SOC 312—Environment, Society & Film

From the earliest surviving film, which features an idyllic English garden in 1888, to contemporary blockbusters, filmmakers have incorporated the non-human world to explore relationships between people and people, and people and environments. In this class we will use films to examine how the history and current status of our interactions with the natural world are expressed through film, using recent Hollywood hits and foreign classics, documentaries, film noir and more. En route, we will study the creative process inherent in filmmaking. Through these films we will track filmmakers’ changing attitudes towards environmental themes. In addition, we will use these films as tools to track the material history of humanity?s interaction with the environment. Throughout, we will critically examine how both the process of filmmaking as well as how films themselves can help us to develop a richer understanding of our indelible relationship to the natural world.