Ecocinema and the City Part I

Ecocinema and the City seeks to add to urban ecocinema scholarship by exploring four sections arranged to

 highlight the increasing importance nature performs in the city: Evolutionary Myths Under the City, Urban 

Eco-Trauma, Urban Nature and Interdependence, and The Sustainable City.  The first two sections, 

“Evolutionary Myths Under the City” and “Urban Eco-Trauma,” take more traditional ecocinema 

approaches and emphasize the city as a dangerous constructed space. 

Part I, “Evolutionary Myths Under the City” examines evolutionary narratives of environmental adaptation in 

both film noir and documentaries focused on urban sewers and subways. The films explored in our first section, 

“Evolutionary Myths Under the City,” call into question the idea of the city as natural and unaffected by human 

intervention and illustrate how social and environmental injustices sometimes intertwine. The notion of

 displacement from the New Objectivity art movement of the 1920s helps elucidate this de-naturalizing of the city. 

As Daniela Fabricius explains, “Displacement can be a way of understanding not only the abyss between a 

landscape and how it is represented but also the erosion of the seemingly fixed binaries that separate natural 

and manmade environments” (175). “Evolutionary Myths Under the City” explores these fluid binaries as it 

focuses on tragic and comic evolutionary narratives. The films explored in this section ask evolutionary 

questions about who we are, where we’re going, and which story of ourselves we choose to construct: 

a tragic or comic evolutionary narrative.

Chapter 1, “The City, The Sewers, The Underground: Reconstructing Urban Space in Film Noir” examines 

the idea of the city as a social and cultural construct through a reading of He Walked by Night (1948). The 

film highlights how and why not genetics but social, cultural and historical forces construct “gangsters.” But 

what sets the film apart from other noir films is the attention it gives to the urban infrastructure hidden 

below its progressive construction. By foregrounding sewers as constructions, escape routes, and seemingly 

safe havens for noir characters, the film demystifies what seem like “givens” and calls into question the 

idea of the city as natural.

Chapter 2, “Documenting Environmental Adaptation Under the City: Children Underground (2001)” explores 

underground constructions from the perspective of homeless children in Children Underground (2001). On the 

surface the children in Children Underground have entered an underground that serves as the site of technological 

progress where excavation produces not only the means of production—coal and oil, for example—but also 

the foundation for the urban infrastructure—sewage and water systems, railways, gas, and lines for 

electricity, computers, and phones. They have entered a technology-driven underworld and reconstructed, 

domesticated, and humanized it as a home, an ecology in which they can move beyond survival toward 

interdependence. Yet because their plight and the home they inhabit are built on both nature and former 

dictator Ceausescu’s cultural attitudes, these homeless children also illustrate how social and environmental 

injustices sometimes intertwine.   

Urban Cinema Studies and the Search for Everyday Environments

Explorations of urban cinema sometimes emphasize the interconnection between cinema and a (sometimes) lifeless 
modern and post-modern city, opening up possibilities for ecocritical readings. In the introductory essay to 
Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, for example, Mark Shiel highlights the 
“curious and telling correlation between the mobility and visual and aural sensations of the city and the mobility 
and visual and aural sensations of the cinema” (1). The film industry contributes to urban economies around the 
world “in the production, distribution, and exhibition of motion pictures, and in the cultural geographies of 
certain cities particularly marked by cinema (from Los Angeles to Paris to Bombay) whose built environment 
and civic identity are both significantly constituted by film industry and film” (1-2). 

Shiel suggests urban cinema’s grounding in the society of the city and the culture of cinema opens it up for 
interdisciplinary readings connecting film studies with sociology, cultural studies, geography, and urban studies. 
The book’s goal is to “produce a sociology of the cinema in the sense of a sociology of motion picture production, 
distribution, exhibition, and consumption, with a specific focus on the role of cinema in the physical, social, cultural, 
and economic development of cities” (3). Both sociology and film studies gain much from this connection, 
according to Shiel. Following an Althusserian structural view, Shiel argues Cinema and the City “recognizes 
the interpenetration of culture [film], society [city], and economics as part of ‘a whole and connected social 
material process,’ to use Raymond Williams’s terminology” (4). For Shiel, cinema is also “a peculiarly spatial 
form of culture” (5) in a global (inequitable) context that is historically situated. Instead of approaching cinema 
and the city from an architectural perspective, this volume explores the connections between the culture of 
cinema and the society and economics of the city.

Focused exclusively on Indian cinema, Preben Kaarsholm’s edited volume

City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience also illustrates the connections between cinema
and the modern city. According to Kaarsholm, “Movies and cinemas have in themselves been
central rallying points, symbols, and institutions of modernization, and battlefields for the
understanding of, for formulations and appropriations of, the conditions of the new life as
against ‘what used to be’” (1). They provide a space in which “modern urban culture and politics”
are controlled and decorate the urban landscape with “sight and sound from movie posters,
film advertisements, tannoys, radio and tapes of soundtrack music” (1).

Like Shiel, Kaarsholm agrees that modernity and the metropolis are intertwined and interrelated, and that 
association produces both positive and negative results. As Kaarsholm suggests, “modernities and experiences 
of the breakdown of the old come to the fore in the plural—as historical conjunctures and life situations which 
are the outcomes of a single evolutionary logic, but rather as battlefields of contestations between different 
forces of development and different cultural and political agendas” (5), especially those between European 
colonial powers with linear and dualist views of progress and an indigenous agenda that strives for a more 
communal and equitable vision of modernity. Indian cinema reflects this same mixture of Westernized 
and indigenous cultures, both in films produced for Indian audiences and those directed at an international 
audience and screening circuit (9).  

With their emphasis on class, race, and cultural politics, Shiel and Kaarsholm highlight issues with 
potential environmental concerns, including environmental justice and environmental racism. They also begin 
to connect the economic concerns illustrated by urban cinema with toxic environments and human ecology. 
The hope is that works like these can also reveal not only the toxic connections between 
“cultural and political agendas” and the environment, but also demonstrate “the fundamental connections 
to the environment in our everyday lives” (Price 538). 

Women's History and Awareness Month 2018

Central Illinois Feminist Film Festival Call for Papers

Central Illinois Feminist Film Festival

      

Eastern Illinois University

Call for Submissions

Deadline: March 1, 2018

Festival: March 20, 2018

We are looking for short student films of high artistic quality that satisfy at least two of the following criteria:

1.    Films created with an emphasis on gender and/or social justice issues

2.    Films that link local and global issues

3.    Films created by people underrepresented in the media field (women, people of color,   

               queer/transgendered people, people with disabilities)

4.    Films made by people from the Central Illinois area

How to submit:

·      Submit through Film Freeeway: https://filmfreeway.com/festival/CIFFF

·      Send a link to your Vimeo, YouTube, or other source to rlmurray@eiu.edu

Guidelines:

1.    Films should be short: under 30 minutes in length.

2.    Films should be labeled with your name, address, and email address, and

               the title of your film.

3.    In your cover letter, explain how you and your film fit our criteria and include a two-three

               sentence synopsis.

Note: There is no submission fee for this film festival.

This film festival promotes the mission of our Women’s Studies Program: to promote an understanding of how issues related to gender, age, race, economic status, sexual identity, and nationality affect women's lives and the communities in which they live. In order to promote an equitable and sensitive environment for all persons, Women’s Studies also responds to issues affecting women on campus and in the community.

Send Queries to: Central Illinois Feminist Film Festival

Women’s Studies Program, Eastern Illinois University, Charleston, IL 61920

Attn: Robin L. Murray

Thanks to UC Davis Film Fest for information regarding the Call