Ecocinema in the City Introduction

In Ecocinema in the City, we argue that urban ecocinema both reveals and critiques Price’s vision of urban environmentalism. Ecocinema in the Cityhighlights films that move beyond nature as “an antidote to cities and modern life” (Price 542) to reveal the complex and sometimes contradictory views of nature in the cities where we live. Urban ecocinema helps reveal how both human and nonhuman nature can interact sustainably and thrive. 

https://www.routledge.com/Ecocinema-in-the-City/Murray-Heumann/p/book/9781138303843

Ecocinema in the City embraces the urban ecologies sometimes missing in the environmental movement, moving beyond a focus on “wildness” (Price 553). In both 20th and 21st century movies, however, nature and culture are typically bifurcated, with the urban representative of the culture binary usually constructed as dangerous, suffocating, and many times deadly. Nature, on the hand, is primarily represented as a haven, a pastoral escape from a deteriorating city environment where all life seems to be threatened.

This book project highlights the increasingly transformative power of nature in urban settings explored in film. Most urban nature films emphasize a toxic city like that of film noir. But others provide more positive perspectives on the natural world. Our organizational structure seeks to reveal the increasing importance nonhuman nature plays in urban settings. Nature’s restorative properties depend on humanities’ willingness to embrace both human and nonhuman nature. 

Although still drawing on toxic visions of the city, some films demonstrate the possibilities of narratives of environmental adaptation. Others go further and highlight interdependent relationships between humans and the natural world. 

A few urban nature films demonstrate a truly sustainable worldview, however, providing attainable solutions to environmental injustice and racism that combine conservation with preservation to, as Jenny Price declares, “take [] joy in wild nature…. [and] take[] joy in our everyday connections to nature” (553). Such a definition of environmentalism includes the city, for “It is an environmentalism, all told, in which our joy in wild nature is widely and deeply informed by the great joy of using nature well” (Price 553). 

This book project 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.