Ecocinema and the City Part I

Ecocinema and the City seeks to add to urban ecocinema scholarship by exploring four sections arranged to highlight the increasing importance nature performs in the city: Evolutionary Myths Under the City, Urban Eco-Trauma, Urban Nature and Interdependence, and The Sustainable City.  The first two sections, “Evolutionary Myths Under the City” and “Urban Eco-Trauma,” take more traditional ecocinema approaches and emphasize the city as a dangerous constructed space.

Part I, “Evolutionary Myths Under the City” examines evolutionary narratives of environmental adaptation in both film noir and documentaries focused on urban sewers and subways. The films explored in our first section, “Evolutionary Myths Under the City,” call into question the idea of the city as natural and unaffected by human intervention and illustrate how social and environmental injustices sometimes intertwine. The notion of displacement from the New Objectivity art movement of the 1920s helps elucidate this de-naturalizing of the city. As Daniela Fabricius explains, “Displacement can be a way of understanding not only the abyss between a landscape and how it is represented but also the erosion of the seemingly fixed binaries that separate natural and manmade environments” (175). “Evolutionary Myths Under the City” explores these fluid binaries as it focuses on tragic and comic evolutionary narratives. The films explored in this section ask evolutionary questions about who we are, where we’re going, and which story of ourselves we choose to construct: a tragic or comic evolutionary narrative.

Chapter 1, “The City, The Sewers, The Underground: Reconstructing Urban Space in Film Noir” examines the idea of the city as a social and cultural construct through a reading of He Walked by Night (1948). The film highlights how and why not genetics but social, cultural and historical forces construct “gangsters.” But what sets the film apart from other noir films is the attention it gives to the urban infrastructure hidden below its progressive construction. By foregrounding sewers as constructions, escape routes, and seemingly safe havens for noir characters, the film demystifies what seem like “givens” and calls into question the idea of the city as natural.

Chapter 2, “Documenting Environmental Adaptation Under the City: Children Underground (2001)” explores underground constructions from the perspective of homeless children in Children Underground (2001). On the surface the children in Children Underground have entered an underground that serves as the site of technological progress where excavation produces not only the means of production—coal and oil, for example—but also the foundation for the urban infrastructure—sewage and water systems, railways, gas, and lines for electricity, computers, and phones. They have entered a technology-driven underworld and reconstructed, domesticated, and humanized it as a home, an ecology in which they can move beyond survival toward interdependence. Yet because their plight and the home they inhabit are built on both nature and former dictator Ceausescu’s cultural attitudes, these homeless children also illustrate how social and environmental injustices sometimes intertwine.