Attack the Block: Environmental Sci Fi Comedy

Written and directed by first time filmmaker Joe Cornish, Attack the Block (2011) follows a teen gang in South London as they defend their block from an alien invasion. Cornish gives an Indie feel to the comic science fiction genre by setting an alien invasion in a council estate in South London on Guy Fawkes bonfire night, casting wannabe gangsters as the heroes who defeat the low-tech yet menacing aliens, and integrating a scientific reason for their attack.  But the film takes this genre further by including at least two intersections humans and the environment: an exploration of the impact of a “lifeless” urban environment on children and young adults and an alien motivation that is explicitly connected with the natural world.

The council estate apartment building, which serves as the primary setting for the film, establishes a cold stark tone to the film with its sparsely lit narrow hallways serve as hollow caverns. Overhead lights blink on and off, their fluorescent gray glow encouraging multiple cast shadows.  Outside the building, dark streets are interrupted only by exploding fireworks and bonfires commemorating Guy Fawkes, who attempted to overthrow England’s King James I in 1605. The explosions also mask the alien invasion, since trails of light from the alien ships and their blasts on impact blend with flowering pyrotechnics surrounding the city serving as a disguise for the entrance of the frightening sightless alien creatures with glowing fangs.

Like Guy Fawkes, these aliens’ attempts to “overthrow” the council estate block are thwarted, but this time the heroic champions are teen thugs, who enter the film as a “gang” when they mug Sam (Jodie Whittaker), a nursing intern. The gang’s leader, Moses (John Boyega), comes off as a tough urban hood, even when the crime is interrupted by an exploding car. When Moses and his boys investigate, instead of finding the remnants of fireworks, Moses is attacked by a small creature, which then runs into the darkness. Instead of  letting it run away, as they did with Sam, Moses and the gang chase the creature and kill it, carrying it to their adult friend and drug dealer, Ron (Nick Frost) for advice about selling it on e-bay.

In this scene, these boy thugs seem to be constructed by their harsh urban environment, products of the lifeless world around them. As Andrew Ross argues, mainstream environmentalists view the city as a monstrous savage (“Social Claim on Urban Ecology” 16), so the contrasting idea of an environmentalism grounded in the city—an urban eco-criticism—may be, as Ross puts it, “an oxymoron” (“Social Claim on Urban Ecology” 16). For Ross, urban eco-criticism would embrace “environmental priorities that affect urban residents, like sanitation, rat and pest control, noise pollution, hunger, malnutrition, poor health, premature death, not to mention the conditions that underpin these hazards, like the slashing of public services and the savage inequities of public housing policies” (“Social Claim on Urban Ecology” 15).  Attack the Block begins to interrogate these issues by setting a typical science fiction narrative in a low-income urban housing project.

When the teen gang turns into the heroic team that defeats the alien attack, the stereotypes about the savage urban environment and its effect on residents is turned on its head. These thugs are actually sons of working mothers with goals outside their initial criminal actions, and they have a fierce loyalty for their “block” and wish to defend it. Ultimately, they even team up with their mugging victim, Sam, to defeat the aliens.

But it is Moses who leads the fight, based on a second and, perhaps, more important connection with the natural world explored in the film:  pheromones as a motivation for the aliens’ attack. Pheromones are introduced in the film during the first scene in Ron’s apartment where a nerdish pot smoker, Brewish (Luke Treadaway) watches a nature program on the community television. With the other boys’ banter in the background, we here a voiceover explain how moths are drawn to their future mate’s pheromones.

The message makes sense later, when Brewish, who also seems to have excelled in zoology classes, notices a luminescent liquid on Moses’ jacket and connects it with the program: the alien Moses killed must have been a female, he theorizes, and left a pheromone on him that the other aliens have been tracking. After Moses connects other alien attacks with his own interaction with victims, he agrees and, like a metaphorical Moses, leads the aliens away from his friends, and they follow the scent of pheromones on his jacket to their deaths.

These environmental messages in the film connect well with its deviations from the comic science fiction genre to make it an Indie-like treat to watch.  As Joshua RothKopf of Time Out New York explains, “You can enjoy this movie as the meat-and-potatoes sci-fi flick it is, or, as with District 9, probe it for the elements of class consciousness and political rage that its makers smuggle in, like the best of subverters.” 

Foreign Land? (1995, Dirs. Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas)

Foreign Land is about studying where you are from and where you are going to. And it goes back to the fatherland that abandoned us Brazilians. The Portuguese that discovered us took out everything that they wanted to. The silver, the gold. Even the name, Brazil comes from a tree that you can’t find in Brazil anymore because it was all taken and brought over to Europe. So it was really about that, studying where we are from and then getting back to the father who had kind of abandoned us. (Walter Salles)

Foreign Land (1995), a beautifully photographed black and white Brazilian mystery, chronicles the union between Paco (Fernando Alves Pinto), an aspiring actor living in Sao Paulo, and Brazil-born Alex (Fernanda Torres), who works as a waitress in Lisbon, Portugal. Much of the tale is set in 1990 when Brazilian president Fernando Collor de Mello threw his country into an economic tailspin by suddenly confiscating the savings accounts of the entire population. At this time, Paco is living with his elderly mother in a poor Sao Paulo neighborhood. Tired of living in squalor, the mother dreams of returning to her native Spain. When she learns that her savings have been seized, the shocked old woman drops dead. Now without his mother, Paco feels little desire to stay in Brazil and so meets with the sleazy Igor, an antique dealer, and agrees to smuggle a violin stuffed with raw diamonds to Lisbon. Paco is to take the fiddle to a certain hotel where he will be paid by the contact. Unfortunately, he arrives, but the contact doesn't. This incident leads him down a twisted road filled with murder, danger and intrigue that eventually ends in the arms of Alex. In many films, this would be the end of the story, but not for Alex and Paco, for they cannot relax and enjoy their relationship unless they can somehow escape the murderous thugs Igor sent to kill them.

The film, then, recollects a film noir narrative and setting, not only because of its black and white cinematography, a setting that is meticulously staged, from the interior and exterior mise-en-scene with its low-key lighting and stereotypical noir figures like the detective, the femme fatale and the hero/victim to the low angle deep focus camera shots so prevalent in film noir since Citizen Kane (1941) As in film noir, the most prominent characters in Foreign Land reflect a nearly hopeless world: the displaced hero/victim and the femme fatale, for example.

It is style, however, that sets film noir apart from earlier detective films. Stylistically, the film acts as homage to noir. Shooting styles draw on those perfected in Citizen Kane, which Andrew Sarris sees as one of the first and most influential noirs, calling it one of the “two-pronged noir breakthrough[s]” (104). Low-key lighting, extreme camera angles, deep focus, wide-angle lenses, and depth of field are all drawn from Kane and the later noir films it inspired. The arched rooms and hallways shot from low angle camera positions recall Gregg Toland’s cinematography in Citizen Kane’s varied locations. And the figures, buildings and interior props are dramatically illuminated to maximize cast and attached shadows, including those figures shot in silhouette. Noirs are shot mostly at night in a decaying urban milieu. Many scenes are shot from low angle camera positions to further set the mood with wide-angle lenses that increase depth of field. Many of these techniques are drawn from German Expressionism, emphasizing the chaotic world in which trapped characters seek meaning. Foreign Land’s city settings fulfill all aspects of this description of film noir.

The city duplicates the urban noir atmosphere with its dank, dark and decrepit streets and buildings and sleazy interior hotel rooms and nightclubs. Noir figures abound in this urban setting, beginning with Paco, the mentally and physically displaced hero/victim in search of salvation and self-realization. Women figures, too, take on the noir roles, as does Alex (Fernanda Torres), who serves as both femme fatale and virtuous virgin. Sound, too, in this cityscape, brings to mind noirs like Fury (1936), Kiss of Death (1947), Out of the Past (1947), They Live By Night (1948), and Gun Crazy (1949). Characters’ speech patterns follow those of noir figures, since their reactions to horrific events are almost emotionless. Nightclub music, too, harks back to 1940s and early ‘50s jazz. Background effects sound hollow and muted, as if heard through penetrating thick fogs and continuous rains.

Foreign Land’s cityscape and the narrative surrounding it most resemble that of films

 like On Dangerous Ground (1952), a Nicholas Ray film in which Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) finds solace in the rural hills, away from the decaying noir urban setting he escapes. Because Wilson, a hardboiled police detective, has become embittered by his dealings with the heartless criminals of the urban underworld, he begins beating his suspects and is sent away from the city to the “country” to pursue a young girl’s killer and curb his violence. In this idyllic pastoral setting, Wilson gains self-awareness, with the help of Mary (Ida Lupino), the murderer’s blind sister, and frees himself of his own rage. Urban shots in the film maintain Wilson’s cynicism and desperation, but gradually, as his view of the world changes, rural shots brighten, suggesting that Wilson’s own blindness about himself has lifted.

Like Jim Wilson, Paco seeks to escape the decay of the city and the empty seediness of his role there and find solace in San Sebastian, his dead mother’s home. Like many characters in film noir, Murdoch feels trapped by forces beyond his control, in this case literally trapped by the role of “mule” forced upon him after his mother’s death. Devoid of a clear sense of self, Paco, like Wilson, frantically battles the city and its underworld while searching for salvation outside the city and its corruption. As in On Dangerous Ground, a virtuous woman contributes to the salvation Paco seeks, a pastoral solution to the corruption associated with a hopeless urban world in both Brazil and Portugal settings, a solution that also, perhaps, calls for an ecocritical reading of its space.

Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Film

Recently I watched a series of short films by Indigenous Canadians at Eastern Illinois University’s Tarble Arts Canter as part of their Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photography exhibit, on view at the Tarble through March 4:  Shirley Cheechoo’s Silent Tears (1997),  Daniel Janke’s How People Got Fire (2009), and a series of shorts from Shelley Niro, one of the photographers in the exhibit. Although directed by filmmakers from different tribes, all these films demonstrate well that representations of American Indians gain further authenticity and serve as more powerful critique of the exploitation of a people and their land when they are constructed by Indigenous filmmakers rather than Euro-Americans. 

Despite their stereotypical representation of Indians as an “other” that must be annihilated, Westerns in which Indigenous characters are highlighted demonstrate how well these first peoples adapt horrific environments into homes through narratives of environmental adaptation. Although Westerns with American Indians at the center or on their edges do construct them as either savage or noble “others,” the films also demonstrate how effectively American Indians have adapted, and adapted to, what white settlers see as an environmental “hell” or something worse. As the Fort Lowell commander Major Cartwright (Douglass Watson) puts it in Ulzana’s Raid (1972),

“You know what General Sheridan said of this country, lieutenant? ... If he owned hell and Arizona, he’d live in hell and rent out Arizona.”

The American Indian constructed in typical Western films, however, fulfills Shepard Kreck III’s criteria for what he calls “the ecological Indian.” According to Kreck, the trope and “dominant image” of the ecological Indian found in literature and film is “the Indian in nature who understands the systematic consequences of his actions, feels deep sympathy with all living forms, and takes steps to conserve so that earth’s harmonies are never imbalanced and resources never in doubt” (21). The ecological Indian valorizes nature at the expense of progress, and this Noble Savage shatters when confronted with a modern world and its technologies. The ecological Indian cannot assimilate into Western culture and vanishes or faces extermination.

Whether or not typical Westerns humanize their American Indian characters, they all rest on a similar ideology of progress. To make way for civilization, American Indians must be removed or eliminated. Only rarely is an alternative for American Indians presented in these films, and that alternative requires assimilation and renunciation of their savage culture. As John E. O’Connor argues in “The White Man’s Indian: An Institutional Approach”: “The view that the Indian impeded progress because he lacked the ambition and “good sense” the whites used in developing the American landscape has prevailed throughout our history. Movies and television, the popular art forms of today, continue to present images of American Indians that speak more about the current interests of the dominant culture than they do about the Indians.”(27-8).

Annette Kolodny’s parting words in her “Rethinking the Ecological Indian” may shed some light on the significance of the changes found when Indigenous filmmakers take the helm. According to Kolodny, when reading Kreck alongside both Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man and historical documents on which they both draw, she and her students discovered, “Together they argue for cultural traditions that self-consciously promote ecological sanity. Dams could still be built on rivers, but they would be opened periodically to accommodate seasonal spawning migrations. Hunting would not be eliminated, but it would be regulated so as to allow the game populations to survive for future generations. And rather than use up or pollute the earth’s resources merely ‘for comfort’s sake,’ the land’s bounty would be husbanded ‘for love’s sake.’” (18).

Instead of embracing either the Noble or Savage representation of Indigenous people, the films we saw this evening complicate and, perhaps, break down this binary. Through narrative, as in Shirley Cheechoo’s Silent Tears (1997), different forms of animation and storytelling, as in Daniel Janike’s How People Got Fire (2009) and, especially, the experimental performance art of Shelley Niro, the identities of Indigenous people and filmmakers are represented as complex and pluralistic. Niro’s films draw on and deconstruct stereotypical images of Indians, but they also highlight Indians’ ambiguous stance toward their identity in a modern or postmodern world.

Niro’s Overweight with Crooked Teeth calls stereotypes of Indigenous people into question with humor and a reversed version of “the gaze.” The male aboriginal figure in the short film gazes at us in increasing close-up shots. The opening view of trees and a barren road suggest a typical view of Native Americans’ connection to the natural world, but as he comes closer and looks directly into the camera, the drums and wind that accompanied his walk up the road end with the slam of cymbals and a voiceover asking, “What were you expecting anyway, a Noble Savage?” With this one line, stereotypes are deconstructed, and the film visualizes this clash when a potato chip bag is thrown to the wind. Even though the film also explains some of the atrocities Native people endured  (they are “victims of a lot of bad breaks,” according to the film), it also highlights the broader and more human identity of a Native figure in a modern world.  “Re-Chargin’” also includes the wind sounds and drums, but the female figure here dances in front of a mirror, seemingly gaining strength from confronting her own image, again in a modern, this time interior, setting.

The Shirt (2003) plays off both messages, highlighting the “bad breaks” but also showing signs of the influx of the modern world on Indigenous identity, a point that’s even further emphasized by “Hunger” where the female Indigenous figure seems to merge nature with an urban landscape and come out wearing sunglasses and eating chips. That effect is reinforced by the female figure who nearly becomes a tree in the film of the same name. Although “Sky Woman With Us” (2002) and “The Flying Head” (2008) take a more mythic approach to Indigenous identity, they too demonstrate the complexity of Aboriginal identity, an identity that is moves beyond stereotypes and binaries in the hands of Indigenous filmmakers like these.  

Hatari means danger!

Over the decades there have been a number of big budget Hollywood films about the white man's adventures in Africa. Many involve the "great white hunter" and include the fashion dummy retro look of Out of Africa, White Hunter/Black Heart, Mogambo and The Ghost and the Darkness. Howard Hawks' Hatari(1962) is in a similar world, but is about animal catchers, groups of men and women who capture wild animals for zoos and circuses all over the globe.

Hatari focuses on the typical close knit insular "Hawksian" world of skilled professionals, people who risk life and limb for money, adventure and the freedom it provides. There is a powerful economic component to the pursuit of capturing all manner of wild animals for the businesses that demand them. And if you want to join this group you have to have a skill set they need or you are rejected without a moment's notice. In Hatari hesitation means injury or death.

So when the film opens with an exciting and dangerous chase after a rhino and ends with the rhino escaping after it gores Indian (Bruce Cabot) because his jeep's driver was not anticipating the rhino's attack, we immediately see how close the hunters have to come to their quarry to capture them and how furiously the large animals react in their own defense. Indian nearly dies but is rescued by a stranger (Gerard Blain) who wants to join the group, but first has to donate his rare AB negative blood, and then prove he can replace Indian who is the group's top rifle shot. Only after he passes both tests is he immediately folded into the group and participates in all further actions as if he had been with these people for years.

The group's leader Sean Mercer (John Wayne) continually scans a large board filled with neatly laid out rows of all the animals requested for delivery in this particular year. As the rainy season approaches the pressure to capture all the promised animals increases. The danger and adventures behind capturing these animals is the primary concern of the film. Hawks was determined to minimize the use of stunt doubles and once Wayne was willing to put himself in considerable danger to enhance the excitement of the actual captures all the other actors fell into line and joined in the action. Audiences were then engaged in over an hour of screen time devoted to the attempts to chase, rope and subdue wildebeests, antelope, giraffes, cape buffalo and rhinos from open doored jeeps and open bed trucks.

Unlike many of the other Hollywood African epics already mentioned, Hatari is unconcerned with killing, though in one sequence is crocodile is supposedly shot to save Kurt (Hardy Kruger) from attack while he is in a river trying to winch a jeep out of the water. Hatari seems to say that real adventure means no guns. You want a buffalo? Go out and capture it with your bare hands.

When a young elephant calf has been orphaned and is about to be shot by the game warden, it is rescued by the group's newest member Dallas (Elsa Martinelli) an Italian magazine photojournalist, who demands to be given the opportunity to keep the calf alive. The group tries to dissuade her, but when she demands loyalty they immediately drop everything, pool their meager money to purchase a goat herd from local farmers, learn to milk them, while she finally develops a formula that saves and nourishes the elephant. By film's end Dallas has saved three young orphaned elephants and they follow her around like ducks that have imprinted on her as their mother. These elephants provide much of the comedy for the film's ending making sure Dallas and Sean become a couple both professionally and romantically.

It is this amiable comic quality that separates Hatari from most adventure epics. The captures are always serious affairs, jeeps overturn and people are injured, but amid the serious tone, is the moral universe of Hawks where people are only judged by their abilities and nothing more, and most of the time their actions are comic and ludicrous in turns. Men and women are reduced to foolish animals when their sexual drives overcome their good sense. The only way to control those impulses is through serious work. This small group functions as a smooth unit willing to face death in order to fufill its contracts. Back at their home base they relax with card games, drink, banter and mild sexual jealousies, which are always settled in the friendliest of fashions. It is an idealized world that never has to challenge the results of the work that they do.

But it is this work that fills the zoos and circuses of the world with animals that were once free and living without disturbance in their own space. Hatari takes great pains to represent the enormous beauty of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), its great plains, rivers and forests all full of life. The intrusion of the capture group is contrasted with the power and grace of the free roaming animals. Now that these animals have become commodified for their value to be displayed in artificial envrionments, their capture is portrayed as being merciful. At least they won't be shot by some rich industrialist on safari trying to impress his mistress or his faithless wife. But since Hatari's crew never questions their work, we never question our own needs for such entertainment. Without us as an audience animal captures would never exist.