Representations of Nature in Film Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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When the very first motion pictures were shown to audiences in France during 1896, many people noticed with delight that “leaves on the trees seemed like they were moving” in Lumiere’s short film Le dejeuner de Bebe (“Baby’s Breakfast”). Although there are many genres and various formats of films, there are also two opposite categories: those that idealize nature or take the defense of the environment, and those that show nature, animals, or space as dangerous for humans.

The Silent Years (1895-1928)

In the early 20th century, many films were short documentaries made by traveling cameramen, showing moving images of Paris, London, Rome, or New York to remote audiences in less developed countries, and then bringing back living images of Egypt, African countries and tribes, colonies, or exotic landscapes to more developed countries. An early science fiction story, Georges Melies’ Le Voyage dans la Lune (Trip to the Moon, 1902), confirmed the fairy imagery of space in the early century, as it was shown again in Fritz Lang’s pioneering Woman in the Moon (1928).

Some directors became famous in showing an idealistic representation of men living in perfect harmony with nature, especially in some ethnographic documentaries. For instance, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) showed the daily life of an “Eskimo” living in Northern Quebec, near the Hudson Bay (Canada). Memorable scenes showed the joyful character Nanook chasing, fishing, and sleeping in an igloo he had built. Flaherty’s movies carried on with this romantic documentary genre: Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age (1926), about the daily life of Samoan islanders; and again in Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931).

In his masterpiece Gold Rush (1925), Charlie Chaplin showed a hard winter in Alaska, with famous scenes of men fighting against the powerful natural elements: a tramp followed by a gentle white bear, a little house blown away by the stormy wind. In F. W. Murnau’s masterpiece entitled Sunrise (1927), the whole plot is centered on nature, as the film shows the passage from the rural zone toward the city, or vice versa. In the first part of the film, the calm beauty of wild nature surrounds all characters; while in the second half, the elements are against them: during a violent storm, the beloved mother disappears in the lake.

Surviving Nature: the Talkies

Between 1927 and 1930, silent movies disappeared. More and more films had to be shot in the studio. But still, allusions to nature and the environment were made in some movies, sometimes as a metaphor for human feelings. However, every filmmaker had his own vision of nature. Shot in Northern Ireland, Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (1934) also included scenes of a violent nature against men, in this case the tide hitting the fishermen and the presence of a shark that is attacked by the local men who live on the coast. In another case of the dangerous sides of nature, French novelist Sacha Guitry’s film Roman d’un Tricheur (Confessions of a Cheat, 1936) shows the story of a child who had lost his parents, brothers, and sisters, because they all ate poisoned mushrooms from the woods.

Some directors have drawn a parallel between the uncontrolled forces of nature and the evil side of humanity. For instance, in Jean Renoir’s masterpiece La regle du jeu (The Rule of the Game, 1939), a group of bourgeois who go hunting for rabbits as a prelude to the elimination of an outsider in their own circle. In Lifeboat (1943), Alfred Hitchcock imagines a group of shipwreck survivors adrift in a lonely lifeboat, lost on the sea during World War II. A few years after the end of the war, Roberto Rosselini shoots in Sicily a moving melodrama, Stromboli, terra di Dio (1949). An unhappy woman (Ingrid Bergman) wishes she could leave the hostile island where she lives, but feels the local population would stop her. On the day she decides to escape her brutal husband, a volcano starts to erupt and she is caught, alone on the top.

More than any other art form, cinema has given people the impression of knowing famous places like New York City or the Wild West without ever visiting them. Hence, Western genre movies have constructed a coherent environment for countless epic stories. John Ford created the most durable, mythical image of the American West, shooting most of his films in the Monument Valley studios, the largest open-air filming location that gave the Western its aesthetic definition for generations. John Ford’s color films, from Drums along the Mohawks (1939) to The Searchers (1955), gave a magnificent vision of the West.

From the early 1960s, a few European movies began to question the dehumanizing effects of urban life and industrial societies. In Italy, Michelangelo Antonioni illustrated the difficulty of communicating in two masterpieces: L’Avventura (1960) and later in Red Desert (1964). Both films showed a beloved woman (Monica Vitti) who could not deal with her human and physical environments, both seen as superficial and artificial.

Some important directors such as Luis Bunuel have given a vision of nature as dangerous. In La mort en ce jardin (Death in the Garden, 1955), a group of bourgeois are lost in the jungle, seeing their belongings attacked by insects. That weird perspective reappears in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972), when a group of Spanish colonialists constantly face danger from the Peruvian highlands near the Amazonian jungle. The jungle has often been used as a symbolic location for a mysterious danger, such as in F. F. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979).

Apart from a few exceptions like Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942), many fiction films showed wild animals as dangerous. In Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), the shark was not seen as an endangered species, but rather as a giant, evil, dangerous monster, as the many film versions of Moby Dick, from the 1926 version by Millard Webb, up to the John Huston version produced in 1956 from Herman Melville’s novel.

The documentary tradition at the National Film Board (NFB) of Canada has enabled the creation of countless short films about men and nature. Among those, Arthur Lamothe’s Bûcherons de la Manouane (“Manouane River Lumberjacks,” 1962), showed some workers in Quebec’s lumber camps. However, a new, respectful attitude toward nature appeared in the early 1960s, for instance in Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault’s Pour la suite du monde (also known as Moontrap, 1963), when a group of islanders living on Isleaux-Coudres (on the St. Lawrence River) capture a small white whale, not to kill, but in order to renew a tradition of fishing that was lost in early 20th century. At the end of the film, the captured animal is sent alive to an aquarium in New York City.

In France, Francois Truffaut has created a film universe where nature is often present. At the end of Les 400 coups (The 400 Blows, 1959), the young Antoine Doinel escapes college goes to the beach in Normandy, for the first time in his life. In Truffaut’s masterpiece L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child, 1970), a wild boy about 10 years old, who probably spent all his life in a forest, is taught how to live in society in the 18th century.

An Era of Controversies: 1975-2000

In the recent decades, an important number of documentaries about environmental issues has showed a growing conflict between environmentalists and industry, or opposing the state. Significantly, many debates about movies dealing with ecological issues have appeared outside the limited circles of film critics; even some governments felt they had to react to some challenging documentaries that criticized the government’s attitude.

Some cases of environmental debates took international proportions. For example, on April 29, 1987, the New York Times reported that the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the U.S. govenment’s right to label three Canadian documentaries as “political propaganda:” If You Love This Planet (1982) by Terri Nash, Acid From Heaven (1982) by George Mully, and Acid Rain: Requiem or Recovery? (1982) by Seaton Findlay.

Perhaps Australian director Dennis O’Rourke produced the most stunning documentary about the dangers of nuclear research, Half Life: A Parable for the Nuclear Age (1985). In this obscure film made with archival footage, the consequences of many radiation experiments on a human population from the tiny atolls of Marshall Islands is seen, after nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean during the 1950s. But possibly the most comprehensive film essay about risks to society in terms of nuclear hazards is Peter Watkins’ The Journey (1987), 15 hours of documentary shot in many countries over three years. Watkins’s message is that we do not know much about the risks surrounding us, and neither politicians nor the media tell us about the real issues. Moreover, demonstrations shown in the media represent those who challenge or oppose these decisions as strange, violent characters, often cut from reality.

In Canada, director Robert Monderie and songwriter Richard Desjardins produced L’Erreur boreale (Forest Alert, 1999), about how the wide forests in Quebec are exploited by giant companies. That provoking documentary created a huge debate about the dangers of clear-cut logging in northern Quebec, and many politicians had to justify these practices after the film was screened.

In France, Claude Lanzmann directed and produced a moving documentary about the memory of the Holocaust, in a nine-hour film titled Shoah (1985). In this film, the author Claude Lanzmann visits former Polish and German Nazi death camps with some survivors. In some cases, these camps were not transformed into memorials; they were abandoned or destroyed, so nothing remains in the woods where thousands of corpses were buried and old railways still remain hidden under the grass. In only four decades, trees have grown where there used to be prisons for innocent civilians.

The 21st Century: Nature as Hero

From the mid-1990s until today, a new awareness toward environmental issues is growing, and movies starring nature itself are appearing; staging a celebration of life, sometimes even without a human presence (or referring to humans as obstacles for animals and plants), in some cases using new technologies.

Many of those movies became a huge success, especially in France, where many teachers brought their classes to watch films like Microcosmos (1996) by Jacques Perrin; Le Peuple Migrateur (The Traveling Birds, or Winged Migration, 2000), by Jacques Cluzaud and Michel Debats; and March of the Penguins (2005), directed by Luc Jacquet. In a few cases, these documentaries were quite successful in movie theaters, which is unusual in that genre. With DVDs and the internet, new modes of distribution can help these films find a wider audience.

Bibliography:

Aitken, ed., Encyclopedia of Documentary Film (Routledge, 2006);
T.W. and Cathy Cavanaugh, Teach Science with Science Fiction Films: A Guide for Teachers and Library Media Specialists (Linworth Publishing, 2004);
“Court Backs ‘Propaganda’ Label for 3 Canadian Films, 3 Films Cited by Justices,” New York Times (April 29, 1987);
Y. Laberge, “Une reappropriation symbolique d’un Fleuve,” Revue d’histoire du Quebec (v.74, 2003);
Mathe, ed., Antiamericanism at Home and Abroad (Publications de l’Universite de Provence, 2000);
P. Patro, ed., Fugitive Images: From Photography to Video (Indiana University Press, 1995);
Schneider, ed., 1001 Films (HMH, 2004).