Marc Terwagne presents a conference entitled “Nature, environment and ecology in popular cinema”.
A great film buff and cinema programmer from the Dinant cultural center, Marc Terwagne travels through the history of cinema to identify how the idea of preserving nature has, little by little, made its way there because, even in science fiction , cinema always reflects the concerns of its time.
From the first silent films glorifying industrial progress, such as John Ford’s “Iron Horse” in 1924 – to the glory of the railway -, to contemporary productions, warning of environmental dangers, this evolution is particularly marked after 1945. The atomic bomb then shakes up consciences and gives rise to a new genre: disaster films.
-What is fundamentally happening for humanity in 1945? The atomic bomb, obviously. The atomic bomb will completely transform people’s imagination. Before, we already had disaster films, but they were mainly natural disasters, like a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, or plane crashes, fires… There, suddenly, there will be a new state of disaster. spirit which is squarely the fear of the end of the world.
After the 1970s, environmental concerns gradually increased in film productions. The animated film WALL-E can be considered a perfect synthesis of contemporary environmental concerns. It combines three key dimensions: nature represented by the small plant growth discovered on Earth, the environment with the planet transformed into an immense public dump and behavioral ecology with this reflection on the way of life of humans in the space station.
