Before it became aware of the pollution it generates or began measuring its carbon footprint, the industry of filmmaking, which is also one of the arts, showed an interest in the environment as a topic. As far back as the 1930s, the earliest movies exploring environmental issues appeared in the United States. While in Germany, with his 1927 film Metropolis, Fritz Lang proposed a social dystopia that challenged the industrial system, mechanization, and the production-driven organization of the world. In France, Jacques Tati offered a first, light-hearted critique of modernity with Mon Oncle, in 1958, before lashing out more harshly with Playtime, in 1967.
So right from the start, the dominant features of “environmental films” emerge, no matter what their genre: fiction or documentary, political films or educational ones. They all criticize – albeit more or less virulently – the destruction of natural environments and point an accusatory finger at the model of ever-increasing-productivity and the threats it is bringing to bear on the future of humanity.
Political Cinema
While Hollywood movies deliberately cultivated a sensationalist, catastrophist vein, European eco-cinema is defined by the protest-driven, documentary path it took quite early on.
Political cinema blossomed widely in the counter-cultural context of the 1970s. L’An 01 was released in February, 1973 – the same year as Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green, which is often described as the first truly ecological movie. Based on a screenplay by the cartoonist Gébé, and involving a large part of the team that published the satirical magazine Hara Kiri, L’An 01 was directed by Jacques Doillon, seconded by Alain Resnais and Jean Rouch. A pseudo-documentary, the film describes the utopia of a world that cheerfully drops out of the increasing-production race and the market economy in order to “replace consumer society with the freedom of dreams.” And so a new era begins: it is the Year 01. This amusing and imaginative cinematographic innovation was in fact soon followed by Michel Karlof’s documentary shot on August 8, 1971 in Gigondas (Vaucluse, Provence) at the “Gigondas An 1” festival, which promoted a counter-culture based on going back to nature, being wary of “100% technology,” and developing culture, creativity and sharing.
The anti-nuclear movement had a major impact on the orientation of this kind of filmmaking. In Europe, it attracted both amateurs and so-called “independent” film-making professionals, and soon specialized in portraying struggles for ecological causes. Nicole and Félix Le Garrec’s 1980 film, Plogoff, des pierres contre les fusils (Plogoff: Stones Against Rifles), for example, documented a local rebellion against the proposed construction of a nuclear power plant. The film did not seek to conceal the filmmakers’ ties to the rebellion, the deployment of police forces or the violence of their clash. Plogoff has become both a symbol and a model of how to organize resistance. The moment is remembered thanks not only to the fact that the struggle was successful, but also because the film was. A restored and remastered version was released in February, 2020.
Showing and Informing
Documentaries have been more systematically mining the environmental or ecological vein since the European success of two major Hollywood productions: the 2004 feature film The Day After Tomorrow and the 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (box office: 750,000 movie-goers in France).
“Green” documentaries come in all of the category’s genres: nature and/or animal films, like those of Luc Jaquet (ecologist and winner of the 2006 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for The March of the Penguins) and Claude Nuridsany, even if they are more likely to be seen on television than at the movie theatre. Investigations, with documentaries by the journalists Marie-Claude Deffarge and Gordian Troëller, who, in the 1970s and 1980s, created in-depth, well-documented cases against specific industrial-pollution sites, deforestation programs and proposed constructions. And Agnès Varda’s films (like Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners & I, 2000)) and the various portrayals of traditional lifestyles that were more or less inspired by Germany’s Heimatfilme (films about specific parts of the countryside), which were first made in the 1920s.
They are all appeals to our conscience that aim to trigger or accelerate greater awareness of environmental issues. What they all have in common is the goal of showing something in order to inform spectators and to raise their awareness. So despite the resolutely controversial tone of his films, Austrian filmmaker Werner Boote, who made Plastic Planet in 2009, insists, “I don’t make propaganda movies […] I’m just trying to find out what’s going on here and now.” Many of the filmmakers who acknowledge their ecological stance the most explicitly come from journalism: Hervé Kempf, who contributed to Marc de La Ménardiere and Nathanael Coste’s 2015 feature A Quest for Meaning, and the Swede Fredrik Gertten, the director of the 2009 film Bananas! As for Denis Delestrac, he is still a journalist who uses his work to serve grassroots political action. “If you’re not aware of the existence of a major global issue,” he points out, “it’s hard to take action about it, so I believe that information is the cornerstone of action.”
Not to be outdone, fictions are also deeply involved in presenting this narrative, swinging from poetical films and bucolic fables to catastrophism. Science-fiction has a clear lead, even if the Collapsology-inspired environmental issue that sets the tale in motion (the end of the world is often shown in the guise of glaciation or an epidemic blamed on humanity’s errant ways) is often somewhat forgotten over the course of the film. That was the case with Spanish filmmaker Miguel Ángel Vivas’s 2015 film Extinction, for example. The more intimate, animal films by Jean-Jacques Annaud and Luc Jacquet offer an antidote to that kind of sensationalism. With The Bear in 1988, Wolf Totem in 2015 and The Fox and the Child, in 2007, they seem to be making films for children.
Increasing Success
The number of environmental films began to grow substantially in the 2000s – and even more so in the 2010s, stimulated by the tremendous success of Coline Serreau’s 2010 documentary Think Global, Act Rural, and Cyril Dion’s 2015 “documentary thriller” Tomorrow, both of which were fully focused on the issue of climate change. By now, the genre can take advantage of the international growth of distribution and promotion networks. So Luc Jacquet’s Ice and the Sky, about the glaciologist Claude Lorius, was screened at the closing of the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, almost 20 years after Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s Microcosmos won the Technical Grand Prize.
Environmental organizations’ support for this type of film (whether through direct funding or, like Greenpeace, by organizing festivals of environmental documentary films) makes it clear that the cinema has become a key player and an essential tool for increasing awareness and mobilization for environmental issues. Nonetheless, it is impossible to precisely measure films’ impact on national and international environmental-protection-policy political decision-making.
The recent thematic evolution of this resolutely politically committed genre clearly shows a turn away from broader issues related to climate change and a disinterest in catastrophism. The change has favored more precise and concrete topics (e.g. plastic, shale gas) and greater optimism, which is in line with “solution-focused” journalism. Are we seeing a return to the values of the Year 01?
