“From cannibals to cockroaches, Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann
fill a major gap in the field with this wide-ranging treatment of horror in ecocinema.
Scholarship of this kind contributes tremendously to the expansion of
ecocriticism from the study of ‘literature’ per se to the understanding of how
environmental themes, such an anthropomorphism and gendered landscapes, occur
in visual culture.”—Scott Slovic, coeditor of Numbers and Nerves: Information, Emotion, and Meaning in a World of
Data
“Compelling. . . . Clear
and meticulous. Another tremendous contribution to the field of ecocinema
studies.”—Stephen Rust, coeditor of Ecocinema
Theory and Practice
“[Readers] will find in
this new book solid scholarship, broad research in the cinematic references
necessary to approach the topics, and insightful analysis and juxtaposition of
films .
. . all contributing to our
understanding of how ‘horror’ is among us now in the very real prospects of
violent and sudden climate change.”—Charles
J. Stivale, editor of Gilles
Deleuze: Key Concepts
Godzilla,
a traditional natural monster and representation of cinema’s subgenre of
natural attack, also provides a cautionary symbol of the dangerous consequences
of mistreating the natural world—monstrous nature on the attack. Horror films
such as Godzilla invite an exploration of the complexities of a
monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies.
Robin L. Murray
and Joseph K. Heumann
demonstrate 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. Organized in relation to four recurring
environmental themes in films that construct nature as a monster—anthropomorphism,
human ecology, evolution, and gendered landscapes—Monstrous Natureapplies ecocritical approaches that 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 in articulating an approach to ecology that explores
why and when nature becomes monstrous.
An exploration of the genre of horror films and its
offshoots, Monstrous Natureapplies
ecocritical approaches that reveal the multiple ways nature is constructed as
monstrous or in which the natural world itself constructs monsters.
The
interdisciplinary Film Studies minor is devoted to the study of cinema history,
theory, criticism and production. The minor is comprised of three required
film-centered courses (Film Studies 3759G, “History of Cinema”, Communication
Studies 3530, “Film Communication,” and English 3504, “Film and Literature”)
and a core list of courses with film-specific content. Up to two courses in the film studies
minor can be double counted in a student’s major. Coursework
may also include Honors Program course equivalents. Existing prerequisites for
all courses must be satisfied. Including
required courses, students may count no more than two courses in their major
area(s).
Requirements:
The Film
Studies minor includes three required courses, as listed below, and three
courses from the list of elective courses, for a total of at least 19 hours:
1. Required Courses:
FILM 2759G - History of Cinema.
Credits: 3
CMN 3530 -
Film Communication. Credits: 4
ENG 4904 - Studies in Film. Credits: 3
·
2. At least three of the following
Elective Courses:
AFR 3300 -
African Cinema. Credits: 3
CMN 2575 Field Production. Credits: 3
CMN 3540 -
Videography. Credits: 3
CMN 4030 -
Seminar. Credits: 3 (See Footnote *)
CMN 4500 - Topics in Electronic Production. Credits: 3 (See Footnote*)
CMN 4540 -
Advanced Video Production. Credits: 3
EIU 4104G -
World Film: Language and Culture in Film. Credits: 3
EIU 4128G -
Politics and Popular Culture Credits: 3
EIU 4170G -
History on Film. Credits: 3
EIU 4174G – Documentary and
Society: 3
EIU 4192G -
Film and Contemporary Society, Honors Credits: 4
ENG 3064 - Intermediate Dramatic Writing. Credits: 3
ENG 3504 -
Film and Literature. Credits:
ENG 3604 -
Special Topics in Literature and Language, 1, 2, 3, 4. Credits: 3 (See Footnote)
ENG 4764 - Advanced Dramatic Writing. Credits: 3
THA 3754G - Theatre and Film. Credits: 3
Footnote: *With the permission of the Film Studies Advisor
(rlmurray@eiu.edu)
See Our Website for more information: http://castle.eiu.edu/filmmnor/
The Sentimental Disney Cartoon Cemented the Myth That Man and Nature Can’t Coexist
By Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann |
Perking up her ears, the dog was the first to notice them, just a few
blocks from our homes in east-central Illinois. One-by-one the does
strolled from the woods into the meadow. They eyed us without lifting
their tails, seemingly habituated to this neighborhood. Their appearance
awed us but also prompted different responses. Joseph recalled long
past hunting trips four miles south in a tree stand overlooking a
soybean field and tried to pick out the fattest doe in the group. But
Robin remembered watching Bambi at a theatre birthday party at
the age of six. That brought her, the birthday boy, and the other female
guests to tears, wondering if our mothers might be next.
These contradictory responses suggest the lingering strength of the
Bambi myth, the lasting legacy of Walt Disney’s 1942 cartoon about that
big-eyed fawn. Seventy-four years later, Bambi’s worldview still
animates debates over animal rights and environmentalism: Should we save
Bambi or save the earth?
Bambi didn’t start as an American environmental fable. Written by an
Austrian author with the pen name Felix Salten for adults in 1928, Bambi: A Forest Life,
recounts the story of a fawn who grows up to be the prince of the
forest alongside his royal father. But his rise to power comes only
after the death of his mother and near loss of his mate Faline. While
hunters are a problem for these deer, so are animals: In the forest,
owls eat mice, crows eat a friendly rabbit, and a fox eats a duck. Early
reviewers considered the book an anti-fascist fable and more recent writers
have speculated that the story was an allegory about the plight of Jews
in Europe. All of Salter’s work was eventually banned in Nazi Germany.
By 1942, when Disney released the film, Americans were processing
their shock at the attack on Pearl Harbor and our entrance into a world
war, which is reflected in the film’s simplified portrayal of deer
living in an idealized forest where predators and prey play together and
fear only a shadowy character called “Man,” who is equipped with guns
and fire. The emotional punch of Disney’s Bambi is heightened by its
artistry, which combines gorgeous natural realism with cartoonish
animals, their exceptionally large heads, small noses, and wide eyes
resembling human children. Disney gave Bambi playful friends like the
rabbit Thumper and the skunk Flower, in contrast to the more melancholy,
quarrelsome animals of the book. Even though these cartoon animals
frolic to the tune of “Little April Shower,” Disney paid special
attention to the details of the forest, sending artists to sketch
foliage in Maine’s Baxter State Park and shipping two fawns to the
studio as artist’s models. This uncanny mix of cuteness and terror and
fantasy and realism has led some to call it a horror film.
When it was released in 1942, Bambi the movie was surprisingly
controversial, but not for the same reasons as the book. Hunters in
particular saw it as an ideological threat. Outdoor Life editor
Raymond J. Brown called the film “the worst insult ever offered in any
form to American sportsmen,” and even asked Disney to correct slurs
against hunters, according to anthropologist Matthew Cartmill’s A View to a Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature Through History. Disney claimed sportsmen were not the targets because Salten’s story was about German hunters. In 1988, Field and Stream urged “hunters to start protesting against the “Bambi-killer jokes” they sometimes encountered.
Bambi had fans too. In a July 1942 issue of Audubon Magazine,
naturalist Donald Culross Peattie “hotly denies” that Bambi
“misrepresented anything.” That same year the National Audubon Society
compared the cartoon’s consciousness-raising power for the environment
to what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the abolition of slavery. New York Times
reviewer Theodore Strauss claimed Disney films “teach us variously
about having a fundamental respect for nature. Some of them, such as Bambi, inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism.”
When it was first released, Bambi lost money, but subsequent re-releases in theatres and video rentals brought in close to $300 million by 1988
as the film became a rite of childhood. And over the years that
“emotional groundwork,” took hold in the form of “The Bambi Factor,” a
sentimental anthropomorphized view of wildlife, especially deer.
One of the first people bitten by the Bambi Factor was, ironically,
early environmentalist Aldo Leopold. In 1943, Leopold encouraged
Wisconsin to institute an antlerless deer season that would have allowed
hunters to shoot does and young bucks to thin the overpopulated herd.
Leopold was interested in the good of all life as part of an ecosystem,
not just special animals. In his Sand County Almanac, Leopold
extends ethics to include nonhuman animals, as well as the plant life
that sustains them. For Leopold, “the individual is a member of a
community of interdependent parts,” and those parts include all elements
of the natural environment, from soil and plants to “Bambi.” A graduate
of the Yale forestry school, Leopold promoted game management,
evolutionary biology, and ecology, rather than sentimental
anthropomorphism. To maintain a diverse ecology, Leopold supported
regulated sport hunting, including shooting a limited number of
Wisconsin’s does with the aim of keeping the herd size smaller. But his
Wisconsin proposal was shot down—the public, according to scholar Ralph H. Lutts, was outraged at the idea of culling any of Bambi’s child-like creatures.
But there’s another environmental ideology hidden in Bambi
that’s at odds with reality. Bambi’s underlying message is that “Man”
and deer can’t co-exist. Only Man disrupts the pristine view of nature
in the Bambi cartoons. “Why did we all run?” Bambi asks after a
gun shot sounds. “Man was in the forest,” his mother replies. A later
gunshot is the last we know of Bambi’s mother, hiding the violence that
is heightened by her absence. Other hunters go on a chilling rampage,
wounding Bambi and causing a final eco-disaster when their campfire
explodes into the woods and destroys the animals’ home. The fire effects
light the scene in oranges and reds, in the spirit of the “Burning of
Atlanta” scene in Gone with the Wind. In the context of Disney’s film version of Bambi, humans and their vicious dogs are shadowy harbingers of death destroying an idealized paradise. Disney focuses almost entirely on a human-free world of the forest.
Unless a spectral man appears, animals of all species live without fear
in a “paradise” untouched by human hands. Even owls act like
vegetarians! In Disney’s natural world, interaction with humans ends
only in death or suffering, so the only real choice is a complete
separation between the two worlds.
As academics, Bambi’s worldview interested us: Did the
“paradise” view of the forest precede the more modern idea of the
ecosystem in popular culture? We were surprised to find that it didn’t.
Just a few months before Bambi came out, audiences went to see the Fleischer Brothers’ animated feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941). Instead of contrasting conflicts between humans and idyllic nature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town
demonstrates how lowland bugs and humans can live interdependently in a
human couple’s urban garden in the center of Manhattan. Despite the
anthropomorphism on display, Mr. Bug’s focus on interdependence
connects with more realistic views about wildlife management and
interconnected communities of plants, bugs, animals, and human animals.
While Mr. Bug was modeled on sophisticated Hollywood comedies of the time, Bambi reflects Disney’s focus on emotionally convincing yet traditional folktales meant to appeal to broad audiences.
Contrary to the Disney story, of course, deer are all too comfortable
with “Man,” “Woman,” and “Cars,” not to mention our delicious gardens,
lawns, and infant trees. By 2015, predictably, protests against the
Bambi Factor started to come from drivers and organic gardeners as the
deer population grew dramatically. The National Traffic Safety
Administration estimates that deer cause 1.5 million roadway accidents
per year with 150 human fatalities and 10,000 personal injuries, as well
as $1 billion in property damage. On Internet gardening forums,
gardeners grouse about deer invasions.
Bambi lovers want to protect the deer even when the deer are sick. As
recently as 2012, naturalist Valerie Blaine blamed the Bambi Factor for
the North Rutland Deer Alliance’s opposition to killing deer even to
test for chronic wasting disease. According to Blaine, the group felt
any herd reduction would spoil their “deer watching experience” in
Chicago’s Northwest suburbs.
The Bambi Factor encourages sentimentalized views of wildlife that
romanticize nature without accepting its messier aspects. With its vast
and varied ecologies, America’s myth is that it is both a frontier to be
conquered and an Eden to be preserved, but there’s more to living on
this planet than choosing between paradise and a parking lot. Bambi
presents us with a powerful vision that is in a sense a false choice.
Instead of looking for a paradise that separates us from wild nature, we
need to find a new vision that stresses how to live together, balancing
habitat preservation with wildlife management. Bambi is, after all, just a movie.
I watched Milk of Sorrow (2009) again tonight as the lab segment of a film class focused on film and the city. My co-writer and I have included it in two of our works now.
In the first, we explored how displacement effects protagonist Fausta--a forced exit from a village home to the seemingly lifeless outskirts of Lima, Peru that is exacerbated by a traumatized and terrorized body.
Our second examination explored how gardens are used in the film--the literal garden of Fausta's European employer, as well as the figurative potato garden growing inside her.
While watching the film tonight, I noticed one more way natural elements are presented in the film--through the backdrop used for photos after a family wedding. In a variety of typical wedding pictures, from the loving couple reenacting the proposal to an extended family posing like a choir, a painted waterfall backdrop enhances the joyous occasion. In the mountain desert that surrounds them, the green and blue matte painting looks like a rain forest oasis.
Only when Fausta enters her employer's walled garden or talks about the one she left behind in her village do we see nonhuman life in Milk of Sorrow. But the backdrop for wedding portraits suggests they yearn for green.
Thursday April 7 in Witters
Conference Room, Booth Library 4440
4:30 – 5:15
We Need Diverse
Media!
with Dr. Robin Murray (Coordinator, EIU Film Studies minor)
Come for a lively discussion of diversity in contemporary film.
Stay for a chance to win one of twenty DVDs in the raffle.
Refreshments will be
served between events
5:45 – 6:45
Social Justice Teacher Panel
featuring EIU Alums
Nico Canaday, Mt.
Zion Public Schools
Kathy Decker,
Champaign Public Schools
Lisa Nuku, Monticello
Public Schools
English
Studies Conference
Friday April 8, Third floor
of Coleman Hall
Presentations, readings, panels, and workshops by EIU
students—a celebration of the rich variety of academic, professional, and
creative activities in English Studies.
Conference Schedule
9:00 Registration
opens
10:00Sessions
11:00Sessions
12:00 Free
Lunch + Poster Sessions
1:00 Keynote Address by Dr. Melissa Ames (see
below)
2:00Sessions
3:00Sessions
Keynote
1:00 Friday April 8 in Lumpkin Hall
Auditorium
“Funhouse Mirrors: Culture’s Distorted Visions of Gender”
Conference keynote by our own Dr. Melissa Ames, author of How
Pop Culture shapes the Stages of a Woman's Life: From Toddlers in Tiaras to
Cougars on the Prowl.
Many critics and reviewers have noted how Chungking Express transforms Hong Kong from setting to character, an urban environment that mirrors and promotes the alienation and coping strategies implemented by all four protagonists. Brigette Ling, the Woman in the Blonde wig, wears femme fatale disguise that includes a trench coat, blonde wig and sunglasses. He Zhiwu, Cop 223 (Takeshi Kaneshiro) jogs each time he loses a girlfriend, claiming the sweat eliminates his tears. Faye (Faye Wong) listens to "California Dreaming" at such a high volume that she can't think. And Cop 663 (Tony Chiu Wai Leung) pretends his ex-girlfriend is waiting for him in his apartment, ready to jump out of a wardrobe in her flight attendant uniform.
Although I certainly agree with these interpretations of how the Hong Kong environment both perpetuates and ameliorates stereotypes of the city as an isolating and alienating ecosystem, for me, food and house pets more effectively connect these human figures with nature and each other. Food, goldfish, and a pet dog illustrate ways an urban environment can promote interdependence rather than separation.
Food and setting interconnect in Chungking Express through the crucial location in the film: the Midnight Express takeout restaurant. The restaurant provide parallels and points of overlap between the two seemingly disparate romance narrative in the film. Cop 223 frequents the restaurant, using the public phone to call all of his ex-girlfriend's relatives and check his messages. The lack of response to these call leads Cop 223 to the bar where he meets and immediately falls in love with the Woman in the Blonde Wig. Nearly every day, Cop 663 buys food at the restaurant for his girlfriend, moving from a chef salad to other dishes at the owner's suggestion. He even claims she left him because he bought fish and chips and decided she wanted variety in men as well as meals. Faye works at the restaurant to help out her uncle, filling in when an employee leaves suddenly.
But food also connects characters and the environment in less obvious ways. When his girlfriend May leaves him, Cop 223 buys one can of pineapple slices per day with an expiry date of May 1, explaining, "We split up on April Fool's Day. So I decided to let the joke run for a month. Every day I buy a can of pineapple with a sell-by date of May 1. May loves pineapple, and May 1 is my birthday. If May hasn't changed her mind by the time I've bought thirty cans, then our love will also expire." On the last day, he eats all 30 cans. His voiceover narrates the journey the pineapple took before ending up in the cans, from field to processing plant, to store shelf. This focus on process explicitly connects him to a natural world beyond but integral to the life of Hong Kong.
Cop 223 eats voraciously throughout his narrative, not only devouring gallons of pineapple, but also eating four chef salads with french fries and a burger during the night he watches Woman in the Blonde Wig sleep. These American foods tie Cop 223's story with Cop 663's in a couple of ways. First because Cop 663 buys a chef salad every day until convinced to provide variety. Secondly because Chef Salads are associated with California, the "California Dreaming" of Faye's song and the locations where they "meet" in parallel--the California Bar and the actual California.
Food brings Faye and Cop 663 together, too. Although after changing shifts, Cop 663 eats Cantonese Food at an outdoor stall instead of American takeout, Faye finds him on her trips back from the produce market, easily convincing him to carry her heavy baskets of fresh vegetables back to the restaurant. The film's conclusion at the Midnight Express counter also connects the two, but I've provided way too many spoilers already. I've also run out of time, so I will need to write about the power of house pets in a later post.
