Film began as an indoor artform, with cameras being too bulky and expensive to move outdoors. However, inventors still found ways to address nature before cinema was even properly invented, as photographer Eadweard Muybridge settled a long-standing argument among horse experts by taking a series of time-elapsed photos of a galloping horse and proving that horses indeed had all four hooves off the ground at a certain point during their natural gait.
As films moved out of the studio, directors became more adventurous working outdoors. D.W. Griffith’s 1920 silent melodrama Way Down East depicted the film’s hero (Richard Barthelmess) carrying the unconscious heroine (Lillian Gish) across ice floes on a frozen river, and the only way to shoot the scene was to have the actors — two of the biggest movie stars of their time — actually perform the stunt without doubles on a river in Vermont. While crew members used dynamite to break up the ice and exaggerated the height of the waterfall that the characters were trying to avoid — it was only a few feet high in reality, so Griffith inserted shots of Niagara Falls to simulate his heroes’ mortal danger — the illusionistic power of cinema brought the scale of nature to audiences everywhere.
Disaster films were among Hollywood’s first attempts to reckon with nature, and W.S. Van Dyke’s 1936 musical San Francisco was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar largely on the strength of its recreation of the 1906 earthquake that hit that city, which was a landmark for special effects at the time. Movies in the mid-20th century largely concerned themselves with nuclear disasters and their impact on the environment, such as the Godzilla movies and James Bridges’ 1979 thriller The China Syndrome, which initially attracted little notice but then became a major box-office hit when the reactor at Three Mile Island melted down 12 days after the film’s release.
While environmental messages have resulted in terribly sanctimonious filmmaking on many occasions, fiction storytellers have found ways to tell nuanced stories about nature. Hayao Miyazaki’s 1999 masterpiece Princess Mononoke depicted an aristocratic town leader deforesting the surrounding area but refused to reduce the character to a simplistic villain, showing the town providing shelter and work for the poorest people. Bong Joon-ho went absurdist with his 2013 film Snowpiercer, portraying the last vestige of human civilization going insane aboard a train barreling through a human-caused ice age. As opposed to that film’s maximalism, Paul Schrader’s 2017 drama First Reformed starred Ethan Hawke as a tormented Reformed Protestant preacher pondering whether to carry out a suicide bombing to protest climate change.
Any history of environmental films must inevitably include documentaries. Most of us grew up with nature films on TV (such as The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau), demonstrating the eating and migratory habits of either furry and cuddly creatures or dangerous predators. The drawing power of these remains hard-wired.
If you want something wildly different, Pare Lorentz made The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River in the 1930s, bankrolled by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to document how farming and forestry practices had damaged the environment of the Dust Bowl and the Mississippi River delta, respectively. Rather than hard data or interviews with scientific experts, the films use footage of the despoiled landscape and poetic narration on the soundtrack (written by Lorentz and read by opera singer Thomas Hardie Chalmers). I saw The River in film school, and the serious tone and deliberate repetitions in the narration raised laughs among my fellow students — “We rolled a million bales down the river for Liverpool and Leeds / We rolled four million bales down the river / Rolled them off Alabama / Rolled them off Mississippi / Rolled them off Louisiana / Rolled them down the river” — but if you’re in the right frame of mind, the repetitions acquire an incantatory power quite unlike anything today. Also unlike anything today is Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi, nonnarrative films examining the clash of traditional ways of life with the march of technology.
Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth not only won an Oscar (and won Al Gore a Nobel Peace Prize), but it also greatly impacted both fiction films and documentaries about climate change. Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein’s No Impact Man took a comic view of Colin Beavan’s attempt to make no impact on the environment, while Marshall Curry’s If a Tree Falls: The Story of the Earth Liberation Front delved seriously into the psyches of the activists who crossed the line into ecoterrorism.
Natural themes show no signs of slowing down in our multiplexes. Viktor Kossakovsky’s ineffably strange documentaries such as Aquarela and Architecton examine the impact of human activity on the planet, and Ben Masters represents Texas to the world with his records of our state’s wildlife in Deep in the Heart and The River and the Wall. On a more mainstream note, environmental themes formed the center of Pixar’s Hoppers and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia. As filmmaking technology improves and our knowledge of the world around us grows more extensive, the big screen continues to give us new perspectives on the environment.
