Living with Nature in Rams (2015)

Recently I heard Norse writers and directors discussing how their mythology influenced their views of the natural world. One director mentioned the Norwegian film The Troll Hunter (2010), highlighting how the movie accurately presented their belief that trolls turn to stone under daylight, forming their country's many mountains. What struck me about the conversation was how this example and others pointed to the Norse relationship with nature. According to this director, they treasure and conserve the natural world because even the mountains live. Although The Troll Hunter does raw on Norse mythology and folktales, for me, the Icelandic film Rams (2015) more effectively illustrates the connections with nature exhibited in Norse myths.

In Rams, brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) have severed all familial connections between them, even refusing to speak with one another. The only thing they have in common are the ancestral sheep-stock they raise on adjoining ranches.

It is only when a lethal disease infects Kiddi's sheep that the brothers find a way to reconnect. Although authorities order everyone in their secluded Icelandic valley to cull their herds, so the outbreak can be contained, the brothers ultimately join forces to protect a prized ram and a few precious sheep.

The brothers' strong relationship with nature is illustrated by their devotion to their sheep and to the land that sustains them. But the conclusion of the film most powerfully demonstrates the interdependent relationship they share with the natural world. Desperate to save the remaining sheep,   Gummi and Kiddi leave their anger behind them and herd the sheep into the mountains above their ranches. Together they battle snow, wind, and cold and survive only by adapting icy drifts into a shelter and stripping away all that's left of the civilization they left behind. Rams ends with a tableau highlighting the brothers' reentrance into both the natural world and familial relationships they now needed to live.

Bob and the Trees: Netflix, Climate Change, and the Economy in the Berkshires

Screened in notable film festivals around the world including the Maryland Film Festival, Hamburg Int. Short Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro Int. Short Film Festival, and the Sundance Film festival, Diego Ongaro’s Bob and the Trees (2015) expands on Bob's compelling narrative, adding environmental themes to its economic message. Set during a winter in rural Massachusetts. Bob and the Trees details the evolution of Bob (Bob Tarasuk), a 50-year-old logger with a soft spot for golf and gangsta rap. Struggling to make ends meet in the merciless logging industry, Bob makes a bad investment that threatens the family business and, according to the production notes, begins to heed the instincts of his ever darkening self. 

Although Bob the Trees does highlight Bob’s journey from hubris in a verité neo-realistic style, for us the low-budget film does more. With its close ups of ants feeding on rotten wood, radio announcements about global warming, and references to rabid skunks attacking livestock, Bob the Trees touches on climate change and environmental destruction caused by habitat collapse.  

Bob’s bad investment underpins much of the film’s narrative and broaches the fragility of both the economy and environment in 21^st century Massachusetts. Instead of taking a share of a client’s trees, Bob pays the owner a lump sum that far surpasses the amount he can earn when he and son Matt (Matt Gallagher) discover many of the trees are rotted and full of ants.

Although Matt blames the ants on the wet landscape, a radio broadcast the family listens to around the dinner table connects this ant infestation with climate change. And a Harvard Forest study confirms this connection, arguing, “Projected atmospheric warming will lead to increases in abundance or range extensions of ant species at the cooler, northern extent of their ranges in the US.”

The reference to rabid skunks also emerges during a dinner conversation, and the solution ends up being slaughtering the livestock, since the farmer cannot afford to sustain them for the six-month quarantine.

These scenes are brief but powerful environmental messages, and they are heightened by the top-notch cinematography using the Black Magic Pocket Cinema Camera. The film left me thinking about these environmental issues. But it also prompted me to look up at the trees with Bob.

Curating a Western Film Series at the Autry

In January and February 2017, we will be curating a film series at The Autry Museum of the American West. "The Autry"—brings together the stories of all peoples of the American West, connecting the past with the present to inspire our shared future. Co-founded in 1988 by Jackie and Gene Autry and Joanne and Monte Hale, the Autry has grown to encompass a broad and inclusive representation of art, artifacts, cultural materials, and library holdings. In 2002, the Autry merged with Women of the West, a nonprofit organization highlighting the impact of diverse women’s experiences on the history of the American West. In 2003, after many years of being on the verge of financial insolvency and with the collection and buildings in need of significant care and investment, the Southwest Museum of the American Indian sought a merger with the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, and a new organization was formed (now known as the Autry Museum of the American West). The Autry's diverse collections include more than 600,000 artifacts, artworks, and archival materials that reflect the interconnectedness of cultures and histories in the American West.

The Autry currently spans three campuses in Los Angeles: the Autry Museum in Griffith Park, the Historic Southwest Museum Mt. Washington Campus, and the Resources Center of the Autry (under construction):

Autry Museum in Griffith Park

The Autry Museum in Griffith Park, originally the Gene Autry Museum of Western Heritage, was co-founded by Jackie and Gene Autry and Joanne and Monte Hale. With the opening of the Museum in 1988, Gene Autry realized his dream "to build a museum which would exhibit and interpret the heritage of the West and show how it influenced America and the world." Attracting between 150,000 and 200,000 annual visitors, the Autry in Griffith Park presents a wide range of special exhibitions and public programs that explore the art, history, and cultures of the American West.

Historic Southwest Museum Mt. Washington Campus

The Historic Southwest Museum Mount Washington Campus is the original location of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, the oldest museum in Los Angeles, and was founded by Charles Fletcher Lummis. In 2015 the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the historic site a National Treasure, launching a collaborative process to identify a long-term sustainable future for this Los Angeles landmark.

We'll pass along more information as it is available, but we know for sure we will be curating the film series at the Autry Museum in Griffith Park. 

Monstrous Nature in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art!

Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen: Part of the Museum's "Guillermo del Toro At Home with Monsters" Exhibit 

http://www.thelacmastore.org/collections/books-home-page/products/monstrous-nature-environment-and-horror-on-the-big-screen 

Monstrous Nature: Environment and Horror on the Big Screen shows how the horror film and its offshoots can often be understood in relation to a monstrous nature that has evolved either deliberately or by accident and that generates fear in humanity as both character and audience. This connection between fear and the natural world opens up possibilities for ecocritical readings often missing from research on monstrous nature, the environment, and the horror film. Horror films such as Godzilla invite an exploration of the complexities of a monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies.

Organized in relation to four recurring environmental themes in films that construct nature as a monster—anthropomorphism, human ecology, evolution, and gendered landscapes—the authors apply ecocritical perspectives to reveal the multiple ways nature is constructed as monstrous or in which the natural world itself constructs monsters. This interdisciplinary approach to film studies fuses cultural, theological, and scientific critiques to explore when and why nature becomes monstrous.

Guillermo del Toro is among the directors discussed by authors Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann.

The River (1938) and the New Deal

My students are watching The River this week in a documentary and society senior seminar, so I'm looking forward to reading their online responses. Here's one we published nearly a decade ago:

In Lorentz’s The River, ecology is foregrounded at the expense of race. This 1937 film provides a clear government-sponsored argument for intervention by programs like the TVA. But it also examines the reasons for wide-spread flooding before offering this solution. The River illustrates the impact of human settlement along the river and efforts to combat flooding that erosion caused by stripping the land for farming encourages, at least from the early nineteenth century. The film illustrates how impoverished the South became after the Civil War not only because of the “tragedy of war,” but because, “already the frenzied cotton cultivation of a quarter of a century had taken toll of the land.” It also demonstrates the ramifications of lumbering in the North, mining in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia and urbanization along each river shore, declaring, 

         The water comes downhill, spring and fall;

            Down from the cut-over mountains,

            Down from the plowed-off slopes,

            Down every brook and rill, rivulet and creek,

            Carrying every drop of water that flows down two-thirds the continent.

The River also shows the extent of the battle against the floods and the number of flood victims, 750,000 without “food and water and shelter and clothing,” the cost of exploiting the lands for their resources. To meet these victims’ needs, the narration explains that “We sent armies down to help the engineers fight a battle on a two thousand mile front: The Army and Navy,/ The Coast Guard and Marine Corps,/ The CCC and the WPA,/ The Red Cross and the Health Service,” programs that were part of FDR’s New Deal.

            

And The River offers numbers to support its claims about the cost of exploiting the land: “For fifty years we plowed for corn, and moved on when the land gave out./ Corn and wheat; wheat and cotton—we planted and plowed with no thought for the future—/and four hundred million tons of top soil…have been washed into the Gulf of Mexico every year.”  It also highlights not only the immediate repercussions of flood damage, but also the consequences of losing top soil—“poor land makes poor people.” According to The River, as of 1937, “forty percent of all farmers in the great Valley are tenants./ Ten percent are share croppers …. But a generation facing a life of dirt and poverty, / Disease and drudgery;/ Growing up without proper food, medical care, or schooling,…/And in the greatest river valley in the world.” 

The images that accompany the narrator’s claims about environmental, human, and economic costs, however, point out an important element missing from The River, Blacks bearing the greatest burden of flood-induced poverty and homelessness. In fact, all of the images of tenant farmers impoverished by poor soil and flooding are of Whites. Blacks are only shown in footage where slaves work the fields and load barges with bales of cotton before the Civil War. Only in the Epilogue to The River are Blacks even mentioned—because their labor contributed to the degradation of the land: “We got [B]lacks to plant the cotton and they gouged the top off the valley,” the narrator explains.

The River seeks to valorize the TVA and other New Deal projects, this time from the perspective of the federal government that commissioned the film. And The River ends with a view of a Tennessee Valley dam producing electricity to bring “a Soul”—and progress—to the South, effective when coupled with “soil conservation” and “model agricultural communit[ies]” built by the Farm Security Administration, programs highlighted even further in Power and the Land and The New Frontier, two other New Deal documentaries. The narration ends by arguing that, unlike past attempts, New Deal projects can successfully control rivers and land of the Mississippi delta, “Control enough to put the river together again before it is too late…before it has picked up the heart of a continent and shoved it into the Gulf of Mexico.” The River argues for federal intervention and public control of land and water. The River seeks to sell the TVA and other federal projects to a general (White) public in 1937, when Whites, especially the Southern Whites most affected by the projects, would resist images of Black slaves and sharecroppers carrying the greatest burden in the Southern agrarian economy.