Ecomedia in ‘Screen’ and ‘Screening the Past’

Recent issues of Screen and Screening the Past include compelling essays on cinema and environment.

In “The Sound of Sunlight” in the Summer 2010 issue of Screen Sean Cubitt argues, “In films as disparate as The Garden of Allah (1935), Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005), sunlight is given an aural presence of considerable distinction. Perhaps only the tradition of the nocturne has acquired such a recognizable audio palette. This paper investigates the types of sounds used to characterize heat and light, with special reference to desert scenes.”

In “The End of Life on Earth?: Discourses of Risk in Natural History Documentaries” in the September 2010 issue of Screening the Past, Peter Hughes “examines the shifting discourses around human impacts upon the natural world from the work of David Attenborough in Life on Earth to the more recent An Inconvenient Truth arguing that the former contributed to establishing the grounds against which the Gore film was received, pointing to the development of a more explicitly environmental discourse in popular documentary.”

In the same issue, Gregory Stephens argues in “Koyaanisqatsi and the Visual Narrative of Environmental Film” that “Godfrey Reggio’s non-verbal film Koyaanisqatsi can be seen, in retrospect, as a pioneer both of the emergent environmental film genre, and of certain tropes of visual narrative that have come to dominate popular culture. This essay argues that the film articulates a critique of the inability of “anti-natural man” to distinguish between the “natural” and the “artificial.””

Please comment if you know of other recent articles we can add to our ecomedia bibliography.