1998), whose opening shot invokes the western genre,
tracking across anonymous and seemingly timeless scrubland (accompa-
nied by the song ‘Tumbling Tumble Weeds’), before eventually arriving at
a vista of late-twentieth-century Los Angeles? In moments such as these,
genres seem almost to come into physical contact with one another.
Watching them, we are reminded that film genres organise and deploy
the environment in carefully circumscribed ways, and that imaginative
filmmakers can choose to expand on or experiment with these patterns
to achieve particular effects. In the same way that stars and costumes are
often generic, and so are ripe for repetition, variation and subversion, so
physical conditions are part of a genre’s field of characteristics.
Anis Bawarshi describes genres themselves as ‘rhetorical ecosystems’
(2001: 70), and writes of the ways ‘in which we perceive particular envi-
ronments as requiring certain immediate and “appropriate” attention and
responses’ (2001: 77). After all, it is common to talk of genres as ‘worlds’
whose invisible rules dictate relations and activities, generating a kind of
internal plausibility, or verisimilitude. Of course, a genre’s verisimilitude
is normally conceived of mainly in social and cultural terms – patterns of
behaviour that become desired and expected – but such activities always
take place somewhere. John Frow suggests that we could define genre as
a ‘relationship between textual structures and the situations that occasion
them’ (2006: 13), and although he is referring to real-world situations that
bring about certain norms (meeting a neighbour for the first time, teaching
your child to swim), I believe the term ‘situation’ could also be taken to
mean something like a fictional setting – such as a courtroom or a desert
– common to a number of generically related texts.
As Frow goes on to explain, ‘far from being merely “stylistic” devices,
genres create effects of reality and truth which are central to the differ-
ent ways the world is understood’ (2006: 19). According to this expanded
understanding of genre, our experience of fictional narratives and real life
are never quite as open as we might imagine; our cultural knowledge is
bound by (generic) parameters of seeing and thinking. A genre’s worldview
is not only to be found in texts, and neither is it purely or exclusively about
people.
For many of the reasons outlined in Chapter 1, the medium of film
is especially likely to lend its genres a vividly and consistently located

53
SHORT CUTS

quality. A comic short story or a painted portrait might well be rigorously

focused on people, and more or less immune to the world beyond the
immediate vicinity of human minds and bodies. But a comic film or a
biopic, meanwhile, is very unlikely to be so absolutely anthropocentric in
its scope, and will almost certainly arrange its human activity within and
against non-human contexts. This chapter will ask what role environmental
conditions play in the identity of film genres. How do these notoriously
amorphous groupings of texts collectively and creatively organise their
worlds? In what ways can film genres be understood as negotiations with
worldly, environmental subjects?
Daniel Yacavone provides one possible approach to this topic in
Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (2014). Although
Yacavone’s study is not especially concerned with environmental subjects
or approaches, it does raise interesting questions about the philosophi-
cal and aesthetic ‘work’ undertaken by a text or a group of texts in their
efforts to make a world for us to view. More specifically, Yacavone borrows
a scheme or rubric from the philosopher Nelson Goodman, whose Ways of
Worldmaking (1978) identifies five processes for ‘meaningful, intentional
world creation’ (2014: 87):

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Yacavone and Goodman are more concerned with the distinctions between
imaginative worlds than what distinguishes an imaginative world from
the real world. But the categories with which they work are very useful for
thinking about what film genres make of, and with, our world. They can be
roughly adapted into the following questions:

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genre’s world?
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54
 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

create its own?

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another?

As Yacavone notes, these intersect and overlap substantially. Taken

together, they provide a very useful starting point for thinking about how
the relationship between the world and a genre is, in the words of Steve
Neale, ‘necessarily continuous’, and how the influence of that world
‘can be detected even where genres themselves are at their most self-
consciously self-referential’ (2003: 213). In short, a genre’s artifice and
contrivance does not prevent us from asking about its relationship to real-
world features and referents.
Take, for example, the road movie. The question is not whether its
vision of the natural environment is valid or profound, but rather how it
becomes, and makes sense as, a genre in part through its environmental
imagination. To return to the terms of Yacavone and Goodman, we can say
that the road movie

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made boundaries and markers, such as roads and borders;
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words and music to incongruous or revealing effect.

Of course, when we turn to striking examples of the genre – Smultronstället

(Wild Strawberries, 1957), Pierrot le fou (1965), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971),
Zhantai (Platform, 2000) – it soon becomes clear that they do not slav-
ishly adhere to such processes. But however disparate and independently
distinctive these examples might be, they can still be said to envisage the
natural world according to ideas and formulae which extend way beyond
their own boundaries as texts. Or, to put this another way, we cannot
help but view and interpret their worlds as somehow constructed by, and
beholden to, generic forces. Given that much of the language used in film
genre studies emphasises the medium’s symbolic, semantic and syntactic

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effects, it is important to remember this other side of the equation – the

ways in which such effects are invariably rooted in, contingent on, and
even productive of, worldly qualities; ‘genre,’ writes Bawarshi, ‘is both
the boundary and the presencing, both the ideological construction of an
environment and its rhetorical enactment’ (2001: 78).
The western is an unavoidable point of reference here. Not only is it
often thought to be the most clearly demarcated of all film genres, but it
is also one with a vivid and ever-present – though unstable and inconsist-
ent – environmental dynamic. (It is interesting to consider the extent to
which these two are related.) As such, it has inevitably attracted ecocriti-
cal attention; in her introduction to the edited collection, The Landscape
of Hollywood Westerns, Deborah A. Carmichael describes the genre as
offering ‘a unique opportunity to explore both current and historical per-
spectives on the role of nature in nation building and national identity’
(2006: 15), and this opportunity has been taken up by a number of schol-
ars, including Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann in their Gunfight
at the Eco-Corral (2012). (Needless to say, this discussion can be taken
to work far beyond Hollywood; see, for example, Yojimbo (1961) and El
Topo (1970).) Horror has also been studied as a genre with considerable
interest in images and ideas of nature, though this tends to manifest itself
in a particular sub-genre, sometimes known as ‘eco horror’ – examples of
which include The Crazies (1973), Gwoemul (The Host, 2006) and Antichrist
(2008) – rather than as a consistent preoccupation or precondition.

Film noir

Film noir does not have the deep and direct connection to environmental
politics and subjects that the western does, and it is far less likely than
the horror film to explore in depth the uneasy distinction between human
and non-human agency. But it is a genre so intent on delimiting a part of
the world as its own, and on revealing the often pathetic lack of control
that people have over that world, that its material environment tends to
accrue a surprising significance. I have chosen to discuss it at length in
this chapter not because it is the film genre most concerned with nature,
but precisely because its environmental poetics are latent. We have the
opportunity to discover, rather than simply chronicle, how and why the
environment matters in film noir.

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Many of the most treasured and most acclaimed examples of film noir
seem not to invite or repay sustained attention to environmental qualities.
And so a great many interpretive and analytical frameworks for dealing
with the genre have found little or no need to dwell on questions or details
of the non-human material world. There is so much to say about noir’s
social and aesthetic character – its knotted sexual politics (Kaplan 1998),
its relationship to World War II (Biesen 2005), its racial project (Lott 1997),
its philosophical preoccupations (Pippin 2012) – that surveys of the genre
might very well not attend to its environmental character at all. We are not
really obliged to watch these films and ask of them ecocritical questions.
They instead seem to be about epistemology, psychosis, fate, eroticism,
capitalism, irony; human energies and dilemmas. Film noir could be said
to fit largely in the tradition described by Leo Braudy as that of the closed
film (exemplified for Braudy by the work of Fritz Lang, who directed many
great noirs), in which ‘the world of the film is the only thing which exists’
(2002: 46), and whose constituent parts are fabricated and manipulated,
rather than welcomed in from the world at large.
But if there is a core line of noir interpretation, exploring its socio-
logical, psychoanalytical and ideological character, there is also what we
might call a ‘second order’ of concerns, clustered around noir’s textural
tangibility, and our sense of it as a strikingly grounded mode. Historically,
American film noir had a stronger geographical and locational realism than
many other Hollywood genres, exploring (in particular) Californian urban
and suburban environments with a relish and a specificity unmatched in,
for example, horror films and musicals. It has also been understood as a
phenomenologically rich genre, which is to say that it is often invested in
tactility and texture (office furniture, rain-soaked streets), and on charac-
ters’ embeddedness in a world of palpable objects and surfaces. Henrik
Gustafsson connects these qualities to the genre’s storytelling strategies,
explaining that ‘its heavy emphasis on subjective experience augmented
by first-person point-of-view, voice-over, and flashbacks solicits a phenom-
enological focus on the sensory engagement with space’ (2013: 51–2). Noir
stories are told and filmed in such a way that physical contexts are almost
never neutral or inert. And because these contexts are often apparently
unnatural in their key characteristics – electric lighting, mechanised trans-
port, claustrophobic architectural spaces – the noir mode is one in which
environmental features can take on considerable energy and significance.

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The Movie Book of Film Noir features two chapters by Deborah Thomas;
the first charts the genre’s navigation of post-war male anxiety, but the
second (which immediately follows the first) is presented as a chronicle
of precisely those effects and pleasures which escape sociological defini-
tion, details which can only be found in the ‘nooks and crannies of the
films’ imagery and language’ (1992: 71). Describing and classifying these
qualities, Thomas is drawn to physical, spatial and textural terms such as
‘boundaries’, ‘solidity’, ‘blockage’ and ‘flow’. These tend to have a meta-
phorical currency in her analyses, but they also describe aspects of the
film worlds themselves:

Noir men are typically tired (or are lured by others wanting or advo-
cating peace and rest) and are easily drawn in to the tantalizing
shapelessness of sleep, forgetfulness, and even death. It is in
this connection that the imagery of water often pointed out as so
prevalent in film noir is important: on the one hand, solidity and
potential fragmentation, on the other hand, liquidity and merging,
an end to the effort of holding oneself together lest one crack into
pieces. (1992: 78)

Paul Schrader was one writer who had identified the importance of water in
the genre, noting in his influential ‘Notes on Film Noir’ ‘an almost Freudian
attachment to water’ (1996: 57), as well as a tendency in the films’ lighting
to give equal emphasis to human characters and their settings. Some of
the examples explored later in this chapter will further develop the ques-
tion of how and why water has accumulated a kind of privileged status in
film noir.
As James Narmeore demonstrates in his exhaustive study of noir, More
Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (1998), the genre can only be prop-
erly understood in relation to non-filmic contexts and practice. Of these,
so-called ‘hard-boiled’ fiction is the one most often cited, as an explicit
and implicit source of a great many noir films. While it is not difficult to
identify ‘key ingredients’ in the novels and stories of Dashiel Hammett,
James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler (many of which have become cli-
chés more cloying than those of other genres), Frederic Jameson’s writing
on Chandler helps us look beyond dialogue, action and character toward
important spatial and material forces at work. For example, Jameson sug-

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gests that the geography of Los Angeles prompts Chandler to develop

a coexistence between the ‘urban’ and the ‘natural’ ‘in which neither is
effaced by the other’ (2016: 48). The Big Sleep, perhaps Chandler’s most
famous novel, offers

a visual fever chart of weather: clouds, drizzle, bright sun, fog,

heavy rain and automobile lights in the darkness; a sequence
which has its own logic and about which it would be premature
indeed to suppose that – following the old ‘expressive fallacy’
– it entertained any meaningful symbolic relationship with the
sequence of human events taking place simultaneously in urban
space proper. (2016: 49)

Jameson also writes in particular about the ocean in the closing passages
of Farewell, My Lovely, which ‘glitters with all that mineral fascination, that
radically non-human, cold, even unnatural mystery that the ocean often
has in writers who do not specialize in sea-stories, or in cultures which are
non-maritime’ (2016: 84). The Big Sleep, meanwhile, climaxes at an inland
location, but Jameson suggests that the presence of pouring rain ‘restores
the watery element that is the sign of the non-human axis of matter in
these novels’ (2016: 86).
These interpretations cannot, of course, be straightforwardly trans-
planted onto the genre’s films. They are, though, in rather striking accord-
ance with Schrader, Thomas, Gustafsson and others, all of whom diagnose
the nature of noir not so much in the rhetoric or even in the structuring
of its films, but rather in momentary details and intrusions. In the films
discussed below, we will find examples of such moments – but also cases
in which the natural environment exerts a considerable and sustained
influence over the films’ shape and character.
I have chosen to draw on examples from different periods and different
global contexts. This is not to deny the fact that mid-century Hollywood
crime films hold a privileged position in the semantic field of noir, but
rather to respond to the fact that the genre’s spirit and logic has been
adapted to a variety of environments. Fascinating on their own terms, these
films also help us build a more substantial account of noir’s tendencies
and affordances, and a fuller picture of how it responds to and orders the
world. Although I have done this in a broadly chronological manner, I make

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no claims for this representing a development or a trajectory. I approach

the films with ecocritical questions which I believe are helpful for thinking
about their environmentality, but which are not offered as interpretive keys
for entire periods or waves of noir production.

Delusion and absolution in classical noir

High Sierra (1941) was an important development in the emergence of

Humphrey Bogart as a major figure in American cinema, and a vivid instance
of early (or proto) film noir. Bogart plays professional robber Roy Earle, and
the film begins with his release from prison. The first we see of him is the
very moment he exits through the prison gate; Roy looks skywards and
smiles, but his ease and satisfaction is sharply interrupted by the appear-
ance of a man, whom we quickly take to be a criminal associate, sent to
collect him upon his release. Roy opts to walk to the park instead of join
this man in the car, because he wants to make sure that ‘grass is still green
and trees are still growing’. It is difficult to be certain whether this is Roy’s
genuine desire, or just a pointed refusal to follow orders (he will spend
much of the film asserting what independence and moral authority he can).
Either way, the subsequent sequence shows Roy enjoying a moment of
genuine pleasure as he sits on a bench at the park. The audience, though,
are shown a discarded newspaper on the grass behind Roy, the headline of
which establishes his criminal past and identity. Taken together, these two
short scenes provide a rather neat microcosm of the film’s larger narrative
design, one in which Roy’s moral absolution will be accompanied by and
enacted through a physical movement to open spaces – his final, climactic
escape is to the film’s eponymous mountain top.
This description suggests a rather crude and simple pastoralism, and
High Sierra can be enjoyed and understood as a narrative which follows
that familiar formula. Other influential noirs such as The Asphalt Jungle
(1950) and On Dangerous Ground (1951) seem to follow a roughly similar
blueprint, of the troubled urban male who needs fresh air and redemption,
or fresh air as redemption. Jonathan F. Bell writes of noir heroes in such
films as bringing ‘their picnic baskets of angst out onto the open roads
of rural America’ (2000: 218). It is perhaps no surprise that a genre which
habitually characterises urban space as threatening and unsettling would,
almost by default, imagine non-urban environments as promising a kind of

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emancipation. That is what the men in these films hope to be granted. But
Robert Pippin’s Fatalism in American Film Noir (2012) has taught us not
to take a noir hero’s worldview at face value, or as evidence of the film’s
own philosophical and epistemological standpoint, and in this sense the
ironies at play in the opening of High Sierra are telling. Roy’s oblivious-
ness to the newspaper lying nearby in the park is a case in point; it is as
if the film is pointedly qualifying his play at innocence, which in any case
was rather superficial (admiring the trees, throwing a ball to a group of
children). And what were his reasons for coming to the park in the first
place? Roy’s claim that he wants see the grass and trees is inane, but more
interestingly it is narcissistic, a self-aggrandising way of thinking about the
world he is rejoining. It is not unlike honeymooners Eddie Taylor (Henry
Fonda) and Joan Graham (Sylvia Sidney) in a famous scene in You Only Live
Once (1937), fooling themselves and each other (and us?) into believing
that frogs are misunderstood romantics. In both films, we as viewers are
tempted to indulge these characters and their longing for a kind of state-
of-nature innocence, but it is typical of film noir (at its best) to retain a
critical distance, and hint at the ineptitude of their fantasies.
Key Largo (1948) is less ambivalent than High Sierra; it features a
Bogart character, Frank McCloud, whose goodness is more straightforward
than Roy’s, and whose relationship to the natural environment is more one
dimensional. Frank is visiting the Hotel Largo in the Florida Keys to meet the
father and widow of George Temple, with whom he served in the war. The
hotel is also occupied by a criminal gang, headed by Johnny Rocco (Edward
G. Robinson), masquerading as a fishing party. The mutual suspicion and
inevitable clash between the two groups has a kind of environmental cor-
relative in the form of a hurricane which strikes the island, compromising
the escape by boat of Johnny and his criminal entourage. As far as film noir
plots go, Key Largo’s is unusually contingent on environmental events, but
in a rather schematic way: the storm is weathered and the innocent pre-
vail; Frank outwits Johnny on a boat and navigates his way back to dry land,
where his new love awaits. As Jameson and many others have noted, the
noir world sometimes features coastal settings to generate a fascinating
dissonance, a clash of scales, as seedy and labyrinthine stories play out
– or more commonly culminate – alongside a monumental, independent
and timeless ocean. Mildred Pierce (1945), Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and The
Long Goodbye (1973) all achieve this to a greater or lesser extent. But Frank

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in Key Largo accomplishes a kind of mastery, or at least a victory, over his

environment in a manner that does not draw on the genre’s capacity for
irony. He knows the world too well and is too sure of his position within it.
It begs the question of whether a small-island setting is perhaps ill-suited
to film noir; after all, islands are already places of isolation and vulner-
ability, and their narrative implications are fairly stable. They do not throw
into relief a person’s paranoia or self-delusion in the way that film noir so
often does. They are too deterministic.
Niagara (1953) could similarly be accused of locating its narrative in an
environment which is simply too straightforwardly significant. In many noir
films, we are surprised by the sudden vividness and meaningful capacity
of an unspectacular setting – the sewers of He Walked by Night (1948), the
marshes in Gun Crazy (1950) – but not so with Niagara and its billboard
location. Throughout, the film relies on the waterfall as a backdrop, a nar-
rative setting, and as a famous profilmic point of reference (including all
the cultural associations that come with it). The environmental context in
Niagara is not latent, but overwhelmingly significant in a manner that is
atypical of film noir. Familiar generic motifs and icons which we tend to
associate with claustrophobic and anonymous spaces play out in a film
world designed to evoke Romantic sublimity; the marriage is awkward, but
the experiment is a fascinating one.
Joseph Cotten plays George Loomis, a veteran of the Korean War whose
marriage to the adulterous Rose (Marilyn Monroe) has left him paranoid
and despondent. The film begins, as a number of noirs do, with its hero at
a point of despair and desperation. At first only a rocky landscape, crash-
ing waterfall and a misty rainbow seem to be visible, but there is a small
figure in grey moving towards the water. Subsequent shots and the intro-
duction of a voice-over reveal this to be George. The voice-over is of course
another noir convention, but here it seems to operate as a present-tense
internal commentary rather than the more familiar retrospective address.
Moreover, Cotton’s calm, almost soothing tone works in deliberate dis-
junction with the on-screen action; as George approaches the foot of the
falls and submits himself to a sensorial assault of noise and water and
reflected light, he reflects on why he might be there in the first place:

Why should the falls drag me down here at 5 o’clock in the morn-
ing? To show me how big they are and how small I am? To remind

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me they can get along without any help? Alright, so they’ve proved
it. But why not? They’ve had ten thousand years to get independ-
ent. What’s so wonderful about that? I suppose I could too but it
might take a little more time…

These final words are spoken as George has turned around and begun
to walk away from the falls, providing some reassurance to viewers who
assumed this was going to be a moment of ultimate despair, of suicide.
Subsequent scenes give us more information with which to explain and
contextualise George’s actions, namely that his early-morning visit to
the falls is not only a journey towards something, but also away from his
secretive and maddening wife. The film treats George as a victim of both
Rose and Niagara, as a simple sheep farmer who finds himself masochisti-
cally drawn to a beautiful, abusive woman and to a natural wonder which
somehow compounds his anguish. This is an important point; George is
painfully conscious of the fact that his fate is in some sense entwined with
Niagara, but is its promise one of doom or of absolution? Does it mirror
his anguish, stir his murderousness or anticipate his fall? As the plot of
Niagara develops, these end up being almost indistinguishable – but that
does not mean they are interchangeable. What threatens to be a crude
symbol becomes something more interesting precisely because George
himself struggles to interpret it.
As discussed in Chapter 2, a famous scene in King Lear has the king
at the mercy of a wild storm whose meaning matters to the character as

Fig. 10: Between

doom and absolution:
Niagara (1953)

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well as the audience. There is a broadly equivalent scene in Niagara, but it

is not when George physically surrenders himself to the falls at the film’s
climax. Rather, it is when he meets Polly Cutler (Jean Peters), one of the
honeymooners whose stay at Niagara overlaps with the Loomis’s. Polly is
a smart, modest and caring young woman who comes to George’s cabin
to treat his injured hand following his violently angry outburst, which had
been deliberately provoked by Rose. The two have a frank exchange but
clearly respect one another, and after a few minutes George turns off the
light so Polly can properly see the multi-coloured illumination of the falls,
of which the cabin offers an ideal view (albeit through noirish blinds). The
scene teases us with the prospect of sexual tension and romantic promise,
but these are held in check partly by George’s absolute seriousness (Polly
for the most part seems to respond to, rather than set, the tone). His offer to
turn off the light is genuinely innocent, and there is nothing to suggest that
he even understands this to be Polly’s honeymoon. The spectacular back-
drop does not prompt tenderness or passion, but rather a sober warning:

Let me tell you something. You’re young, you’re in love. Well don’t
let it get out of hand like those falls over there. Up above … did you
ever see the river up above the falls? It’s calm, easy. You throw in
a log and it just floats around. Let it move a little further down and
it gets going fast, and it hits some rocks, and in a minute it’s in the
lower rapids and nothing in the world – including God himself, I
suppose – can keep it from going over the edge. It just goes.

For the natural environment to be so deliberately and self-consciously

framed, as a visual and a narrative subject, is rare in film noir. The design
and execution of this scene in Niagara in fact has more in common with
the famous Universal melodramas of Douglas Sirk than with contemporary
noirs such as The Big Heat (1953) or The Big Combo (1955); not unlike the
wildlife motifs in Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, the falls in Niagara are an
apparently simplistic metaphor whose meaning is never quite settled. In
the scene between Polly and George, the falls take up their position in a
mise-en-scène which seems to determine one set of meanings, only for
George to respond to this with his own take on the environment.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of how Niagara ‘positions’ the
falls is the way in which the main character does not know how to engage

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Fig. 11: An apparently

simplistic metaphor:
Niagara (1953)

with it. At first a solitary and reflective George is drawn to the waterfall,
and seems to be on the verge of sacrificing himself; later, with Polly, he
observes the falls as if from a cossetted box in an auditorium, attempt-
ing to extract a serviceable meaning from what he sees; finally, George
is thrust over the precipice in his boat, after accidentally getting swept
up in the river’s current above the falls. The finale is a particularly deft
coming together of environmental conditions and generic logic; George
has already stated with utter clarity what happens to figures floating on
the river as it approaches the falls (although at the time he was doing so
metaphorically), and now he finds himself in that very position. And yet
Cotten’s performance in this final third is not that of a man consciously and
willingly heading for disaster, but one who is helplessly being directed by
sheer force of circumstance (the drift, the police pursuit, the running out
of fuel) to his death – a quintessential noir trajectory. Niagara can by no
means be understood as typical or representative of classical noir, but it
does take to an extreme something which lurks more quietly in other films
of the time, namely the tendency for troubled men to hope, in vain, for
some kind of reconciliation between their situation and their environment.

Over exposure in art-film noir

In Screening Modernism, his comprehensive study of the rise of art cinema

in post-war Europe, András Bálint Kovács identifies film noir as an impor-

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tant ‘transitional step’ between the classical and the modern, and argues
that it makes perfect sense for this genre to have been a launching-off
point for the careers of, amongst others, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut: ‘The modernist idea that
the narrative should serve merely as a frame that is filled in with expres-
sive, emotional or intellectual material, the intensity of which is more
important than the rational consistency of the narrative, proved to be a
viable solution in film noir’ (2007: 247). Kovacs relates this development
to a broader shift in cinematic storytelling, namely the folding together
of human acts and mental processes – the rise of subjective narration.
No longer could audiences assume that the space-time they encountered
in a film was some kind of absolute, disinterested or neutral context or
container for actions and activities. Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Persona
(1966) and Sedmikrásky (Daisies, 1966), for example, are not made up of
consecutive verifiable events in the way that so many classical films are,
but rather they are renditions which seem traceable to states of mind.
This mode of film narration, in which a character’s consciousness
holds significant sway over the presentation of action, tended to ‘weaken
the referential relationship between the world represented in the story and
the empirical world’ (2007: 244). The aesthetic possibilities of this, accord-
ing to Kovacs, could be ‘safely’ explored in noir, a genre which allowed for
some looseness of logic and rationality while still offering audiences (and
filmmakers) a relatively stable and identifiable framework. I find this a con-
vincing account of how and why the latent or qualified modernism of clas-
sical film noir would be taken up and built upon by ambitious European
filmmakers, but it is one which regards narrative primarily as a system of
information distribution and perspective. What, we might ask, became of
the ‘stuff’ of noir – the objects and textures and environments – in this
transition to a European art-film context?
Ossessione (Obsession, 1943) is a crucial work in this linage, not
least because it rather neatly stages the meeting of American influence
(James M. Cain’s crime novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934)) and
European authorship. It is also identified as a vivid marker of film-histor-
ical change by Gilles Deleuze, who early on in Cinema 2: The Time-Image
writes of this film as marking a shift in what constituted a film ‘situation’;
in Obsession and subsequent Visconti films, writes Deleuze, ‘objects and
settings take on an autonomous, material reality which gives them an

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importance in themselves’ (2005: 4). Gino (Massimo Girotti) is a poor and

nomadic young man who, at an inn, meets and falls in love with its mar-
ried proprietress, Giovanna (Clara Calamai). Unsure whether to choose the
passion of Gino or the stability of her husband, Bregana (Dhia Cristiani),
Giovanna eventually conspires with one (Gino) to kill the other (Bregana).
The couple, though, cannot find happiness, and Giovanna is eventually
killed in a car crash as the two of them flee from police.
If, as Kovacs suggests, noir lent itself to a move away from linear nar-
ratives propelled by human actions, then Visconti’s debut film is a vital
case in point. Its story has many film-noir features – adultery, masochism,
fatalism, paranoia, irony – but the world of Obsession is not reduced to
these as it seems to be in, for example, Detour (1945), an American noir
with which it shares a number of qualities. Instead, the key locations in
Obsession of the river and the road (between which sits the inn), and
the documentary treatment they receive from Visconti, always nudge our
awareness away from the melodramatic exchanges of the characters. ‘It is
as if the action floats in the situation,’ writes Deleuze (2005: 4). According
to Giuliana Minghelli, the road of Obsession is ‘one of the first truly open
spaces in the Italian cinema’ (2008: 181).
Openness is a quality which seems to conjure up positive associations;
open spaces, open minds, open hearts and open doors are for the most
part more promising and more emboldening than their closed equivalents.
But the distinction between openness and exposure is a fine one, and the
people of film noir are so laden with guilt and secrecy that the prospect
of space and visibility is not always a liberating one for them – and in
many cases can prove to be quite the opposite. One of the most striking
scenes in Obsession comes very near its climax; after trying to end their
relationship, Gino has returned to the inn to confront Giovanna, believing
her to have reported him to the police. Giovanna tells him the truth (she
hasn’t betrayed him, and is pregnant with his child), prompting Gino to
leave. We next see the lovers at what appears to be the following morning,
on the bleak, beach-like plain of the river. After a night of searching for
him, Giovanna has found Gino wandering barefoot and aimless – a kind
of abstracted reiteration of their first meeting. Gino talks in almost reli-
gious terms of his night spent walking this terrain and of having become
a new man; the couple decide to leave together, and the vast unpeopled
landscape might seem to chime with their vision of beginning again. But

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as well as vast, the environment has a flatness and a monotony which

counterpoints their optimism. The river behind them is, after all, the same
one into which Giovanni’s husband fell to his death, and there is nothing
in the gestures and the demeanour of the couple to suggest momentum or
progress through and beyond this place, nor anything like a point-of-view
construction showing Gino or Giovanni to be looking at their surroundings
and discovering where they might lead. (From what we see, it is hard to
even register the movement of the river.) The two of them have forgot-
ten, or not quite realised, that the police continue to hunt Gino, and their
naiveté is more pronounced than it would be in another setting precisely
because this place makes us so aware of the couple’s inertia and their
exposure. They have mistaken space for promise.
Visconti’s film pre-dates what is normally understood as the era of the
European art film, and the positioning of noir characters in an exposed
and an exposing landscape can be traced through to later films by, for
example, Michelangelo Antonioni, Bertrand Tavernier and René Clément,
as well as Hollywood films with a pronounced European influence, such as
those by Robert Altman, Arthur Penn and Francis Ford Coppola. Antonioni’s
Blow-Up (1966), for example, may not often look like a film noir, and the
brazen self-confidence of its central male, Thomas (David Hemmings), is
an almost total inversion of the despair and pessimism we tend to see
in film noir’s broken men. But the structure of the film – in which a man
encounters a beautiful woman embroiled in mysterious circumstances,

Fig. 12: Lovers with

too much space:
Obsession (1943)

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

and cannot fathom those circumstances – positions it somewhere on the

branches of what Raymond Durgnat described in 1970 as ‘the family tree of
film noir’. And so the fact that its most vital location is a well-kempt urban
park warrants attention as a conscious play with the genre’s environmen-
tal conventions. It is here that Thomas first sees Jane (Vanessa Redgrave),
photographs her secretive meeting with a man, and eventually finds a
corpse.
Andrew Spicer, writing about European film noir, describes a ‘dysto-
pian sensibility that is fundamentally existential, evoking a malign and
contingent universe’ (2007: 15), but we find something more muted at the
park in Blow-Up. It is a profoundly quiet place, an orderly (but not formal)
design, distinguished by vivid and slightly monotonous greens, its trees
and shrubbery gently animated by a soft breeze. However, while the film
deliberately makes these affective details available to us, there is very little
sense of what any of this has to do with Thomas, Jane and the situation in
which they find themselves. The generally immobile camera and occasion-
ally oblique framings do not allow a meaningful dynamic between people
and place, figure and ground, to develop. The human narrative is neither
determined by nor determinative of an environment, but simply there, in a
place which Murray Pomerance aptly describes as one of ‘eventlessness,
poise, fixity’ (2008: 224). What Thomas treats as an incidental backdrop
to his photographic subject will become a stage on which his own doubts
and confusions are exposed.
A number of European art films could be said to produce broadly simi-
lar effects, relocating film noir dynamics into colourful and airy environ-
ments, and in doing so introducing new uncertainties about the threats
and tensions experienced by the characters. As one critic asked of Nuri
Bilge Ceylan’s Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,
2011), ‘why is this film noir so preoccupied with light?’ (Wood 2012a: 18).
The intense sun which is seen and felt throughout Bertrand Tavernier’s
Coup de Torchon (1981) only makes the sudden murderousness of its buf-
foonish main character (Philippe Noiret as Lucien Cordier) all the more
absurdist and unsettling, while the similarly unrelenting brightness of
Plein Soleil (1960) leaves us just as unsure about how to understand Tom
Ripley (Alain Delon) and his own motivations for killing Phillipe Greenleaf
(Maurice Ronet). In one of that film’s key moments, Tom is left stranded on
a small dinghy during a yachting trip, the result of a cruel and misjudged

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prank by Phillipe, whom Tom will soon murder. One could read it as a nar-
rative sequence which motivates Tom’s subsequent violence, an action
which helps us understand more clearly his hatred of Phillipe. But seen in
the broader context of art-film noir and its environmental aesthetics, the
sun-drenched humiliation of Tom has rather different implications; alone
on a small boat and in the brightest light one might imagine, this young
man is no more knowable than he would be in more conventionally noirish
settings. It is as if the film is pushing back against the genre’s visual and
spatial conventions as hard as it can, experimenting with a kind of environ-
mental revisionism, but offering up nothing more hopeful or more lucid.

Neo-noir and material economies

When genres are adopted and developed in different parts of the world,
the results can be, and often are, read as variations on and conversations
with an ‘original’ Hollywood blueprint; that is how I have characterised
European art-film noir. David Desser suggests that of all internationalised
film genres, global noir is particularly animated by an ‘impulse towards
cinephilia’, taking the form of a ‘circuit of acknowledgements’, allusions to
an American-centric canon (2003: 528). But an environmentally-oriented
approach to film study must of course acknowledge that films are not only
texts amongst other texts, and that they are responses to and engagements
with a material world. So Coup de Torchon is not only a creative upending
of generic conventions; it is a film of and about West African climate and
topography. And Chinatown (1974) is not only a Hollywood film continuing
a certain Hollywood tradition (film noir); it is also a record of, and response
to, certain localised conditions and politicised environments – namely the
watersheds of Southern California. This is another way we can choose to
approach the environmentality of film noir, by noting its capacity for ‘plug-
ging in’ to the material economies of particular cities, regions and land-
scapes. Although it is true that a great many so-called ‘neo-noirs’ – such
as Blade Runner (1982), Strange Days (1995) and Dark City (1998) – have
embraced the genre’s more baroque and expressionistic qualities, other
noir films of recent decades have established and explored paranoia and
intrigue as manifestations of real-world material conditions.
For example, a number of Chinese films which emerged around and
since the turn of the twenty-first century have explored that country’s noto-

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rious ‘black economy’ through a film noir framework. Films such as Bari
Yanhuo (Black Coal, Thin Ice, 2014) and Mangjing (Blind Shaft, 2003) find
in the genre an appropriate means of exploring the terrifying scale and
anonymity of coal mining. They do not adopt an ethical position on the
rights and wrongs of natural-resource extraction, but they do continue an
important impulse of the classical noir tradition by seeking out those loca-
tions and environments in which rapid modernisation takes its toll – on
people and places alike. In ‘Lounge Time’, her influential study of American
noir and its rootedness in a post-war historical moment, Vivian Sobchack
draws attention to the pertinence of certain non-domestic spaces (such as
motels and diners) in noir, which she describes as ‘chronotopes’ distin-
guished by ‘hyperbolized presence and overdetermined meaning’ (1998:
130); the slag heaps and shipping containers of Black Coal and Blind Shaft
have a similar agency and aptness which extend beyond their narrative
function.
In the intricate and baroque Black Coal, these only occupy relatively
little screen time; instead there is an expressionistic abundance of snow
and ice, as well as certain familiar generic locales, such as a seedy night
club decked out with mirrors. But it is the coal-mining context which pre-
vents the film descending into a mannerist or overly derivative ‘circuit of
acknowledgements’, and through which it retains the ‘element of realism’
that Carl Richardson, in his book Autopsy (1992), argues is the genre’s life-
support system. Blind Shaft is more straightforwardly realist, employing as
it does certain conventions (such as the candid filming of non-professional
performers, eye-level camerawork and the absence of music) which we
associate with documentary, and with the urge to achieve a directness of
experience and information which is normally compromised by generic
conventions. In fact, Blind Shaft operates as a film which is as much natu-
ralistic as it is realistic, drawing our attention to material details of miners’
lives (where they sleep, how they wash) not for their intrinsic interest, but
rather as evidence of an environmentally determined fate. J. Hoberman
described the film as having the B-movie qualities of ‘flavorsome report-
age and the grit of daily life’ (2004), and we should not misread this ‘grit’
as an immaterial aesthetic sensibility – it is an all-too-real constituent of
daily experiences and environments. The rapid ascendency of Chinese
capitalism has been possible because of the harvesting of fossil fuels on
an almost unimaginable scale, and Chinese filmmakers have found in film

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noir a mode and worldview which is able to make this palpable at the level
of humanist narratives.
The politics of Blind Shaft are its driving impulse, and contemporary
China’s material economy matters in the film to the extent that it gov-
erns the lives and livelihoods of marginalised and exploited people; this
seems to be the project of the filmmaker Li Yang. In Night Moves (2013),
an American film about the planning, execution and aftermath of an attack
on a dam in Oregon, environmentalism and politics are much more boldly
intertwined. Its noir characteristics, like those of Blind Shaft, are to be
found in tone and outlook rather than mise-en-scène (as well as its title,
which is inherited from Arthur Penn’s desolate noir of 1975). A heist film
whose protagonists are ‘eco-saboteurs’ rather than robbers or gangsters,
Night Moves is not coy about the political pertinence of its subject matter.
Early on, two of the three protagonists attend a screening of an amateur
agitprop documentary about impending ecological catastrophe, and while
filmmaker Kelly Reichardt is careful to clarify that neither of them seem par-
ticularly affected by it (Jesse Eisenberg’s Josh is particularly unimpressed),
the sequence nevertheless indicates a rather forthright approach on the
part of Night Moves to confirm itself as part of a live, contemporary envi-
ronmental discourse. A similar affect is achieved when one of the gang
talks at length about marine biodiversity, or when another complains bit-
terly about the spread of golf courses and its catastrophic implications for
the region’s water. These are not digressions from the film’s status and
functioning as a wonderfully tense thriller, and neither are they solicita-
tions by the film for us, as viewers, to become environmentally ‘activated’.
Instead, they are reminders that the paranoia and existential angst which
are so important to noir’s character can be rooted in a place and a time – a
material economy and a living ecosystem.

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4 NATIONAL CINEMAS AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Chapter 3 asked how the natural environment could be said to affect

and inform film genre, one of the most common means by which narra-
tive cinema is categorised and interpreted. This final chapter asks similar
questions of another crucial concept in film studies, and wider film culture:
national cinema. For reasons I will explain in more detail, Japanese cinema
offers itself as a particularly revealing case study for such a discussion,
and we shall move towards an ecocritical interpretation of three Japanese
films.
There is not the opportunity here to explore the vital debates about
the relative efficacy of national cinema as an idea, and the simplifica-
tions and generalisations it can invite – but it would also be a mistake
to pretend they didn’t exist. After all, globalisation and postmodernity
have exacerbated doubts about the already unstable notion of national
identity, and questions of nationhood are perhaps even more vexed in the
case of cinema than many other cultural forms, given the fact that movie
production and distribution are global processes of baffling complexity.
The volume and variety of work produced by national cinemas, and their
uneven circulation around the world, can make it difficult to select and
pursue a particular aspect in particular films with any confidence that they
are indicative of larger currents.
In turn, this raises questions – similar to those common in genre
studies – about the importance of representativeness; O Thiassos (The

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Travelling Players, 1975) is not like many Greek films, and London (1994) is
not like many British films, but does this compromise their usefulness or
validity as examples of national cinema? There is rarely a neat way of rec-
onciling richness with typicality, and the three Japanese films discussed at
length towards the end of this chapter have been chosen for their intrinsic
interest rather than their ability to reliably stand for other films – but they
can nevertheless still be said to have clear and meaningful links to their
national context. As I hope to demonstrate, these links can be understood
more fully by attending to the films’ engagement with the natural environ-
ment.
However, if national cinema is always a subject plagued by meth-
odological compromises, another difficulty comes to the fore when it is
approached by way of environmental features and qualities – the risk
of determinism. To claim that a certain nation’s environmental condi-
tions have a manifest effect on its cinema is to come dangerously close
to a deeply problematic logic of purity, and seems to promote a vision of
nationhood which is blind to the heterogeneity of collective identities. In a
cautious pretext to his writing on determinism in environmental literature,
Lawrence Buell warns that ‘the theory of people and cultures as ecocontex-
tual products may seem, and sometimes be, a pretext for ethnocentricity,
imperialism, and racism’ (2001: 130). Watchful of these risks, it is never-
theless important to recognise that filmmakers working in different parts
of the world not only function in contrasting cultural contexts, but may well
also find themselves in vitally different natural environments – and that
this too can inform their films.

Ecocontextual national cinemas

In his popular book about international politics, Prisoners of Geography,

Tim Marshall claims that environmental conditions are the crucial – but
often ignored – parameters dictating trade, diplomacy and warfare: ‘geog-
raphy has always been a prison of sorts, one that defines what a nation is
or can be’ (2015: 279). Climate, topography, natural barriers and points of
access, navigable waterways, fossil fuels – these, according to Marshall,
establish a non-negotiable context within which national leaders and their
ideological ambitions must function. But as well as affecting a nation’s
political fate and culture, these same factors of course influence its crea-

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tive expressions too. Russian geography did not determine the content of
Anton Chekhov’s writing, for example, but the tone and pathos of much of
his work is not unrelated to the country’s vast stretches of near-uninhab-
itable landscape. We tend to think of artists as responding to social shifts
and emerging opportunities, but many are also likely to be engaging with
the more-or-less constant facets of a given physical environment.
One way to begin thinking about the environmental character of a
national cinema is to take stock of what those facets might be. Senegal
is a country of sandy plains, and its capital city is mainland Africa’s west-
ernmost point. Bangladesh has approximately seven hundred rivers. The
far north and south of Mexico are, geographically speaking, extremely
different from one another. In and of themselves, these simple facts do
not explain anything about the cinema of those nations, but they are an
initial step towards a more nuanced understanding of those cinemas, and
the sort of information which is very easily overlooked. Many important
works in the canon of a national cinema may bear no obvious trace of these
environmental characteristics, but just as many would be hard to imagine
transposed or relocated to a physically different country.
That said, a film will almost certainly attend to only a tiny proportion
of a nation’s geography, and our awareness of large-scale characteristics
will ideally be balanced by a sensitivity to more localised phenomena.
These could be specific formations and locations, such as the swamps of
Louisiana in the American South, or even certain environmental issues,
such as the damming of the Yangtze River in China. Lúcia Nagib, whose
writing on realism and global cinema we encountered in Chapter 1, argues
that Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964) is a
film whose value and profundity as a Brazilian text is achieved, at least
in part, through its knowing use of a very particular landscape, the sertão
shrubland in the country’s northeast. Nagib notes that the word ‘Brazil’ is
not heard during the film, but far from interpreting this as an ambivalence
about or turning away from nationhood as a concern, she instead focuses
on how the sertão offers the director Glauber Rocha a literal and rhetorical
grounding for the formal and ideological experiments he undertakes. More
specifically, the extremely taxing physical experience, for cast and crew, of
filming in these places contributes towards a ‘revelatory realism’ on which
the film’s ‘national-identity effect’ relies (2011: 52). Its closing sequence,
in which the film’s main character/actor runs across the sertão landscape,

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Fig. 13: Brazil’s sertão

landscape: Black God,
White Devil (1964)

is testament to a ‘painful bodily experience and recognition of a harsh,

cruel soil, under an unrelenting sun, which happens to be unmistakably
located in Brazil’ (2011: 64).
Nagib, it should be noted, finely balances an appreciation of the
sertão as a physical place with a knowledge of its complex social, ideo-
logical and political associations in Brazilian society. Our appreciation
and understanding of any national cinema will, likewise, be enriched by an
awareness not just of a country’s geography, but of its culturally inflected
landscapes. In Landscape and Memory, his exhaustive chronicling of
Western civilisation’s environmental narratives and representations,
Simon Schama argues that, rather than repudiate the cultural processes
through which nature is mediated, ‘it seems right to acknowledge that it
is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter
and landscape’ (1995: 10). On a very basic level, this could, for example,
mean acknowledging the subtle distinctions between what is meant by
the ‘bush’ and the ‘outback’ in Australia, or paying heed to the role of
the forest in the German imagination. It would be difficult to adequately
account for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (The Nibelungs, 1924)
without reflecting on what Schama calls the ‘undeniable connections’ in
Germany ‘between the mythic memory of the forest and militant national-
ism’ (1995: 119). It would also be interesting to ask whether such connec-
tions should have any bearing on our interpretation of German filmmaker
Werner Herzog’s use of woods, forests and jungles in countries far away

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from Germany. However, there are real risks here of crudely imposing sim-
plistic predetermined meanings, and Herzog’s films should serve as an
important reminder that natural environments can inform a film’s irony as
well as its majesty or its realism.
Finally, an environmental approach to a national cinema might have
reason to look outside the films themselves, and consider industrial trends
and practices. For example, when and to what extent has location filming
been a common practice? Has there been support and opportunities for a
regionally various output? Which genres and modes are particularly impor-
tant to a national cinema, and how have these emphasised (or overlooked)
certain environmental characteristics? The prevalence of spectacular bodily
movement and non-synchronous music in popular Hindi (‘Bollywood’)
cinema generate conditions in which the natural environment is unlikely to
be granted sustained prominence; the industrial conditions are different
in France, where durational and locational realism have been more impor-
tant to the design and production of films. As with all of the examples
offered so far in this chapter, these are illustrative and provocative starting
points rather than verdicts. A close reading of, for example, La Marseillaise
(1938) and Mother India (1957) would no doubt bring to the fore textual
details that cannot be explained away by these general characterisations
of national cinema; but such readings could nevertheless consider the
industrial practices and conditions which informed those films, and which
might well have their own environmental dimension.

Japan

In order to develop a more sustained argument for the validity of an

environmental approach to national cinema, I have chosen to focus on
Japan. In the preface to his seminal study, To the Distant Observer: Form
and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema, Noël Burch declares it ‘beyond
doubt that Japan’s singular history, informed by a unique combination
of forces and circumstances, has produced a cinema which is in essence
unlike that of any other nation’ (1979: 11), and although our access to,
and knowledge of, global cinemas has developed considerably since
Burch wrote this, it is hard to deny the thrust of his claim. As he him-
self notes, the self-sufficiency of Japan’s film infrastructure in the early
twentieth century allowed it to resist the tidal-wave influence of American

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and European practices which swept across so much of the world (1979:
27–8). But while Burch conceives of ‘forces and circumstances’ primarily
in formal, cultural and industrial terms, I will look to emphasise the raw
material of Japan’s natural environment as a key point of reference and
influence in its cinema.
Japan is an island nation; not only does it have no land borders, but
it consists of a huge number of islands. These are situated off the east-
ern edge (downwind) of the gigantic Eurasian landmass, an arrangement
which helps to determine Japan’s meteorological extremities. The country’s
physical geography is dominated by forested mountains (which in fact fea-
ture relatively infrequently in Japanese cinema), and so populations have
largely been limited to coastal areas; likewise, a shortage of farmland has
made it necessary to cultivate mountain-sides for the establishment of rice
paddies on terraced slopes. In The Language of Landscape (1998), Anne
Whiston Spirn suggests that Japan’s intricate land management conveys
a ‘false sense of control’ (1998: 135), and there is certainly a precarious
quality to physical conditions across the nation – something which was
cruelly exposed to extreme lengths in the earthquake and tsunami of 2011.
This is all complemented by regular and significant precipitation, as well
as dramatic seasonal transitions (for example, Shigehiko Hasumi’s writing
on weather in the films of Yasujiro Ozu; see Chapter 1).
Few environmental customs from anywhere in the world are as globally
recognisable as the annual spread of cherry blossom across the Japanese
archipelago, and its associated celebrations – but this is only the most
spectacular of a great many ways in which seasonality in Japan is a forma-
tive phenomenon. Haruo Shirane has written of Japan’s ‘culture of the four
seasons’, exploring the crucial influence that meteorological cycles have
had on Japanese art and literature; but though the country’s climate is the
root cause of this, Shirane is careful to point out that creative artworks
have tended to shape – rather than simply echo – Japan’s environmental
self-awareness: ‘the oft-mentioned Japanese “harmony” with nature is not
an inherent closeness to primary nature due to topography and climate,
but a result of close ties to secondary nature’ such as ‘poetry, screen
paintings, gardens, flower arrangement, and the tea ceremony’ (2012:
18). These modes, according to Shirane, have disproportionately empha-
sised the transitional seasons of Spring and Autumn (because of their
visual interest and poignant poetic associations), generating a cultural

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tradition which is both rooted in – and subtly distortive of – the Japanese

environment.
From the haiku of Matsuo Basho to Akira Kurosawa’s Shichinin no
Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954), and from domestic architecture to polite
conversation, seasonal climates can be said to ‘hang over’ Japanese cul-
ture as a frame through which the natural world is often experienced and
represented. Is this, as is often claimed, indicative of a cultural attitude
towards, and acceptance of, ephemerality more generally? (It is interesting
to note that Japan has comparatively little in the way of rivers, a natural
feature which in other contexts – the poetry of Goethe, the films of Renoir
– is so often understood as a material manifestation of time passing.)
An engagement with the fleeting present is one of the characteristics of
wabi-sabi, ‘the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we
think of as traditional Japanese beauty’ (Koren 2008: 21). Wabi-sabi is a
notoriously difficult idea to define, but is perhaps most usefully thought of
being both an aesthetic mode and a worldview – a translation of Chinese
Buddhist ideas into Japanese culture, in which simplicity, impermanence
and intuition represent higher ideals than sophistication and resilience.
It is, in short, not a cultural outlook attuned to the sublimity and force we
often find in Western representations of natural beauty and wonder.
And yet Japan’s most famous geographical feature is of course Mount
Fuji, the nation’s highest mountain and a subject which is anything but
fleeting. It is surely telling, though, that Katsushika Hokusai’s globally
iconic series of prints, ‘Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji’, treats the mountain
not only as a monumental and magisterial ‘thing’, but as something that
can be glimpsed behind or alongside or above all manner of momentary
human experiences; of work, play, danger, luxury, building, dwelling,
transit, etc. To some extent this is a question of practicality – Mount Fuji
is visible from Tokyo, and so is more easily integrated into social experi-
ences than spectacular natural landmarks in other countries. But there is
also something of a cultural logic at play here, too. Augustin Berque (1997)
argues that Japanese environmental poetics tends not to operate accord-
ing to the civilisation/wilderness binary we find in many other cultures,
and that it instead offers a more gradated (and more circular) manner of
perceiving the natural world. As part of his ‘chorology’ of Japanese eco-
aesthetics, Berque posits the mountain and the ocean as non-human,
divine sites which bookend the human realm; but he also stresses that

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these are permeable, and that religion and art in Japan have made consid-
erable room for liminal spaces such as shorelines and rocky boundaries,
allowing ‘a constant toing and froing from one realm to the other’ (1997:
56) – a quality which is crucial to the three Japanese films explored in this
chapter.
Berque concedes that a sensitive responsiveness to natural condi-
tions is by no means distinctive to Japanese culture (citing Rousseau and
Thoreau as writers who exemplified this in a Western context), but insists
that we should look for ‘the singularity of forms of expression of this need
according to different milieux’ (1997: 67). With recourse to a remarkable
metaphor, Berque complains that culture is too often conceived of as
a ‘hot-air balloon’ untethered to a particular place, and that we should
remain mindful of the ‘geomorphological traits’ which inform and under-
pin a culture’s artistic practice (ibid.). This is what I intend to do in my
responses to three Japanese films.
Hadaka no shima (The Naked Island, 1960), Kamigami no Fukaki
Yokubo (Profound Desires of the Gods, 1968) and Futatsume no mado (Still
the Water, 2014) are all films whose narratives are almost entirely bound to
an island setting. They explore the dramatic and aesthetic affordances of
such restrictions in very different ways, and although they can certainly not
be said to share a coherent message or vision relating to national identity,
their Japaneseness matters to their meaning in no small part because of
their setting. Considering the country’s topography, for a Japanese film-
maker to opt for such a setting constitutes at the very least a flirtation with
metaphor, and with a national-commentary register. It also lends itself, as
I hope will become clear, to a more intensified study of human/non-human
dynamics.
These are not obscure films, but neither do they sit at the heart of
the canon of Japanese cinema, at least as it has developed in English-
language film culture. Were we to focus on this canon, the films of Yasujiro
Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa would certainly repay sustained
ecocritical study. (Tim Palmer has proposed that the far-flung success of
this triumvirate in the 1950s was partly attributable to a ‘garden aesthetic,
representing Japan as a source of natural abundance, beautiful and untar-
nished wilderness, a limitless milieu of diverse organic splendor’ (2010:
212), but this takes little account of anything distinctive to Japanese condi-
tions). The dangers of confusing a national cinema with its most critically

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feted auteurs are well known, and in the current study it would certainly
distract from the effort to prioritise a common milieu rather than a con-
sistent authorial vision. The island-setting criteria is rudimentary, but it
will also work as an invitation to readers to cast their thoughts towards
other contrasting and complementary examples, whether these be from a
Japanese context – Godjira (Godzilla, 1954), Setouchi Shonen Yakyu-dan
(MacArthur’s Children, 1984), Batoru Rowaiaru (Battle Royale, 2000), Oku
no hito (The Tale of Iya, 2013) – or indeed from further afield.

The Naked Island

Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island was produced independently of the

Japanese studio system, directed by a native of Hiroshima, and shot on
an uninhabited island in Japan’s inland sea. The film features no names
of people or places, virtually no dialogue, and a story whose significant
developments can be counted on the fingers of one hand. A woman, a
man and their two young sons live at subsistence level on a small island,
which they farm using freshwater laboriously transported by boat; the
woman accidentally spills water, and is punished by the man with a brutal
slap; the children catch a fish, which is sold, funding a rare restaurant
meal; one son dies from a fever; the woman deliberately spills a bucket
of water in a fit of despair. The repetitiveness of much of the action and
the film’s apparent disinterest in plot has led some to characterise The
Naked Island as a kind of quasi-documentary, but the deliberate vague-

Fig. 14: A strongly grounded fable: The Naked Island (1960)

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ness of its time, place and population also gives the film a strong fabular
quality. This is not a fable with a strong message, though, so much as a
strong grounding; the geographical location may be anonymous, but its
island status could not be more potent as a force governing the film’s
movements and rhythms.
The actions of the two adults are largely dictated by the need to trans-
port and distribute water, and a considerable proportion of The Naked
Island consists of tasks leading up to, during, or immediately following the
collection of freshwater from a nearby ‘mainland’ (which may in fact be a
larger, more developed island). One of the quiet ironies in the film is the
fact that the family’s absolute isolation requires them to journey constantly
between their island and elsewhere. The careful manoeuvring of buckets
of water by boat is treated by the film as both noble and absurd. Yes,
the task is carried out with extraordinary resilience, but is there perhaps
vanity here as well as hardship? What motivates a people to insist on such
unnatural isolation? The ‘source’ of the water from which the woman col-
lects her supply appears to be a manmade roadside stream, perhaps part
of an irrigation network; what are we to make of this disconnect between
extreme labour and agricultural convenience? In ‘Desert Islands’, Gilles
Deleuze reflects on the philosophical and creative function of islands,
and in particular their ability to enable thoughts of separation and primal
(re)creation: ‘islands are either from before or for after humankind,’ he
writes (2004: 9), and The Naked Island bears this out in a very practical
sense; the family’s attempts to dwell on or with the island seems destined
for failure or compromise. The experience is all labour, and virtually no
fruit.
This is true of the family’s agricultural efforts, but also true of what we
might call their human, or humanist, experience. The limited opportunity
for varied experience on the island, and the mortal need to spend time and
energy collecting water, seems to have left the characters with no reserve
for imaginative, playful or creative engagements with their environment –
at least none to which the film grants us access. As Vernon Young wrote in a
review shortly after the film’s American release, ‘the burden of expression’
falls on the ‘plastic commerce of the tides, the light and shadow, wind and
rain, animal and bird life’ (1963: 258). The absence of dialogue in the film
is striking, but perhaps not quite so unnerving as the fact that the islanders
do not (or cannot?) look around them – in recognition of one or another or

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Fig. 15: Looking inwards and downwards: The Naked Island (1960)

of the striking landscape and seascape around them – in a non-utilitarian

way. Almost every glance in the film seems to be toward the ground or
into the near distance, and related to a task at hand. Shindo’s tendency to
use repeated framings of actions (the steering of the boat, the watering of
potato crops) adds to the stultifying nature of this, as if the film is confirm-
ing a regime of patterned and purposeful looking whose constraints are
dictated by the islanders’ working life.
If there is an exception to this, it comes by way of the children rather
than their parents. At the film’s half-way point, and while their parents are
delivering harvested wheat, the brothers work together to catch a large
fish; the younger boy is fishing alone, but fetches his older brother to help
him wrestle it safely to shore. They preserve the (still living) fish in a small
rock pool, and proudly display it to their delighted parents. Despite its
obvious potential as a food source for the family, fishing had not been
established by the film as part of the survival routine, and so this sequence
has an element of surprise and improvisation which is absent from those
scenes chronicling the work of the mother and father; it is something of
a transgression of the film’s dramatic rhythm. One cannot quite imagine
the parents catching the fish, so ingrained have they become in a particu-
lar system of working with their surroundings. Their delight at its capture
prompts the only gesture of happiness we see in The Naked Island, as the
father congratulates his youngest son by plunging him into the water. But
even this action will have a tragic echo or variation later on in the film,
when the older brother is ceremoniously buried at the island’s peak.

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To the extent that Shindo’s film is an account of life on an island in

challenging conditions, it is often dispiriting, and keeps a surprisingly
cool, almost unfeeling distance from its own protagonists. But as an exer-
cise in film form, and as an attempt to render island living through moving
images, The Naked Island is extremely inventive. The film’s deployment
of montage is particularly striking, not least because we would probably
imagine the labourious processes which are so vital to the film as ripe
for treatment in sequence shots – for example, a long take disembarking
from the boat with the woman, and travelling alongside her as she care-
fully struggles up the slope to the farmland. Instead, the camera tends to
be stationary, and positioned so as to anticipate the (all too predictable)
movement of bodies around the island, and to frame them accordingly.
The film also overlaps one task with another, so there is rarely the pleas-
ing arc of an activity which has begun and ended in one sequence. Just
as the characters themselves never rest between activities, the film’s
shot-to-shot relations generate a sort of restlessness or incompleteness.
For example, when the man and woman come to harvest their wheat, a
close up of the woman scything cuts to a low-angle shot of her lifting a
sheaf; moments later, a tilt downwards reveals that she is now removing
the wheat heads; a few seconds subsequently, the two of them are now
threshing the wheat with flails. These different tasks are not interspersed
with visual or aural ‘beats’ of any kind, and in fact the melancholic score
carries across the shots to support the continuity across them. There is no
opportunity for repose.
When the family visit a nearby town to sell their fish, they encounter a
television in a shop window, and stare at it in incomprehension. The broad-
cast is of a young woman in a black leotard against a blank background,
performing an energetic exercise-cum-dance – an activity whose seem-
ing pointlessness leaves the islanders bemused. It is a sequence which
throws into sharp relief another important aspect of the island setting in
Japanese cinema; an isolated land mass not only invokes Japan itself, but
it can also dramatise with great force the tensions between modernity
and pre-modernity which have been particularly fraught in twentieth-
century Japan. Setting out the scope of his book on this topic, Overcome
by Modernity, Harry D. Harootunian describes how interwar Japan was
‘distinguished by a consciousness that oscillated furiously between rec-
ognizing the peril of being overcome by modernity and the impossible

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imperative of overcoming it’ (2001: x), a dynamic which has been played
out to a greater or lesser extent in many Japanese films, most famously in
the work of Ozu and Mizoguchi. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Japan
was in self-imposed exile from dramatic developments in global trade and
industry, and although the post-war American occupation seemed to settle
the question of whether or not Japan would be a ‘modern’ country (a strong
parliament, improved rights for women, etc), the dilemma of whether to
look outward or inward, forward or backward, was certainly not settled by
1960. It is virtually impossible not to map onto The Naked Island a schema,
however reductive, of island/Japan/tradition vs. mainland/global moder-
nity. A similar schema is taken up by Shohei Imamura in The Profound
Desires of the Gods, but while Shindo builds from this idea an austere
and ambivalent fable, Imamura offers up a carnival-cum-menagerie, and a
wholly different set of responses to Japan’s islandness.

Profound Desires of the Gods

In contrast to the ‘naked island’ of Shindo’s film, which is palpably close to

larger and more modernised habitations, the (fictional) island of Kurage in
Profound Desires of the Gods is fundamentally removed from the Japanese
mainland. Imamura’s island also has a closer real-world correlative than
Shindo’s, namely the island of Okinawa. Part of a larger chain of islands
which sits roughly between Taiwan, Japan and mainland China, Okinawa
has a rather ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to Japanese nation-
hood; deeply influenced by other South Asian cultural traditions, it also
remained under American control through to the 1970s, and occupies
something of a playground status in the Japanese cultural imagination.
A social and geographical outlier, Okinawa was perhaps an inevi-
table subject for Shohei Imamura, a director drawn to the margins of a
(Japanese) society whose pretensions of purity he consistently took
issue with. In an overview of Imamura’s filmmaking character and career,
Donald Richie suggests that, throughout his work, ‘naturalness – hidden,
muffled, concealed though it is by official Japan […] is irrepressible’ (1997:
8). Richie is here using ‘natural’ to describe a certain manner of human
behaviour – ‘selfish, lusty, amoral, innocent’ (ibid.) – but is also refer-
ring to the preponderance of animal life which is shown and alluded to
in Imamura’s films, and which parallels and contextualises the films’

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Fig. 16: Kurage,

a dysfunctional
paradise: Profound
Desires of the Gods
(1968)

human drama. The director of Buta to gunkan (Pigs and Battleships, 1961)
and Nippon Konchuki (The Insect Woman, 1963) made films about people
whose instincts and gestures were as biological as they were social.
Profound Desires of the Gods is firmly in this mode, but here the medita-
tion on nature and naturalness is given a special focus and inflection by
dint of the island setting.
Kurage is home to a rather disorienting mix of religious rituals, super-
stition, feudal working conditions and vibrant wildlife. It is paradisal and
deeply dysfunctional, and the film posits the Futori family as a kind of
symptom of the island’s extraordinary character. The Futoris are overseen
by the incestuous Yamamori (Kanjuro Arashi), father and grandfather to
Toriko (Hideko Okiyama), a mentally unstable and sexually voracious
woman who is also believed to have shamanistic powers. Yamamori’s
son Nekichi (Rentaro Mikuni) spends much of the film in a giant hole in
the ground, trying to dislodge a huge boulder which is said to have blown
onto the island as divine retribution for his own sexual transgressions
(he is in love with his sister). Into this steps Kariya (Kazuo Kitamura), an
engineer dispatched by his Tokyo-based sugar-manufacturer employer
to research the water supply on Kurage, and who hires Nekichi’s son
Kametaro (Choichiro Kawarasaki) as an assistant. Imamura intersperses
the ensuing drama with quasi-documentary sequences giving voice to the
island’s politically disenfranchised and economically frustrated youth, as
well as songs by a wheelchair-bound minstrel recounting the origin myth of
Kurage – a story which is itself founded on incest, and which bears a strong
resemblance to Japan’s own creation story.
The Futori family is maligned by other islanders for its ‘beastliness’,
but as far as Imamura’s worldview goes, this is hardly a damning quality.
Nekichi’s and Toriko’s closeness to animal life – their physically instinctive

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actions as well as their tendency to handle living creatures – is neither

celebrated nor mocked by the film, which (like The Naked Island) does not
adopt the affective point of view of anyone on or beyond the island. We
never look at the family with a character about whom we know or care, and
nowhere in Profound Desires is there a normative rhythm or set of relations
against which the Futoris’ character can be judged. Early on in the film,
immediately after its opening credits, a short anecdotal sequence depicts
a group of Kurage fisherman passing by a larger commercial vessel carry-
ing sleeping pigs; one of the pigs falls overboard, and is quickly devoured
by a shark. Is this aberrant? Symbolic? Foreboding? Natural? The scene
establishes the fact that Kurage as an island and Profound Desires of the
Gods as a film are not best understood according to notions of ecological
harmony and permanence (of the kind we might associate with Japanese
Shintoism or wabi-sabi aesthetics), but rather of instinct and collision.
This is an ecosystem whose logic we have little hope of understanding;
it is also one which includes the fisherman and the boats on which they
travel, just as it will include the dynamite with which Nekichi conducts his
own fishing, and the trains and aeroplanes which eventually arrive at the
island. In most films these developments would surely function as distur-
bances or violent impositions, but Profound Desires of the Gods is careful
to disassociate the image of the island from the idea of equilibrium. The
natural order of Kurage – its palpable ‘sense of completeness’ (Mellen
1976: 386) – is deep and unpredictable disorder.
Which is not to say that the film’s narrative is chaotic or unstructured.
The arrival of Kariya, or ‘Mr. Engineer’ as he is sometimes called, provides a
familiar and predictable storytelling motif to complement and counterbal-
ance the sheer oddness of much of what we encounter. The unwelcome
visiting expert is a type who often features in films about ‘off-the-grid’ com-
munities, such as Wild River (1960) and Local Hero (discussed in Chapter
2), and it is common for his or her initial utilitarianism to be compromised
or undermined by the emotional and sensorial experiences provided by
the new environment. This is true of Kariya, who is initially impatient to
locate a water source on Kurage as soon as possible, in order that he might
escape its stifling heat and its bothersome wildlife – but by the film’s half-
way point has been seduced by Toriko, and lies half-dressed sprawling on
the sunlit beach (his spectacles discarded on a nearby rock), being hand-
fed molluscs direct from the ocean.

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SHORT CUTS

Fig. 17: The visiting

expert ‘goes native’:
Profound Desires of
the Gods (1968)

And yet this almost cartoonish characterisation of the modern main-

lander ‘going native’ belies a more subtle strategy on the part of Profound
Desires of the Gods, whereby the engineer’s expedition is positioned not
as an invasion or a contamination of Kurage’s wellbeing to be triumphantly
foiled by the island’s charm, but as something which could demonstrably
improve the lives of many islanders. A number of throwaway references
are made to Kurage’s unbearably salty drinking water, and the one pre-
cious freshwater source which is being hid from the engineer (by Ryu
(Yoshi Katô), who effectively manages the island) is likewise being denied
to the majority of Kurage inhabitants. Looked at from one perspective, the
engineer’s mission is a culturally insensitive imposition of modern tech-
nology, which leads inexorably to the opening up of Kurage by way of a new
airport; but his exploration is also born out of a concern for, and expertise
in, the physical conditions and capacities of the island, an island whose
resources are being palpably misdirected in service of a religious tradition
which is no more ‘natural’ than industrial sugar production. To suggest,
as Mika Ko (2013: 83) does, that the film indulges ‘Japan’s nostalgia for a
utopian vision of its own pre-modernity’ is surely to simplify its extraordi-
narily complex meditation on purity and impurity, regression and progress.
Profound Desires of the Gods climaxes with the ritual assassination of
Nekichi and his sister-cum-lover Uma (Yasuko Matsui) as they attempt to
escape Kurage, a killing carried out by a group which includes Nekichi’s
son, Kametaro. An epilogue then shows us the island five years later, after
an airport and train line have been established there; Kariya is visiting
with his wife and mother-in-law, and during a sight-seeing train tour they
are shown ‘Toriko Rock’, a huge statue-like formation on the coastline,
which – according to local legend – formed when a woman was waiting
for her lover to return. The lover for whom Toriko was waiting was Kariya

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Fig. 18: Catching a

glimpse of Toriko
Rock: Profound
Desires of the Gods
(1968)

himself, and logically speaking this ‘legend’ could only be a few years
old. What do we make of it? The rock, as far as we can see (through the
fleeting and obstructed telephoto composition) does indeed resemble a
seated woman, but nothing in the film’s presentation bestows on it any
special status of the kind we might expect for such a miraculous, uncanny
manifestation. Perhaps it has always been on the island, and some local
people mischievously applied the myth as testament to an entertaining
local scandal. The attempt by Kariya to dismiss the story as an example
of the islanders’ delightfully primitive naivety does not quite convince us;
after all, the film has shown us only minutes before Toriko sitting on a rocky
beach gazing longingly out towards the sea, and has previously given cre-
dence to the claim that she has supernatural faculties.
Perhaps the rock is just a rock, but it sits on the edge of an island which
has nurtured ideas of animism and ecological agency that cannot be easily
dismissed. Imamura approaches the island and its inhabitants in such a
way that leaves room for those ideas without romantically indulging them.
His film presents Kurage as a meeting point between the instincts of a
pre-modern Japan and the priorities of a rapidly modernising nation state,
but the contrast is muddied. It is not clear which of these worldviews has
a stronger attachment to the sentience of Toriko’s Rock. And neither is it
clear whether we have watched a film about an island on the periphery of
Japanese culture, or one at its heart.

Still the Water

Each of the Japanese films discussed in this chapter develops a narrative

and aesthetic account of what it means to live on an island. In both The
Naked Island and Profound Desires of the Gods, the condition of being

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geographically and socially separate (and separated?), a condition which

cannot help but implicitly address ideas of Japanese nationhood, has trau-
matic currency. The apartness of an island, rather than facilitating self-suf-
ficiency and harmony, in these films places seemingly irresolvable strains
and pressures on human and natural resources. Naomi Kawase’s Still the
Water also features something of this tension between the centripetal
and centrifugal forces of island living, between a profound sensitivity to
local circumstances and a disquieting concern for what lies beyond those
circumstances, but it tends to emphasise the restorative and revelatory
potential of the island environment.
Another way of putting this would be to say that, of the three films, Still
the Water is the least concerned with the profound compromises that island
conditions can impose. The monotony which underpins The Naked Island,
for example, or the siege mentality of the Kurage community in Profound
Desires of the Gods, are absent. This is a film in which islanders treat their
locale as an opportunity for spiritual reflection and projection (of the kind
which would be inconceivable in The Naked Island and Profound Desires
of the Gods), and a number of reviewers have in fact responded with
some exasperation to the film’s rather saccharine conjoining of personal,
ecological and religious ideals. Maggie Lee in Variety accuses Kawase of
‘padding her modest human drama with pretentious yet hollow musings’,
and takes issue with the ‘nature worship and pompous philosophising’ on
the part of the film and its characters alike (2014). I too have reservations
about the film’s rhetoric, but nevertheless find it to be another revealing
example of what happens when an island setting becomes a clear and
guiding influence on the style and meaning of a Japanese film.
On the shores of Amami-Oshima, an island about two hundred miles
northeast of Okinawa, a teenage boy, Kaito (Nijiro Murakami), finds a dead
body which has been washed up by a violent storm. Rather than concern
itself with the identification of, and explanation for, the dead man, Still
the Water focuses mainly on Kaito and his on/off girlfriend Kyoko (Jun
Yoshinaga) as they simultaneously navigate their adolescent love and their
coming to terms with family trauma (his parents have separated, and her
mother is dying of an incurable illness).
One important, but implicit, consequence of the corpse, and Kaito’s
discovery of it, is that it entrenches Kaito’s distrust of the ocean, a distrust
which becomes an important thread in the film. Kaito’s reluctance to swim

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Fig. 19: Young lovers and their geography: Still the Water (2014)

in the water is developed in sharp contrast to Kyoko’s supreme ease and

confidence (in a rather surreal sequence, she swims fully clothed under-
water), and the film clearly invites us to see this in relation to their capac-
ity for emotional sensitivity; Kaito is painfully uncommunicative with his
mother, and his self-pity impedes his ability to empathise with her, while
Kyoko accepts her own mother’s mortality, and has an almost miraculous
capacity for ‘processing’ her family’s situation in terms of mutability rather
than tragedy. The final scene of Still the Water shows the two teenagers
swimming together underwater, naked and holding hands, a rather neat
conclusion to the film’s ‘taking-the-plunge’ metaphor, and perhaps the
most vivid example of what critics such as Lee recoiled from – an all-too-
convenient marriage of natural splendour, individual humility and philo-
sophical awakening.
The opening shots of Still the Water form a rhetorical prologue. Long-
distance landscape shots of an increasingly turbulent storm and large
waves breaking upon a shore are followed by a cut and a short blackout;
a final establishing shot then shows the same stretch of beach in serene
stillness. The rhythm of the cutting and the quality of the light suggest
that the calm shortly follows the storm – dawn the next day, we would
guess – and this could be interpreted, on a rather schematic level, as
indicative of Kawase’s tendency to regard tranquility as a state to which
things will reliably and eternally return (although second-time viewers of
the film will be alive to the irony that a dead body floats within or nearby
this scenic arrangement). More significant than the ‘message’ of this pas-

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sage, though, is the fact that it establishes a particular mode of looking

at the environment, especially the ocean, one whose characteristics will
recur throughout the film.
Firstly, it is a looking out; with very few exceptions, Still the Water is
a film which imagines the island habitat from the inside out, inviting us
to look with, rather than at, the islanders and their home. Secondly, the
opening shots are not attributed to a character, but the fact that they regis-
ter a time lapse between ‘storm’ and ‘calm’ gives them a roughly subjective
quality; the film has no fewer than fifteen shots of the ocean which, like
these, cannot be described as point-of-view shots, but whose cumulative
effect is nevertheless that of a consciousness being drawn out to sea. And
thirdly, the sequence is unashamedly choreographed; nowhere in Still the
Water does Kawase really try to evoke the irregularity or unpredictability
which some artists (and audiences) might believe to be vitally constitu-
tive of ‘naturalness’. Her camera is never caught off guard by actions or
details for which it was unprepared, and although only a small number
of shots have a markedly omniscient quality to them (including a remark-
able aerial shot which traces, presumably from an aeroplane, the contours
of an underwater ridge through translucent ocean water), the island and
its actions are regarded throughout the film from a position of knowing
detachment.
Taken together, tendencies such as these position Still the Water not
as a study of the island, or a documentary record whose production has
had to contend with the challenges of a pro-filmic world, but rather as an
impressionistic account whose sensibility – of contented resignation –
is very close to that of Kyoko and her family. Kyoko’s dying mother, Isa
(Miyuki Matsuda), is a shaman, and is able to share with her husband,
Toru (Tetta Sugimoto), and daughter an acceptance of the transience of
human life. She describes herself as being on the ‘threshold’ between
gods and humans, and therefore undisturbed by the prospect of moving
from mortal life to the afterlife. Returning from hospital to the family home
for her final days, Isa sits with Kyoko and Toru on the threshold between
the inside and outside of their house, which we learn has been a favourite
spot of hers for many years. Before long, Isa stands up and moves towards
a huge banyan tree, as if magnetically drawn into its field. Toru reassures
Kyoko that her mother probably ‘sees something’ that others are unable
to. But what do we see? The film cuts to a shot of Isa and the tree from a

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position some distance away from the house, as if to declare our access to
be more far-reaching than Toru or Kyoko’s – but all we see is Isa place her
hand upon the trunk, hold on to a branch, and look out to sea. As is the
case in many sequences throughout Still the Water, the natural environ-
ment is venerated, but through the filter of a religious impulse which longs
for the invisible and the otherworldly. Richie argues that Shohei Imamura
‘never asks us to believe anything we are not shown’ (1997: 22); Kawase,
by contrast, shows us a rich material and atmospheric world while seem-
ing unconvinced by its inherent, substantial importance.
When Isa looks out to sea, a cut to an extreme long shot of the water
is not confirmed as a point-of-view shot, and so remains somewhat sus-
pended in its meaning and function – as are many similar shots throughout
Still the Water. But such shots are not arbitrary and, as already suggested,
they could be said to be closely attuned to the (non-individualised) experi-
ence of island inhabitants. (After all, for those who live on Amami-Oshima,
looking out to sea is a fact of life, and not necessarily the exceptional per-
sonal experience it is for others – such as Antoine Doinel at the end of Les
quatre cent coups (see Chapter 1)). These images are most fully integrated
into the film’s drama during an important scene shared between Kyoko
and Keito, during which the two teenagers sit together on a bench over-
looking the sea; the sun is setting, and its glow casts a warm light across
their faces. It certainly looks like a romantic set piece, and the scene does
indeed culminate in a kiss, but Kyoko and Keito arrive at this by way of a
conversation about the sea that separates them as much as it unites them.
Following an initially tense exchange about Keito’s knowledge (which
he denies) of the dead body, Kyoko challenges him about his relationship
to the water, which she seems to believe is related to his emotional and
sexual reticence:

Kyoko: Why don’t you try surfing? My father said you should get
into the sea.
Keito: The sea is scary.
Kyoko: Huh?
Keito: The sea … it’s alive.
Kyoko: I’m alive too.
[pause]
Kyoko: My father told me, when you’re surfing – he’s only felt this

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Fig. 20: Taking the plunge: Still the Water (2014)

rarely – but there are moments when you feel like you become
one with the sea.
Keito: It’s way too big for that.
Kyoko: [ignoring Keito] I thought that’s like sex.

Most of this exchange takes the form of a two-shot in profile, in which

Keito is closer to the camera but Kyoko’s face is clearer to us. When she
begins to report her father’s thoughts on surfing, the film cuts to a shot
of the sea – yet another ‘loose’ point-of-view shot, only this time there
is something narratively at stake, namely the dilemma of whether to
regard the sea as an enticing opportunity for spiritual enlargement, or as
a force whose vastness and unknowability are terrifying. (Fiona Handyside
writes that beaches can bring to a film’s narrative ‘too much meaning, an
excess of meaningful potential’ (2014: 7).) We know that both characters
are bringing their own experiences and desires to bear on the water, and
the image neither proves nor disproves either compulsion. How could it?
Because this is a film, the sea appears in the form of a framed, fleeting
moving image; not an illustration of the abstract ‘sea’ about which Kyoko
and Keito talk, but rather a tiny proportion of that millennia-old sea’s sur-
face at one moment, a little under twenty seconds. To this extent we could
consider it an inadequate image, but this is surely what the scene has set
out to explore – how human thoughts and feelings take shape in dialogue
with an environment whose complexity and magnitude always lie beyond
comprehension.

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Still the Water is perhaps a little too sure of nature’s therapeutic poten-
tial, too confident that the non-human world can be engaged with in such
a way that resolves unease. Towards the film’s end, Toru talks to Keito and
Kyoko about his love of surfing and his mourning for Isa, comparing his
departed wife with a wave whose energy continually sustains him, imply-
ing that it is this attitude which has allowed him to grieve with such for-
bearance and peace. Considering that Toru seems to have lived his life in
conditions which have allowed him to acquire such an outlook, this seems
to be a rather exclusive and rarefied sentiment. Which is why it is impor-
tant for the film that these words are addressed primarily to Keito, a young
man who has only recently come to Amami-Oshima, and whose efforts to
understand its environment and its values have caused no small amount
of anguish. Still the Water certainly aligns itself with Toru’s worldview, but
Keito’s presence counterbalances this; Kawase knows that the island is
the seed bed for ways of thinking and being that are only ‘natural’ on a
local scale.

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CONCLUSION

Throughout this book, I have attempted to elucidate a way of exploring

film texts which takes full account of the medium’s ability to engage with
non-human, environmental, ‘natural’ subject matter. A fundamental chal-
lenge for ecocritical writing of any kind is that of finding a balance between
the craft of a particular work and the irreducibility of the world to which
it refers. In trying to meet this challenge, I have been led to focus largely
on films which themselves achieve such a balance, which acknowledge
something of the world’s totality without disavowing their creative and
expressive ambitions.
Although the films discussed do, I believe, engage the natural environ-
ment with deliberate care and considerable imagination, none of them can
really be considered ‘green’ film texts; theirs is not an environmentalist
rhetoric. My approach has, though, been an ethical one, to the extent that
it has encouraged readers to maintain an alertness to the natural world as
something which cannot be understood simply as setting or theme. Films
are never categorically ‘environmental’ any more than we are, but they can
– like us – develop a rich and multifaceted relationship with their environ-
ment, not least by reminding us that such relationships are a matter of
both perception and physical circumstance. ‘We are aware of the world,’
writes Arthur C. Danto, ‘yet seldom aware, if at all, of the special way in
which we are aware of the world’ (2001: 231). Narrative cinema can help
us better understand this awareness, allowing us simultaneous access to

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records of the world and the creative consciousness through which the
recording takes place.
I have tried to make the case that such ‘awareness’ does not simply
boil down to the overt emphasis a film places on nature; what is at stake
is not how much screen time is given to flowers and rivers and mountains,
but the kind of significance and meanings such phenomena accrue over
the course of a film – what we could call the nature of their presence in
the work. And even if a narrative film can only show us these phenomena
in relatively fleeting moments, and as relatively superficial surfaces, such
‘glances’ can have extraordinary potential. ‘In their capacity to set forth
the figure and texture of any given occupant of any given environment,’
writes Edward S. Casey, ‘surfaces act as sheathes for that environment,
showing and specifying what would otherwise be mere perceptual flotsam
and jetsam’ (2003: 196). Casey writes this in the context of an argument
he makes (drawing on the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas) for the ethical cur-
rency of the glance in the emergence and maintenance of an environmen-
tal awareness. Rather than disparage surface details as superficial, Casey
argues, we should value them precisely because of their expressivity and
simplicity; we should trust our perception of the environment as a vital
starting point for journeys towards greater ecological responsiveness.
A recurrent theme throughout this book has been the importance of
point of view and perception in the study of a film’s engagement with the
natural environment; the need of attending to environmental views and
relations within the world of the film – such as those of George Loomis
in Niagara or Verónica in La mujer sin cabeza – if one is to develop an
account of the film’s own environmental character. This is, I think, a fruitful
approach, and one which is somewhat underexplored in ecocritical film
studies. But I would like to conclude by once again broadening out the cov-
erage of my discussion, by returning to the theme of Chapter 1 (namely the
environmental subtext across many areas of film studies), and by bringing
together a range of dissimilar passages of writing which all, nevertheless,
combine close attention to a film’s environmentality with broad and com-
plex issues. Taken together, the words and ideas of these contemporary
writers go further than I have had the opportunity to in the main chapters
of this book to demonstrate the sheer breadth of environmental film study
– each in their own way registering a film’s sustained glance as a call to
think about the natural world, and about what we make of it.

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Michael Wood on movement

In Film: A Very Short Introduction (2012b), Michael Wood ‘sets the scene’
for his reflective study of the medium by way of a hypothetical response to
an unassuming sequence:

A man stands before a grave in a country cemetery. He doesn’t

move, nothing moves; no birds, a still world. But this is a man in
a motion picture, we have seen him move, and he will move again
in a moment when his spell of meditation and memory is over.
The film in John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). The man is Henry
Fonda playing a grieving Lincoln as he lingers over Ann Rutledge’s
grave.
You like the shot and its framing, so you pause the film. Now it
looks and feels quite different. How can it? What could the differ-
ence between a stilled and a moving picture of a scene where there
is no movement? You start the film again, and pause it again. Yes,
quite different. Then you realise. There is a river at the back of the
image, and in the motion picture it flows, there are pieces of ice
drifting down the dark surface. (2012: 1)

There is in this thought experiment only implicit attention to film craft (per-
formance, cinematography, mise-en-scène, etc). Wood’s primary empha-
sis is instead on the fact of encounter between a film and a viewer – a
viewer not only accustomed to laws of nature, but accustomed to laws of
nature as they tend to be employed in narrative film. As he sees it, the
physical environment in a scene such as this is not only a formal and nar-
rative constituent; it is the very contract between film and viewer that this
story is happening in a world whose time is ‘real’. ‘If nothing else moves in
Young Mr. Lincoln,’ Wood continues, ‘the water in the river does; and if the
water doesn’t move, it isn’t a movie’ (2012: 2).
One way of characterising ecocritical film studies would be to say that
it is the pursuit of other instances in which a film’s very ability to commu-
nicate its information and achieve its most meaningful sensorial effects is
one and the same with its particular treatment of the natural environment.
Wood playfully conflates the criteria for what constitutes a film with what
constitutes this film. Of course not all films require moving rivers, but it is

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an illuminating question to ask of other work: which features of an environ-

ment become the assurance of a film narrative having taken place in the
world?

Slavoj Žižek on metaphor

Adrian Ivakhiv takes Tarkovsky’s Stalker to be a work in which we can see

with particular vividness how films traffic in material, social and percep-
tual ecologies (2013: 1–29). Slavoj Žižek’s approach to the film (and one
which Ivakhiv incorporates into his own model) is more focused on its psy-
choanalytical register than its environmental qualities, but he is neverthe-
less acutely aware of the ‘typical Tarkovskian landscape’, defined as ‘the
human environment in decay reclaimed by nature’ (1990: 227), and which
in Stalker determines the form of ‘the zone’.
What is especially distinctive about Žižek’s response to the film is his
claim that a particular political-historical point of reception will have deter-
mined (or heavily influenced) the range of meanings an audience could
project onto Stalker:

For an ex-citizen of the defunct Soviet Union, the notion of a for-

bidden zone gives rise to (at least) five associations: the Zone is
(1) Gulag, i.e. a separated prison territory; (2) a territory poisoned
or otherwise rendered uninhabitable by some technological (bio-
chemical, nuclear…) catastrophe, like Chernobyl; (3) the secluded
domain in which the nomenklatura lives; (4) foreign territory to
which access is prohibited (like the enclosed West Berlin in the
midst of the GDR); (5) a territory where a meteorite struck (like
Tunguska in Siberia). The point, of course, is that the question ‘So
which is the true meaning of the Zone?’ is false and misleading:
the very indeterminacy of what lies beyond the limit is primary, and
different positive contents fill in this preceding gap. (Ibid.)

Not all of these historically informed associations would have been ‘in
play’ at the time of the film’s production (Stalker, it can be easy to forget,
predates the Chernobyl disaster). But neither can we go far as to say that
any filmed landscape will be a ‘blank slate’ onto which a viewer will pro-
ject his or her own cultural and environmental associations, regardless

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of their historical or geographical connection to the film. Žižek’s list, I

think, is both a testament to the openness and profundity of Stalker, and
a reminder that certain historically informed interpretations nevertheless
force the issue. Faced with extraordinary but ambiguous film landscapes,
we cannot simply accept their ‘indeterminacy’; there will almost always be
‘positive contents’, limits on the universality of a filmed world.

Salma Monani and Matthew Beehr on social justice

The temptation to separate off non-human landscapes as sites of ideologi-

cal neutrality and innocence is widespread, and is often hard to resist. For
many, this is the very definition of nature; a de-politicised and non-cultural
balm, a ‘separate, timeless, wild sphere’ (McKibben 2003: 47). But it is
not a definition which bears much scrutiny, and there is no starker illustra-
tion of the irregularity of environmental meaning – of the fact that ‘green
aesthetics’ can never be a universal value system – than agricultural
slavery and servitude. Human history has seen millions of people forcibly
conditioned to labour on and with environments, people who have simply
not been able to find in wild spaces and far-reaching vistas promises of
escape, redemption, exultation or stimulation. As Salma Monani and
Matthew Beehr write of a character in John Sayles’ Honeydripper (2007), a
film set in the cotton fields of 1950s Alabama, ‘with his arrival in the fields
being the result of injustice, it would be hard for Sonny to appreciate either
his presence in this environment or the environment itself’ (2011: 11).
In these terms, ‘appreciation’ becomes a less benign activity than it
is often taken to be; what are the social conditions which have enabled
a film and its characters to engage their environments in particular ways?
Monani and Beehr find that Honeydripper, in ‘its continuous careful
attention to the natural environment in the context of its characters’ cir-
cumstances, presents a compelling narrative of African American environ-
mental attitudes’ (2011: 6). These circumstances are determined by race
relations and social inequality, in such a way that manifestly affects how
African American characters in the film can interact with the landscape:
‘The combination of disparate origins and lack of investment in the fields
makes it difficult for the labourers there to form a community, either with
each other or the extended natural world’ (2011: 15). Monani and Beehr
trace how Sayles actually moves towards a somewhat hopeful resolution, a

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positive rejoinder to widespread images of ‘African Americans in toxic and

polluted environments, or distanced entirely from the natural world and
engaged in excessive, materialistic consumerism’ (2011: 21–2). In short,
while many environmental experiences – awe, disorientation, harmony,
inspiration – seem to be tied to individual perception, they will invariably
be influenced by social parameters such as ethnicity, age, prosperity and
gender. Navigating the relationship between a film character’s socialised
view of nature with that of the film itself is an increasingly important chal-
lenge for ecocritical film studies.

Lucy Fife Donaldson on artificiality

Many of the analyses in this book have assumed a discernible distinc-

tion between natural and man-made environments, exploring films’
special attention to, and treatment of, the former. The distinction has not
always been straightforward, but it has tended to matter to the narrative
and meaning of the film in question. In Lucy Fife Donaldson’s writing on
Vertigo (1958), demarcations of naturalness are shown to matter less than
the textural character of various environments. Imagining the palpability
of costumes and props, flora and fauna, as well as the cumulative texture
of shot-to-shot relations, is for Donaldson an important part of interpret-
ing cinema. According to her model of analysis, a film environment will
always be a sensorial arrangement just as it is one of narrative, cultural or
ideological meaning.
And so, in Vertigo, when Scottie (James Stewart) and Madeleine (Kim
Novak) visit a forest and a (seemingly nearby) rocky beach, the effect is
not of an ‘escape to nature’ in the generic sense of that term; instead, ‘the
material qualities of space seem to become increasingly elastic, as back
projection is used interchangeably with matte paintings and interior sets
in order to trouble the experience of this environment for Scottie, and for
us’ (2014: 91). Of course it is not incidental to the film that these famous
scenes invoke monumental and pre-cultural (natural) forces, namely
gigantic trees and crashing waves – but Donaldson is alive to the fact that
the overriding sense is of profound surreality rather than ecological com-
munion.
The forest in Vertigo is not a worldly space, ‘but rather an entirely
plastic one that seems to move backwards and forwards, folding in on

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itself and expanding between shots’ (2014: 93). Alfred Hitchcock is no

more taken by the majesty of the giant redwoods than is Scottie. The forest
is a means to a formal, affective end, for filmmaker and film characters
alike. But in her attention to those qualities of film which are perhaps the
hardest to articulate – ‘the depth that spills over’; ‘the tangibility revealed
by light and sound’; ‘the feeling of a world’ (2014: 48) – Donaldson con-
vincingly demonstrates the fact realism, veracity and indexicality do not
demarcate what ecocritical film writing can explore. Fabricated worlds are
by no means out of bounds.

Laura Mulvey on disaster

Abbas Kiarostami’s Koker triology – Khaneh-ye Doust Kojast? (Where Is

My Friend’s House?, 1987), Va Zendegi Edameh Darad (And Life Goes On,
1992) and Zir-e Darakhtan-e Zeitoun (Through the Olive Trees, 1994) – is
perhaps the most critically acclaimed model of film realism since post-
war Italian cinema. It is marked not only by a bracing immediacy and
naturalism of human performance, but also by a deeply reflexive approach
towards these very qualities. The textual relationships between the three
films are complex and multi-layered, but the trilogy’s major structuring
point of reference is the Manjil–Rudbar earthquake of 1990, which struck
the region in which Where Is My Friend’s House? was shot; this disaster
prompts Kiarostami to stage a semi-fictionalised return to the area in And
Life Goes On, which in turn becomes the subject of diegetic reenactments
in Through the Olive Trees.
Laura Mulvey, in the context of her writing about stillness and film,
explores the ‘earthquake’s impact on Kiarostami’s cinema in relation to
reality and its representation,’ and how it opened a gap ‘separating the
reality of a traumatic event and any attempt to turn it into an exegesis,
a representational account of the event’ (2006: 128). One of the major
themes of environmental film and media studies, particularly as it relates
to current and imminent ecological crises, is the sheer impossibility of
showing environmental disaster in a manner that is at all adequate to the
subject at hand. But rather than link Kiarostami’s cinematic disaster to a
contemporary moment of environmental turmoil, Mulvey (borrowing the
terms of Gilles Deleuze) traces a longer and narrower trajectory back to
European modernist film: ‘Like the volcano in Viaggio in Italia (Journey to

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Italy (1954)), ‘the earthquake represents the sudden eruption into move-
ment of something that should have remained still’ (2006: 131).
The term ‘disaster film’ is usually used to designate a genre which,
unlike the Koker trilogy, sets about creating and recreating a catastrophe
as a narrativised event – an exegesis. Kiarostami (and Rossellini), mean-
while, indicate a different line of possibility, in which the disaster is felt
through its after effects, asking what it means for a worldly event to have
been so profound that the very idea of stillness has become uncertain (the
stakes here are not dissimilar to those in critical writing about film and
Hiroshima’s atomic trauma). After 1990, the filmed landscape of Where
Is My Friend’s House? ceased to be a stable ground against which human
dynamics could be played out; the earth ‘should have remained still’, but
didn’t. It is difficult to imagine a more succinct summary of what it means
to watch filmed environments at the onset of the Anthropocene.

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FILMOGR APHY

Non-English language films are listed here under their English-language

release titles.

The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959, France)

A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961, UK)
Aftershock (Nicolás López, 2012, USA)
All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955, USA)
And Life Goes On (Abbas Kiarostami, 1992, Iran)
Antichrist (Lars Von Trier, 2008, Denmark)
The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950, USA)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975, UK/USA)
Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000, Japan)
The Big Combo (Joseph H. Lewis, 1955, USA)
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953, USA)
The Big Lebowski (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1998, USA)
Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao Yinan, 2014, China)
Black God White Devil (Glauber Rocha, 1964, Brazil)
Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf, 2000, Iran/Italy/Japan)
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982, USA)
Blind Shaft (Li Yang, 2003, China)
Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966, UK/Italy)
Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005, USA)
Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974, USA)
Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994, Hong Kong)
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941, USA)

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Coup de Torchon (Bertrand Tavernier, 1981, France)

The Crazies (George A. Romero, 1973, USA)
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000, Taiwan/Hong Kong/USA/
China)
Daisies (Věra Chytilová, 1966, Czechoslovakia)
Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998, Australia/USA)
Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1993, USA)
Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945, USA)
The Devil Operation (Stephanie Boyd, 2010, Peru)
Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (Fritz Lang, 1924, Germany)
Earth (Alexandr Dovzhenko, 1930, Soviet Union)
El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1970, Mexico)
Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog, 1982, Germany)
Force Majeure (Ruben Östlund, 2014, France/Norway/Sweden)
The General Line (Grigori Aleksandrov and Sergei Eisenstein, 1929, Soviet
Union)
Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1954, Japan)
Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950, USA)
Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen, 1986, USA)
He Walked by Night (Alfred L. Werker, 1948, USA)
The Headless Woman (Lucrecia Martel, 2008, Argentina)
Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005, France)
High Sierra (Raoul Walsh, 1941, USA)
Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959, France)
Honeydripper (John Sayles, 2007, USA)
The Host (Bong Joon-ho, 2006, South Korea)
I Know Where I’m Going! (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1945, UK)
The Insect Woman (Shohei Imamura, 1963, Japan)
It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934, USA)
Journey to Italy (Roberto Rossellini, 1954, France/Italy)
Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993, USA)
Key Largo (John Huston, 1948, USA)
Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955, USA)
L’Argent (Robert Bresson, 1983, France)
L’Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934, France)
L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1963, Italy)
La Marseillaise (Jean Renoir, 1938, France)

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Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949, Japan)

Local Hero (Bill Forsyth, 1983, UK)
London (Patrick Keiller, 1994, UK)
The Long Goodbye (Robert Altman, 1973, USA)
MacArthur’s Children (Masahiro Shinoda, 1984, Japan)
Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979, USA)
Match Point (Woody Allen, 2005, USA)
Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945, USA)
Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957, India)
The Naked Island (Kaneto Shindo, 1960, Japan)
The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005, USA)
Niagara (Henry Hathaway, 1953, USA)
Night Moves (Kelly Reichardt, 2013, USA)
Obsession (Luchino Visconti, 1943, Italy)
On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1951, USA)
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011, Turkey)
Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946, Italy)
Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966, Sweden)
Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, France)
Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura, 1961, Japan)
Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000, China)
Predator (John McTiernan, 1987, USA)
Profound Desires of the Gods (Shohei Imamura, 1968, Japan)
Purple Noon (René Clément, 1960, France)
Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939, France)
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960, UK)
The Seven Samurai (Akira Kurosawa, 1954, Japan)
Splash (Ron Howard, 1984, USA)
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring (Kim Ki-duk, 2003, South Korea/
Germany)
Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939, USA)
Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979, Soviet Union)
Still Life (Jia Zhangke, 2006, China)
Still the Water (Naomi Kawase, 2014, Japan)
Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995, USA)
Stromboli (Roberto Rossellini, 1950, Italy)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F. W. Murnau, 1927, USA)

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The Tale of Iya (Tetsuichiro Tsuta, 2013, Japan)

Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991, USA)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974, USA)
Thirty Leagues Under the Sea (John Ernest Williamson, 1914, USA)
This Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944, UK)
Through the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994, Iran)
Titanic (James Cameron, 1997, USA)
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953, Japan)
The Travelling Players (Theodoros Angelopoulos, 1975, Greece)
Two-Lane Blacktop (Monte Hellman, 1971, USA)
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul,
2010, Thailand)
Vagabond (Agnès Varda, 1985, France)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958, USA)
Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967, France)
When Clouds Clear (Danielle Bernstein and Anne Slick, 2008, USA/Ecuador)
Where Is My Friend’s House? (Abbas Kiarostami, 1987, Iran)
Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960, USA)
Wild Strawberries (Ingmar Bergman, 1957, Sweden)
The Wind (Victor Sjöström, 1928, USA)
Yellow Earth (Chen Kaige, 1984, China)
Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961, Japan)
You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937, USA)
Young Mr. Lincoln (John Ford, 1939, USA)
Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970, Italy)

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INDE X

Adorno, Theodor 5 Bigelow, Kathryn 26

Affron, Charles 34 Bíró, Yvette 26
Affron, Mirella Jona 34 Bordwell, David 42
Angelopoulos, Theodoros 39 Bousé, Derek 3
air 13, 24, 60 Bozak, Nadia 7, 9–10
allegory 22 Braudy, Leo 11, 57
Allen, Woody 9–10 Brereton, Pat 8
Altman, Robert 68 Bresson, Robert 24
Andrew, Dudley 16 Brown, William 17–18
Antonioni, Michelangelo 51, 66, 68 Buell, Lawrence 74
apocalypse 33 Burch, Noël 77–8
artifice 34, 55
audience 34, 37, 40, 42, 44–5, 48, Cain, James M. 58, 66
50, 60, 64, 66, 92, 99 camera mobility 12
authorship/auteurism 26, 31, 66, 81 Canudo, Ricciotto 15
Carmichael, Deborah A. 56
Bawarshi, Anis 53, 56 Casetti, Francesco 19
Bazin, André 14–17, 21, 24 Casey, Edward S. 97
beach 21, 26, 45, 67, 87, 89, 91, 94, catastrophe 1, 33, 72, 99, 103
101 causality 4, 14, 39
Beehr, Matthew 100 Cavell, Stanley 24–5
Bell, Jonathan F. 60 CGI 12, 18
Berque, Augustin 79–80 characterisation 4, 33, 77, 88
Biesen, Sheri Chinen 57 Clayton, Alex 23–4

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 FILM AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

cognitive film studies 12 Harootunian, Harry D. 84

Coppola, Francis Ford 68 Herzog, Werner 9, 35, 76–7
Cubitt, Sean 9–10 Heumann, Joseph K. 8, 56
Higson, Andrew 21–3
Danto, Arthur C. 96 Hitchcock, Alfred 102
Davis, Terence 26 Hoberman, J. 71
Décor 34 Hollywood 11, 20, 56–7, 59, 68, 70
Deleuze, Gilles 10, 66–7, 82, 102 horror (genre) 56–7
Delluc, Louis 13
diegesis, diegetic 21, 41, 50, 102 ideology 31
digital cinema/video 10, 17–18 Imamura, Shohei 85–6, 89, 93
disaster 1, 20, 65, 99, 102–3 infrastructure 50, 77
disaster movies 18, 52–3, 103 Ingram, David 8
Donaldson, Lucy Fife 101–2 island 46, 61–2, 78, 80–90, 92–3, 95
Durgnat, Raymond 69 Ivakhiv, Adrian 99

earthquake 78, 102–3 Jameson, Frederic 58–9, 61

ecocriticism 11, 38 Japanese 5, 25–6, 73–4, 77–81,
ecology 12 84–5, 87, 89–90
Eisenstein, Sergei 14–15 Jones, Kent 24
elements 15, 28–9, 33–4, 39–40
Emerson, Ralph Waldo 47 Kawase, Naomi 90–3, 95
Epstein, Jean 13 Keathley, Christian 24
Keiller, Patrick 39
film noir 4, 52, 56–62, 64–72 Kiarostami, Abbas 102–3
Ford, John 98 ‘kitchen sink’ (genre) 22–3
Forest 28, 32, 39, 76, 78, 101–2 Klevan, Andrew 23–4
Forns-Broggi, Roberto 8–9 Ko, Mika 88
Forsyth, Bill 44 Koren, Leonard 79
French New Wave 21 Kovacs, András Bálint 66–7
Frow, John 53 Kracauer, Siegfried 15–16

genre 3–4, 11, 26, 33–4, 39, 52–73, landscape painting 3, 18, 37
77, 102 Lang, Fritz 57, 76
Godard, Jean-Luc 26, 66 Lee, Maggie 90–1
Goodman, Nelson 54–5 Lefebvre, Martin 36–7
Gorky, Maxim 13 Leung, Helen Hok-Sze 19
Gustafsson, Henrik 57, 59 location filming 77
long shot 22, 37, 93
Handyside, Fiona 94 long take 10, 12, 84

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MacDonald, Scott 9 Pick, Anat 9

Marshall, Tim 74 point of view 4–5, 41, 47, 57, 68, 87,
Martel, Lucrecia 26, 48, 50 92–4, 97
Mayer, Sophie 49 Pomerance, Murray 68
McKibben, Bill 100 profilmic 14, 21, 62
McKim, Kristi 9–10 Purse, Lisa 18
Mellen, Joan 87
melodrama 26, 52, 64, 67 realist, realism 2, 4, 15–16, 21–3, 27,
Minghelli, Giuliana 67 40, 57, 68, 71, 75, 77, 98, 102
mise-en-scène 4, 9, 23, 41, 64, 72, 98 reception 9, 12, 21, 99
Mitchell, W. J. T. 36 reflexivity 21
Monani, Salma 100 Reichardt, Kelly 72
montage 4, 14, 84 Richardson, Carl 71
Morgan, Daniel 26 Richie, Donald 85, 93
Mules, Warwick 3 road movie 26, 55
Mulvey, Laura 102 Rocha, Glauber 75
Münsterberg, Hugo 14 Rossellini, Roberto 16, 18, 103
Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 26–8
Murray, Robin L. 8, 56 Schama, Simon 76
musical (genre) 57 Schrader, Paul 58–9
seasons/seasonal 25, 27, 78–9
Nagib, Lúcia 21, 75–6 Shakespeare, William 25–6, 32, 39
Narraway, Guinevere 9 Shiel, Mark 20
nature 1–6, 10–11, 13–15, 18–19, 22, Shigehiko, Hasumi 25, 79
24, 26, 31, 33–4, 36, 39–41, 43, Shirane, Haruo 78–9
52, 56, 61, 72, 78, 83, 86, 90, 95, Sirk, Douglas 84
97–101 Sitney, P. Adams 12
Neale, Steve 55 Sobchack, Vivian 71
Soper, Kate 2
objects 6, 11, 57, 66 Spicer, Andrew 69
ocean/sea 1, 21, 26, 46–7, 59, 61, Spirn, Anne Whiston 78
78–80, 83 87, 89–90, 92–4 Stam, Robert 12
Orr, John 51 Starosielski, Nicole 20
Ozu, Yasujiro 25, 78, 80, 85 Steadicam 26
suburban, non-urban, urban 2–3, 19,
Palmer, Tim 80 36, 45, 57, 59–60, 69, 87
pastoral 2–3, 21, 33, 60 Swedish cinema 15
Penn, Arthur 68, 72
Perkins, V. F. 15, 23 Tarkovsky, Andrei 9, 11, 20, 39, 99
photogénie 13 Tati, Jacques 26

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technology 1, 5, 9, 12, 17–21, 31, 88 weather 10, 25, 41–3, 45–6, 48, 59,
temporality, time 12–14, 17, 21, 27, 61, 78
31, 34, 47, 53, 61, 66, 72, 79, 82, western (genre) 52–3, 56
92, 98, 100 Whissel, Kristen 18
Thomas, Deborah 58–9 wilderness 3, 20, 33, 79–80
Thompson, Kristin 42 Williams, Raymond 1
Toles, George 26–8 Wilson, George 40–1
Truffaut, François 66 Woo, John 26
Wood, Michael 69, 98
underwater cinema 20
Yacavone, Daniel 54–5
violence 42, 50, 70 Young, Vernon 82
Visconti, Luchino 66–8
Žižek, Slavoj 99–100
wabi-sabi 79, 87
water 3, 11, 13, 16, 20, 25–6, 29–30,
33, 44, 46, 49–50, 58–9, 62, 65,
70, 72, 74, 81–3, 86–8, 91–4, 98

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