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Contribution short abstract:

Film narratives about nature are rooted in a long tradition of worldviews where it cannot escape a condition of object of concern for human scrutiny, taming and consumption. This paper examines how audiovisual content navigates (and has navigated) such dominant toxic narrative infrastructure.

Contribution long abstract:

Arguably, film is one of the most influential forms that human communities have created to build and look at themselves. Thus, it is unsurprisingly rich in conceptualizations of the environment, in narratives about nature. For instance, in the past few decades, we have become increasingly familiar with apocalyptic tales concerning multiple human ways of relating to the environment, broadly understood, and their subsequent destructive effects. But these narratives, however well-meant they might be, are unequivocally rooted in a long tradition of representations and worldviews that precede and overlap the history of film itself as well as the current growing sense of looming environmental catastrophe. Often in these narratives, nature cannot escape a condition of object of concern for scientific scrutiny, technological taming, political-economic management, socio-cultural commodification and, in the end, all-round consumption.

Through a few illustrative examples and combining perspectives from film and screen studies and environmental humanities, this paper will explore a range of film, televisual and wider audiovisual narratives which, in many ways, have tried to offer alternative stories and/or, at least, question the dominant views about nature. We will therefore examine to what extent it has been and/or is feasible, through films, or better nowadays, audiovisual content, to overcome the dominant and long-lasting toxic communication infrastructure that, from the abovementioned approach, ends up silencing, normalizing, and/or invisibilizing (socio-ecological) injustices.