Plains of Being: An Art House Environmentalism Watchlist
This April, come to FACETS and celebrate Earth Month with our Art House Environmentalism Screening Series running from April 1st-15th. Programmed by our Customer Service Rep Perry Ruhland, each selection contemplates humanity’s modern disconnection from the natural world.
To accompany Perry’s screening series, here are ten films we have curated to reflect different elements of how humanity lives with nature… or has corrupted it. From across the world and via a variety of genres, each one makes a statement on a dimension of environmental concerns. From sustainability concerns to sheer disaster, these films reflect the vantage of their artists grappling with the way humans live with nature or impose upon it.
KOYAANISQATSI
DIRECTED BY GODFREY REGGIO (1982, USA)
An accompanying work to Baraka, director Godfrey Reggio’s film is similarly wordless and image-based. Ron Fricke, director of Baraka, worked as cinematographer for this film and it is a powerful demonstration of his talent behind the camera.
Buttressed by a powerful Phillip Glass score, Koyaanisqatsi works off of a pure interpretation of Eisenstein’s montage theories, all juxtaposition of images. Time-lapse photography is used to imply a feeling of acceleration and carries forward the film’s themes of humanity’s influence on the world at large.
Koyaanisqatsi has an intense ambience about it that is meant to distill a different reaction among each viewer: a difficult film to describe but one easy to recommend. It remains as one of the defining and purely cinematic experiences with a formal ambition rarely matched.
Rent Koyaanisqatsi from FACETS.
STALKER
DIRECTED BY ANDREI TARKOVSKY (1979, SOVIET UNION)
If Koyaanisqatsi is embodied by its nearly relentless series of juxtaposed images, Stalker is a film that represents a formal opposition while covering similar themes of environmental alienation. Tarkovsky’s signature style of long takes is at work here making for a unique effect when combined with its disconnected soundscape.
In a post-apocalyptic future, “Stalkers” are guides taking explorers into an area known as the Zone. An overgrown and uninhabited landscape, the Zone supposedly contains a structure within where rumors say someone’s innermost wish is granted. The film’s setting allows Tarkovsky to play with the impact of color in film: scenes in the decaying industrial landscapes where humans live are filmed in sepia and brown tones. Conversely, scenes in the Zone, for all its danger and eerie qualities, are in color. Surrounded by forestry and full of abandoned signs of human life, the Zone uniquely feels like nature taking the world back by force.
Underappreciated on release, Stalker has since been reevaluated within Tarkovsky’s filmography. A striking take on the relationship between man and nature as well as a harrowing embodiment of disaster as rebirth. Short on comfort but long on impact, Stalker will have you debating the numerous interpretations of what it means to be “overrun.”
Rent Stalker at FACETS.
BLACK RAIN
DIRECTED BY SHOHEI IMAMURA (1989, JAPAN)
The use of the Atomic Bomb by the United States on Japan during WWII remains one of the most scarring instances of human action upon ourselves as well as the environment. Socially conscious Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain shows the lives of the hibakusha, those who survived exposure to the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yasuko (Yoshiko Tanaka, Godzilla vs. Biollante) lives with her uncle and aunt in Hiroshima and is exposed to the radioactive fallout from the bombing. Despite showing no signs of sickness, she’s stigmatized by the society around her for being single while at marrying age even when suitors believe she’s incapable of birthing healthy children. Imamura’s film is shot in stark black and white and reminiscent of the neo-realist tradition with an emphasis on the personal. Imagery of animals and foliage underline the tension of a world now out of balance from the blast. For Imamura’s protagonists, society and nature are now equally precarious.
Its opening sequences of the devastation wreaked by the atomic bomb remain harrowing even now and its critique of a society which quietly pushes away a category of victims is forever relevant. A portrait of one of humanity’s most severe transgressions and unnatural acts, Black Rain wonders distance from a disaster insulates the individual from understanding and action alike.
Rent Black Rain from Amazon.
SAFE
DIRECTED BY TODD HAYNES (1995, USA)
Inspired by articles about “environmental illness” director Todd Haynes crafted this horror film about well-off housewife Carol White (Julianne Moore, The Big Lebowski) whose life breaks down once she manifests sensitivity to stimulants present across her affluent Los Angeles suburb.
Shot in a way where characters are constantly framed at a middle distance to keep audiences from truly connecting, or trusting, anyone who comes into contact with Carol. As she becomes increasingly alienated from friends and exhausts medical options, she retreats into the arms of a new-age commune hoping to find the solace and connection now denied by her condition.
Understood alternately as a critique of the New Age movement and a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, Safe is an ambiguous and disturbing portrait of how society places the burden of recovery on the individual. Haynes later made Dark Waters in 2019, a powerful dramatization of the case levied against the chemical manufacturer DuPont following their contamination of a town in West Virginia.
Rent Safe from FACETS.
PLASTIC CHINA
DIRECTED BY JIU-LIANG WANG (2016, CHINA)
A documentary about the human cost it takes to keep up with our own living practices as a species, Plastic China shows life in a plastic recycling workshop through the eyes of Yi-Jie, an 11 year old girl. China, as the world’s largest importer of waste plastic, has an enormous industry of small scale recycling outlets sorting through the world’s scrap materials. Wang’s film finds Yi-Jie and her family as denizens among a landscape of global leftovers, hoping to work their way to a better life.
One of the aspects at the forefront of our minds with the environment is wondering what kind of world will be left over for the next generation. As climate change remains a wraith lingering over our everyday activity, Plastic China shows a side to sustainable practices often forgotten about as a beneficial act is broken down to another source of revenue. The film isn’t as discouraging as that description: it does offer hope for its individual subject’s future. But it does so while casting a light on the fact we are all interconnected no matter where we are in the world.
Rent Plastic China from Amazon.
SNOWPIERCER
DIRECTED BY BONG JOON-HO (2013, SOUTH KOREA)
Life after a catastrophe is a common theme in ecological sci-fi and Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer fits in that framework with a stylish take on societal structure and control.
Curtis (Chris Evans, Puncture) lives in the back compartment of the Snowpiercer, a train which holds the last holdouts of humanity following the inception of a new ice age. The train circles the earth, with its back compartments containing the underclass that maintains it during its unending journey. The forward compartments hold the wealthy and privileged who live in comfort while taking whatever they want from the rear compartments, including their children. Curtis leads a revolt to get to the front of the train, enlisting its security specialist (Song Kang-Ho, Parasite) in an eventual confrontation with the mysterious industrialist (Ed Harris, Pollack) at the head of it all.
Based on a series of french comics, the film is a truly international meeting of the minds with Bong making his English language debut after the acclaimed Mother. Though some of the thematic elements are a little obvious to some viewers, Bong’s familiar tonal mixture is on full-display and masterfully switches from surreal comedy to grimy realism. For all of its sci-fi trappings, the film addresses where societies and governing bodies place the onus of addressing problems in a way few others reach at. Harrowing technically and masterfully aware of the power of stardom, Snowpiercer remains a thoughtful and thrilling film stylishly told by a master filmmaker.
Rent Snowpiercer at FACETS.
ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD
DIRECTED BY WERNER HERZOG (2007, USA)
Werner Herzog has a number of films which are conscious of our relationship to nature, to say nothing of his memorable monologue from The Burden of Dreams. From Grizzly Man to Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, Herzog’s filmography offers plenty of ruminations over humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Though he considers nature “monumentally indifferent” to humanity’s presence, this 2007 documentary about Arctic landscapes and the people who live upon them is both harrowing and awe-striking.
Herzog, for whatever his existential inclinations, captures staggeringly beautiful vistas. Aware of how nature can be as capricious as the human whims imposed upon it, the documentary shows the remnants of the Shackleton Expedition still preserved in the Arctic tundra where temperatures register an average of -57 degrees celsius. Respectful of nature but aware of its dangers, Herzog and his cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger act as the sole crew on a journey across Antarctica that takes them from McMurdo Research Station to the slopes of Mt. Erebus and beyond.
Rent Encounters at the End of the World from FACETS.
STILL LIFE
DIRECTED BY JIA ZHANGKE (2006, CHINA)
Winner of the Golden Lion at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, Still Life shows the real life impact of the Three Gorges Dam construction along the Yangtze River via the fictional story of two people searching for their missing spouses.
Jia Zhangke is one of China’s “Sixth Generation” filmmaker movement and all of his films carry social concerns about the way people interact with their environments whether social or ecological. The Three Gorges Dam is a particularly interesting topic because it remains a controversial structure. Its construction caused flooding in a staggering number of cities, towns, villages, and historic sites while displacing over a million people. Zhangke’s films thematically deal with the effect of globalization within modern Chinese society, told with a realistic style.
Still Life breaks from that slightly with some stylistic asides, such as UFO appearing during one of the act breaks between its three segments. But its juxtaposition of natural beauty with actual urban decay brings you back to reality quickly. Yet the drama between the characters remains powerful even with the powerful imagery of the setting. Still Life is an excellent pick for examining the relationships between people and environment lensed through the staggering impact of man made constructs.
Rent Still Life from FACETS.
THE TREE, THE MAYOR, AND THE MEDIATHEQUE
DIRECTED BY ÉRIC ROHMER (1993, FRANCE)
Many of our films in this series embody a harsher take on the state of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. But if you’re looking for something lighter about the contest between nature and the modern world, then Rohmer’s 1993 political farce is an excellent choice.
A remote village sees itself with a new mayor that hopes to use the construction of a modern cultural center as a boost in reputation for later national campaigns. Spending most of his time in Paris, Mayor Dechaumes is surprised to find a mixed response when he finally makes the time to visit his new constituents: they’re upset the construction requires a great deal of groundwork, including the removal of a beloved 100 year old willow tree.
Released in the middle of Rohmer’s Four Seasons cycle of films, his work here dwells on what defines the nature of politics and manifests it as an escalating comedy of errors. There’s no clear indication if there’s an entirely right answer to any of what’s at stake. Rohmer’s conservative tendencies are apparent through his hatred of bureaucracy but he’s also sympathetic and affectionate towards nature that the tone is light. The need for advancement and the pull of necessity are then stacked against one another in a film commenting on how even the smallest decision humanity makes creates a mark on nature.
Watch The Tree, the Mayor, and the Mediatheque at MUBI.
SHIN GODZILLA
DIRECTED BY SHINJI HIGUCHI AND HIDEAKI ANNO (2016, JAPAN)
An absolutely blistering take on the need for unified action during a time of crisis, Shin Godzilla pulls no punches. Its depiction of what it takes to force a bureaucracy to face a problem remains a concern for any citizenry concerned with catastrophe response. All the Godzilla films have some element of ecological concern even as they evolved from the initial 1954 film into more wild directions. But Anno and Higuchi’s film evokes how critical it is for governing bodies to react to imminent threats as embodied by their take on cinema’s most famous giant lizard.
If the original Godzilla sprang from the specter of the atomic bomb, this version’s inspriations lie in the 2011 Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. But rather than the 1954 film’s depiction of a steely and confident government taking immediate action, Shin Godzilla shows an institution drastically unprepared to the point of satire. The result is a film that gives some relief to the frustration we all feel when seeing the slow motion of climate reform. A cutting depiction of a nation struggling with old systems holding back actual change, the film is a unique and striking choice for Earth Month viewing.
Rent Shin Godzilla from FACETS.
Prepare for our Environmental Arthouse series by pre-ordering tickets. Each film will screen on a Friday at 7 PM from April 1st to the 15th, starting with The Last Wave. To accompany this watchlist, which is full of selections you can pick up from the FACETS catalogue, you can also explore our current rental micro-genre of other Arthouse films with environmental themes.
Richard Hooper is an Editorial Assistant Intern at FACETS; his favorite film ruminating on humanity’s role in the environment is Princess Mononoke. He has an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, writing his thesis on intermediality in animated film. He’s worked with film practically and critically, and a piece of his heart will always belong with 35mm projection.