HNAR-383: History of Ecological Films

This is a film genre course focused on films concerned with the planet earth and the ecology. It will track and survey films starting from early 20th ca film history reflecting on modernity and the environment and proceed up to current films that directly attend to the ecological condition. The study will categorize documentaries, fiction, newsreel, advertising, public service ads, and digital media and some painting and photography that attend to the ecological concerns science warns and hopes to resolve. Course purposes include understanding and considering this topic is not new and questions how it has been dealt with before the crisis we find ourselves in now; reflects upon the problems and strategies of communicating environmental data and ecological issues that are single and multifold; and questions audience/viewer habits and literacies deliberating how this is imperative to address for better results. Along with lectures, the class views and discusses a precise curation of films, television, digital, painting and writing spanning ecological categories, subjects and positions.