Sunday, January 3, 2016

Cli-fi on the screen(s): patterns in the representations of climate change in fictional films

 
 
[FULL TEXT Embargoed Until January 31, 2016]

In a July 10, 2015 blog post, a journalist ...recalled the challenges separately issued in 2005 by Bill McKibben and Robert Macfarlane.

Where are the works of art, they asked, the fictional works about climate change?

In the 10 years since these questions were posed, the journalist argued, they have been answered—by cli-fi novels and cli-fi films.

American film critic  Michael Svoboda has written an academic study of cli-fi cinema for WIREs journal and it can be cited as ''WIREs Clim Change 2016, 7:43–64. doi: 10.1002/wcc.381''

Below is brief look at the article, with excerpts until the the story goes public at the WIREs website.

Fictional works about climate change, or cli-fi, have been hailed as a new genre. As a complement to previous WIREs studies of novels and plays, this article focuses on cli-fi films, providing an overview of some 60 films, including major theatrical releases, smaller festival films, and made-for-TV movies. Of the many possible impacts of climate change predicted by scientists, this study finds that filmmakers have focused on extreme weather events and the possibility of Earth slipping into a new ice age. These choices reflect filmmakers’ predispositions more than any scientific consensus and thus demonstrate the challenge that cli-fi films pose to climate change communicators. Finally, noting the recent emergence of films that parody concerns about climate change or that depict attempts to mitigate its causes or ameliorate its effects as possibly more disastrous than climate change itself, this study recommends that researchers in the humanities and social sciences look beyond ''The Day After Tomorrow,'' which has received far more attention than any other film.

© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

MORE:

This overview is presented in  4  parts. First,
after very brief notices for six notable precursors,
55 films produced since 1984 are grouped by the climate
impacts they depict; then these groups are
reviewed for their unifying characteristics and distinguishing
differences. Only then, second, is the limited
academic literature related to cli-fi films reviewed.
(Because the cli-fi designation is relatively new,
because half of the films in this list are less than 3
years old, and because many made-for-TV and
straight-to-DVD films receive few critical notices, this
paucity of sources is not surprising.) To aid in applying
this literature to the much broader set of films
reviewed here, a critical framework is imported from
work on communicating climate change. Third, the
efficacy of these films is evaluated using this framework,
supplemented by critical observations provided
by the academic literature. The salient results of this
overview, and their implications, are then summed
up in a final conclusion.


THE FILMS

‘Cli-fi,’ for the purposes of this overview, excludes
documentaries and advocacy films even if, as in the
case of ''The Age of Stupid,'' they include fictive elements.

And while ‘film’ or ‘movie’ most readily suggest
feature films played in cinemas or theaters, this
overview includes fictional works produced for much
smaller screens, such as those found in art houses,
film festivals, or in homes and apartments (i.e., television
or computer screens). This means made-for-TV
movies and movies released only on DVD or blu-ray
are included, but only if they are full length (85 min
or more) and self-contained (a one- or two-part production).
On this basis film shorts and regular, multiepisode
TV programs were excluded.

Several
strategies were used to find the films reviewed here.
Keyword searches (‘climate change’ and ‘global
warming’) were conducted at the International Movie
Database (IMDB) website.Websites and blogs that
focus on cli-fi or on climate change and popular culture
were scanned for the titles they listed. Other
titles were found through the scholarly literature.
And several scholars who have published relevant
work were consulted by e-mail.

All but two of the films identified in this way
were English-language productions. This reflects both
the actual dominance of English language films in
this ‘genre’ and the difficulty of obtaining the few
non-English cli-fi films that exist. The two such films
that could be obtained (through a major online
American retailer) are both German films, Das Noah
Arch Prinzip (or The Noah’s Ark Principle, 1984)
and F4 (Vortex, 2006).

The former was included
because it is the first full-length work by Roland
Emmerich, the director of TDAT, and it likely
inspired The Storm, a movie made for TV in 2009.
F4 was included because it is discussed in one of the
early academic surveys of cli-fi films.

BLOG NOTE: [Svoboda then sorts these 61 films into seven groups: flooding/sea-level-rise, extreme weather events, into/in an ice age, melting poles, famine/drought, preclima(c)tic stress disorder, and antagonists.]


PREFACE

In a July 10, 2015 blog post, a journalist ...recalled the challenges separately issued in 2005 by Bill McKibben and Robert Macfarlane.

Where are the works of art, they asked, the fictional works about climate change?

In the 10 years since these questions were posed, the journalist argued, they have been answered—by cli-fi novels and cli-fi films.

In fact, by 2005 at least 14 novels about climate change had already been published in the UK and the United States, and what is still the most commercially successful feature film about climate change, The Day After Tomorrow4 (hereafter TDAT), had been released the year before (a point McKibben grudgingly acknowledged).

But the journalist is right: in the 10 years since McKibben and Macfarlane issued their challenges, there has been an outpouring of work.

So much so that the state of ‘cli-fi’ is now regularly updated in the pages of major news venues such as The Guardian and The New York Times ; in magazines devoted to political/cultural commentary such as Dissent and Salon ; in environmental newswires and websites such as ClimateWire, The Daily Climate, and Grist; and in film-trade publications such as Entertainment Weekly. Fictional works about climate change have also been addressed in the pages of WIREs Climate Change. In 2011, Adam Trexler and Adeline Johns-Putra provided an overview of ‘Climate Change in Literature and Literary Criticism.’ Then, in 2012, Stephen Bottoms covered ‘Climate Science on the London Stage.’

No comments: