Jennifer Fay reviews Film and the Natural Environment

Adam O’Brien. Film and the Natural Environment: Elements and Atmospheres. New York: Wallflower Press, 2018. 144 pp.

Review by Jennifer Fay

11 March 2019

Amitav Ghosh has made a compelling case that “serious” literature has proved inadequate to narrating the dramatic weather events we now associate with climate change. Specifically, the novel form that consolidates during the nineteenth century and the conventions of realism that constellate around the “regularity of bourgeois life” presume a nature that may serve as a uniform background against which the novelistic details of the everyday and the quirks of individual subjectivity come into relief.[1] Our realist sensibility for narrative, he argues, was formed in a period when geology was governed by gradualist accounts of the climate, significantly also during the industrial revolution. He speculates that this is one reason that novels dealing with environmental catastrophe are usually categorized as belonging to the less serious genres of science fiction, melodrama, or even pre-modern (pre-Enlightenment) modes of storytelling that revolve around improbable events, irruptions, and coincidences. Abruptly changing weather in realist fiction strikes many readers as bad plotting. Given that climate change is now our most pressing global emergency and that novelists, so Ghosh argues, are still writing with in a nineteenth-century paradigm of nature, what counts as realist fiction in the age of the Anthropocene is in fact a “concealment of the real.”[2] This is what Ghosh in the title of this book calls “the great derangement.” His is not a diagnosis of climate change denial so much as a trend he identifies in which novelists either have refused to tell stories about how our environment is changing, or they have failed to find the aesthetic strategies that could narrate current environmental reality through serious, realist conventions. The crisis of the climate change is thus, for Ghosh, a crisis of the literary imagination. This would not be such a big deal if literature were not so central to how we imagine a life lived well and if novels were not historically so instrumental in forming us as modern subjects.

Ghosh’s provocation is especially striking when carried over to film. What difference does the medium make in creating an archive of climate change, or discovering aesthetic resources that alert us to the environment in narratives we can take seriously? In his recent book Film and the Natural Environment: Elements and Atmospheres, Adam O’Brien explores the ecocritical study of cinema as a pressing area of inquiry as well as a critical and aesthetic practice that has informed film theory, history, and criticism since Maxim Gorky got his first glimpse of cinema in 1896 and marveled at the transcription of the natural world into uncanny scales of grey. It is not the case that filmmakers have taken up explicitly questions of climate change and catastrophic weather throughout film history. As a photographic and predominately photorealist medium, narrative cinema is a paradigmatic artform for ecological critique because it so often places its characters in locations that both set the stage for the story and exceed narrative signification. This degree of excess is perhaps where cinematic and novelistic realism may part ways. While there are a host of documentaries about environmental ruination and so called cli-fi cinema about natural disasters past, present, and future, O’Brien turns his attention to fictional films that are not explicitly or overtly environmental in theme. We may say, after Ghosh, that O’Brien considers “serious” fiction movies. Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan (1946), F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (2008), or John Sayles’s Local Hero (1983), which have little else in common, are open to and made more interesting when the natural world is at the center of analysis. When we watch The Headless Woman with an eye to water and its interconnected sources in this film, we learn something about this area’s infrastructure that delivers water and something about the human actors whose activities contaminate it. In the chapter devoted to Japanese national cinema and the discrete uses of island environments, O’Brien masterfully sketches both the highly local resonances of geomorphology in Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island (1960), Shohei Imamura’s Profound Desires of the Gods (1968), and Naomi Kawase’s Still the Water (2014), while also considering how these island locations lend themselves to narratives about sustainability, isolation, transience, and human precarity. This book does not focus “attention on an overlooked body of work, but rather on an overlooked approach or strand of thinking” (p. 4). Indeed, O’Brien argues that environmental cinema is neither a category of film nor a subject that filmmakers have failed to address; environmental cinema is produced through a pivot in critical attention. Nature, particular environments, and nonhuman elements in most any film may surface through careful observation and become meaningful through critique. Putting O’Brien and Ghosh into conversation, we may surmise that realist film provides data for environmental thinking that the realist novel rarely yields. In this short introductory level book, O’Brien provides an overview of environmental film criticism and demonstrates though his own readings how a shift of attention to what is often considered the background of a film (weather conditions, seasonal signifiers, mountains, oceans, and rivers, in a sense, the often latent features of location shooting) changes our sense of characters in their world rather dramatically. Film may even realize its ontological distinctiveness when narrative is arrested and nature continues to move.

Unlike Ghosh’s meditation on the “unthinkable” nature of climate change, Film and the Natural Environment is not a polemical or political study of film, and it is not a call to mobilize cinema to address the effects of climate change. Nor does O’Brien privilege certain ecocritical models over others or deeply problematize the category of nature or what counts as a natural world. Instead, O’Brien eloquently considers a wide range of films and critical practices that engage with “nonhuman, environmental, ‘natural’ subject matter” that attest to the “irreducibility of the world to which [film] refers” (p. 96). This is a world that far exceeds the bounded bourgeois subjects of nineteenth-century literature even when such characters are featured in a film. Perhaps realist novelists may find new aesthetic inspiration, new ways of being realist, by taking stock of environmentally-attuned movies, many of which have taken their cues from serious fiction. And maybe, following O’Brien’s example, a different orientation in literary criticism could discover a new canon of serious, climate-minded literature.

[1] Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, 2016), p. 25.

[2] Ibid.