Ecocinema in the Late Twentieth Century

Lambert, Matthew; Lambert, Matthew

From its earliest days, cinema has been essential in helping to circulate ecological ideas and awareness to a broad audience. This panel, “Ecocinema in the Late Twentieth Century,” is a companion panel to Nathaniel McBride’s special session, “Ecocinema in the Early Twentieth Century.” Our panel explores how terraforming and technological overreach evoke climate anxiety across three films from two countries from the second half of the twentieth century: Chinatown (1974), The Ozone Layer Vanishes (1990), and Jurassic Park (1993). In finding family resemblances across genres as diverse as neo-noir, science fiction, and action/thriller, these panelists discover how in the late 20th century, filmmakers from across the globe seemed to be wrestling with questions of environmental overreach, asking: How far is too far? Can humankind restrain itself from remaking the world to its own detriment? Together, these panelists from different stages of their scholarly careers highlight how late twentieth century films register concerns about resource exploitation, environmental degradation, and the limits of human self-control. Each presenter will be strictly limited to fifteen minutes, opening up fifteen or more additional minutes for audience questions and comments.

The panel’s first paper is by Dez Miller, PhD Candidate at Emory University. “Reading the Cruelty of Water Hoarding in Chinatown (1974)” explores how Chinatown positions water hoarding as among the worst kind of human behavior. By linking a routine Capitalist eco-violence–the re-routing of a river to feed a metropolitan city–with the most depraved character of the movie–Noah Cross–Chinatown shocks the viewer out of their previous assumptions about what is normal and necessary under Capitalism. The paper also explores Chinatown’s family resemblances to real events, arguing that in pinning an act that the entire city voted on–the passing of a bond to build the Los Angeles Aqueduct–on Cross, the film casts the entire city in Cross’s immoral light. Thinking about Chinatown’s family resemblances to contemporary water fights, it becomes possible to consider how water hoarding erodes social norms, setting off a chain reaction in which everything and everyone becomes commodified.

In the panel’s second paper, “A Haunted Eco-Future: Crises, Imaginations, and Bodies in The Ozone Layer Vanishes (1990),” Qiyan Chen, PhD student at University of California, San Diego, examines The Ozone Layer Vanishes, China’s first eco-science fiction film directed by Feng Xiaoning, to explore how ecological and scientific-technological imaginations intersect and co-envision an alternative eco-future that haunts its present. While situated in the socio-historical context of post-socialist China, the film bears a family resemblance to global ecocinema in the late twentieth century that addresses the intersection of ecology and technology in shaping planetary futures. Engaging with ozone depletion as a global crisis, the film resonates with millennial anxieties and imaginations about planetary survival while offering a distinct vision of ecological futurity that embodies and, in Steven Shaviro’s words, “haunts the present.” By centering the bodies of animals, children, and women as active agents in eco-future making, Qiyan analyzes these “ecological bodies” as alternatives to dominant techno-futurist forces, while suggesting a “haunted” ecological futurity that is intimately entangled with the lived reality of technological overreach and ecological crises.

The last presenter, Matthew Lambert, is an instructor at the University of Alabama. His paper, “‘Life, uh, Finds a Way’: The Ecocinematic Legacy of Spielberg’s Jurassic Park,“ interprets Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Jurassic Park, as a major example of ecocinema, one that demonstrates a family resemblance to past and later ecological films. At the heart of the film, he argues, is a thematic concern that haunts eco-texts of whatever medium: whether we should pursue paths of technological progress that can result in our destruction. The film’s focus on genetically engineered dinosaurs alludes to the eventual extinction of human beings as well as the influence of one of the earliest examples of ecocinema, Ishirō Honda’s Gojira (1954). While the title prehistoric character of the Japanese film comes to represent the inescapable destruction of the hydrogen bomb, the dinosaurs in Spielberg’s film depict more contemporary environmental issues. Climate change becomes particularly relevant to Jurassic Park, Lambert concludes, when considering that filming was significantly interrupted by Hurricane Iniki, the most powerful hurricane to ever hit Hawaii and a reminder, like the dinosaurs, of nature’s ability to challenge human encroachment and shortsightedness.

640 Ecocinema in the Late Twentieth Century: Calls for Papers