Cinema, Nature, Ecology: The Sixth Annual Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference

From massive multiplayer games to the multiplex, cinema and media play a central role in shaping our awareness of "environments.” The sixth annual Cinema and Media Studies graduate student conference presents new scholarship on the moving image and the environmental imagination. Cinema, Nature, Ecology brings together young scholars investigating how nature, environment, and ecology might be taken up by the history, theory, and practice of cinema and other experiential media. These investigations range broadly, from Walt Whitman's poetry to Pixar's blockbuster WALL-E, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Paul Virilio, and from ecological psychology to evolutionary biology. What they all have in common is a commitment to expanding how we think about the interplay of cinema and media with the natural world, the environment and environmentalism, and ecological ways of thinking.

Featured screening: Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance

Godfrey Reggio, 1982, 35mm, 86min

Koyaanisqatsi is the visually and musically virtuosic film by director Godfrey Reggio, cinematographer Ron Fricke, and composer Philip Glass. An unconventional documentary of the changes wrought by 20th century technology, shot almost entirely in slow motion and time lapse, the film moves from images of unspoiled nature to the chaos of cities to the alienation of high technology.