The Greening of The Film Industry and the Independent Environmental Filmmaker

The “greening” of film production distribution and exhibition had been jump-started by the success of digital films and 3D blockbusters such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II(2011) (1.3 billion in worldwide ticket sales) and Avatar (2009) (2.75 billion in worldwide ticket sales). This success now forces far greater beneficial environmental results throughout the whole process of filmmaking and film viewing. The digital age may reduce the carbon footprint of film companies in major ways that are still being calculated. Although, as Alimurang suggests, the shift to digital will have negative consequences for independent theatres, projectionist jobs, and classic film distribution, it may also help “green” the movie business.

Digital filmmaking also makes it possible to produce low-budget independent films.  The digital cinematography used in the powerful anti-mountaintop removal mining films of B.J. Gudmundsson and the humorous call to address climate change found in Jon Cooksey’s How to Boil a Frog lower their budgets, making them more financially feasible to produce and distribute. Even larger budget documentaries such as The Last Mountain and Blue Vinyl lower production costs using digital filmmaking processes. Technologies such as digital cameras, computer generated editing for both image and sound have made the whole process of filmmaking truly democratic. 

Yet making those films accessible to a wider audience creates other economic and financial problems. New York Times reporter Nancy Ramsey highlights the hidden costs of documentaries in her exploration of Jonathan Caouette’s distribution experience with Tarnation (2003). Although the film cost as little as $218 to make, once the film gained distribution, costs exceeded $500 thousand, with rights to the music included in the film accounting for $230 thousand of the total. The difficulty attaining distribution also limits low-budget documentaries’ accessibility. Peter Judson’s Nobody Wants Your Film (2005) provides a, sometimes, comic perspective on the problems director Alexandre Rockwell and writer Brandon Cole face when attempting to market their film, Thirteen Moons. Nobody Wants Your Filmcollects and augments footage shot on the set of Thirteen Moons, as well as a series of interviews with cast and crew members and e-mails between Rockwell and possible distributors to provide a semi-fictionalized story of difficulties gaining distribution, illustrating the problem many of the films explored here face when their films are only available through a small distributor’s website.

Of the twelve mountaintop removal mining films we watched, for example, only two gained a wide release: Coal Country, as a regional festival favorite, was broadcast on PBS in the fall of 2009, perhaps because it was directed by Mari-Lynn Evans and Phylis Geller, the filmmakers who brought The Appalachians to PBS in 2005. With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at its center, Bill Haney’s The Last Mountain acquired a limited theatrical release after premiering at the Sundance and Seattle Film Festival. Another documentary examining mountaintop removal mining, On Coal River(2010) is becoming a festival favorite like Coal Country and The Last Mountain, but it has chosen a different distribution route: iTunes. The film is available as a DVD for schools, libraries, and universities, but individual films are only available through the iTunes library. Even though only two of these films have found limited distribution success, however, all twelve draw on the experiences of the nearly the same anti-MTR activists, including Maria Gunnoe, Joe Lovett, and especially, (before her death), Julia/Judy Bonds. They also all highlight MTR incidents primarily in and near Boone County, West Virginia, even though other parts of Appalachia are suffer the results of MTR, including Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and other counties in West Virginia. 

Which brings us back to the original question: Can the film industry and environmental movements mix? With cautious optimism, we can give only a qualified “yes” to the new attempts because of the enormous energy expenditures used to create film and the yet uncalculated waste levels associated with its distribution and exhibition.  Hollywood film studios are making the move to “green,” partially because of economic issues, partly because of California’s environmental laws which regulate greenhouse gas emissions more stringently than the federal government, and partly because Hollywood film stars from George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio demand it.  As the Warner Brothers website declares, “It takes creativity to entertain the world while conserving resources on our planet.”

The Changing Image of American Indians in Film

On July 4, 1898, Quanah Parker asserted, "We fear your success. This was a pretty country you took away from us--but you see how dry it is now. It is only good for red ants, coyotes, and cattlemen." This is the country we see in Western films. Although American Indians and the American landscape were portrayed sympathetically in silent films such as The Red Girl (1908), Hiawatha(1913), The Daughter of Dawn (1920), and The Vanishing American (1925), in most later Westerns these representations primarily turned savage. According to Scott Simmon, they devolve along two paths, "one about war, the other about love--neither leading anywhere except Indian death" (4, 80, 81). Films highlighting Quanah Parker such as Comanche(dir. Carl Krueger, 1956) and The Searchers(dir. John Ford, 1956) illustrate this change. It is only when they are constructed by American Indian filmmakers such as Chris Eyre and Sherman Alexie that representations of American Indians regain authenticity and serve as more powerful critiques of environmental degradation.

Westerns as a genre tend to focus on Plains Indian tribes, the nomadic tribes in the plains settlers crossed to reach the West, with little distinction between tribes. But the films also respond to film history, a history that coincides with political and cultural history of both Hollywood and the United States as a whole. According to Simmon, “Indians may well have entered American film for the reason they came into the European tradition as a whole: Searching for stories to set in the landscape, pioneer filmmakers stumbled upon ‘Indians,’ the presumed men of nature” (4). Set in Eastern lush forests instead of desert plains, the narratives of these early silent westerns “are set entirely within tribal communities or feature a ‘noble redskin’ as guide or savior to the white hero” (4).

By 1914, however, Simmon asserts, American Indian actors and sympathetic narratives were no longer prominent in westerns at least partly because the “U. S. Army began planning, with some innocence, for America’s entry into World War I by requisitioning horses” (80). According to Simmon, “The subsequent history of Indian images in silent-era Hollywood becomes a story with two paths—one about war, the other about love—neither leading anywhere except Indian death” (81).  In spite of Simmon’s contention, at least a few westerns highlighting American Indian characters and narratives present a more sympathetic view of a possible comic evolutionary narrative, a narrative of environmental adaptation that reveals the ineffectiveness of a tragic evolutionary path and the intruder pioneers who seek destruction rather than adaptation. 

The Daughter of Dawn, for example, romanticized Native American culture and lifestyle, as did In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), Hiawatha (1913), shot by F.E. Moore's production company, The Vanishing Race, a 1917 film made by the Edison Studios, and Before the White Man Came (1920) which employed Crow Indians and Cheyenne Indians as actors. The film cast is entirely Native American, with over 300 people from the Comanche and Kiowa tribes in the film including White Parker, as lead actor, and Wanada Parker. They were the children of Quannah Parker. The cast wore their own clothing and brought their own personal items to the film, including tepees. No matter how noble a savage the American Indians might be, however, they cannot assimilate into western culture and must be removed to reservations or destroyed. American Indians, like other human and nonhuman nature, must be exploited for gain or, if they limit the construction of civilization, annihilated. These films reinforce the destiny of forced environmental change and eradicate the possibility of an alternative, a narrative of environmental adaptation.

American Indian Representations in Film: A Pictoral Blog