Of all critical approaches to cultural texts, ecocriticism stands among those that have blossomed latest and fastest. Narrowed to ecocritical studies of cinema, Kiu-wai Chu’s and Jamie Uy’s Oxford Bibliography Ecocinema (2024) counts 111 books and articles published in the field in the last three decades, nearly half published since 2017. However, most of these monographs return to blockbuster American films or animation, focus on contemporary ecological documentaries, or select examples across decades and cultures to propose a general theory of film and ecology. Few offer historically situated readings of culturally specific cinematic moments outside the United States, and none sustain such a reading of filmic texts prior to the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, human culture has expressed its self-conscious engagement with animals, agriculture, resource extraction, and other practices and beings coded as “natural” through art and narrative across the centuries. Long before the “inconvenient truth” of global warming accelerated documentary attention to climatological issues, filmmakers throughout the world were documenting and responding to economic and epistemological shifts in our engagement with nature. In line with the theme of the 2026 MLA Convention, this session will bring together three researchers whose papers address the “family resemblances” of ecologically engaged cinema in the early twentieth century to ongoing crises of human-nature relations. Each presentation will be limited to 15 minutes, with 5 minutes between each presentation for speaker introductions and transitions, leaving the final 15 minutes for questions.

Emma Ridder will open the panel with an ecological reading of the documentary film work of Jean Painlevé. She steps beyond previous scholarship on the role of spectatorial wonder in early cinema to consider the other affective responses this surrealist’s octopus films engender: an aesthetics of disgust. She argues that the unsettling animal encounters in these films threaten the integrity of human body, self, and epistemologies due to the familial resemblances between human and nonhuman life. She will show that these films do not merely reflect the “order of things” but stress how disordered nature can appear when our anthropocentric perspective becomes unmoored by the inhuman gaze of the camera. Through her concept of “bio-affect,” Ridder will interrogate the ways in which disgust may function as an ecocritical strategy that exposes and dismantles the hierarchical boundaries between species.

Turning to fiction film, María Hernández will consider gendered representations of the oil industry in mid-twentieth century Mexican cinema. In line with Cara Daggett’s concept of petro-masculinity, she illustrates how these films depict male characters as those in charge of the oil industry due to their supposed intellect and rationality while reducing female characters to insanity and dependence of male protection. Her analysis demonstrates the role that petro-masculinity played as a narrative strategy to validate oil consumption, providing apparent protection to Mexico’s middle class and justifying this extraction of natural resources through a positive perception of the oil industry as a path to achieving an alleged modernity.

Finally, Nathaniel McBride will compare filmic narratives of a return to the countryside in Spanish film of the early 1950s. Historically, these films occupy an intermediary space in the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), between the official celebration of rural morality (in the 1940s) and the wholesale promotion of urbanizing development (in the 1960s). McBride will show that these popular, conservative films demonstrate a pattern of rurality, limits, and conversion: in an urban setting, protagonists come to terms with the limits of modernizing progress (moral decay or physical weakness), prompting a change of heart and return to the rural past. This paper suggests that this tripartite pattern constitutes a “conservative ecology” useful in an era of over-development. While recognizing the errors into which this conservatism can fall when it permits violent hierarchies, McBride proposes that the values of rurality, limits, and conversion can build bridges between conservative ideology and ecological values.

Together, these three papers will demonstrate the diversity of self-conscious artistic engagements with nature in film at the start of what scholars have termed the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene. These speakers come from varied fields of study to address cultural and sexual diversity. They will draw out filmic representations of changing encounters with nature in relation to concrete historical moments in France, Mexico, and Spain. In this way, they will model a culturally situated ecocritical study of early twentieth-century cinema and the contemporary relevance such cinema can offer through an ecocritical lens.