Political Ecology film series

NoC Staff Report

Last week, a group of graduate students at the University of Kentucky started a free film series in Lexington dedicated to showcasing relationships between people and the natural environment. Organized under the banner of the UK Political Ecology Working Group, the series will feature both fictional films and documentaries (and some that will blur those categories). Ranging from Travis Wilkerson’s experimental 2002 documentary about radical organizing in Montana copper mines to Terrence Malick’s 1978 masterpiece Days of Heaven, the films showcase how the natural environment figures into daily life and historical processes.

We hope the films will help to forge links between faculty, students, and Lexington residents with interests in environmental history, nature-society relationships, environmental justice, or any other mediation between social and natural processes. Aside from showing great films for free every other week, the series intends to raise interest in the second annual Dimensions of Political Ecology: Conference on Nature-Society Research to be held at UK in April 2012. For more information or to get involved with the conference or the UK Political Ecology Working Group, please visit: http://www.politicalecology.org.

The films will be shown every other Tuesday at 7 PM in the Bingham Davis House, part of UK’s Gaines Center (232 East Maxwell Street). Descriptions of the next two films are below, and you can access the full schedule at the web site above.

9/20: GasLand (USA: Josh Fox, 2010: 107 min)

The largest domestic natural gas drilling boom in history has swept across the United States. The Halliburton-developed drilling technology of “fracking” or hydraulic fracturing has unlocked a “Saudia Arabia of natural gas” just beneath us. But is fracking safe?

When filmmaker Josh Fox is asked to lease his land for drilling, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey uncovering a trail of secrets, lies and contamination. A recently drilled nearby Pennsylvania town reports that residents are able to light their drinking water on fire. This is just one of the many absurd and astonishing revelations of a new country called GASLAND. Part verite travelogue, part expose, part mystery, part bluegrass banjo meltdown, part showdown. (Description from film’s website: http://www.gaslandthemovie.com/

10/4: Days of Heaven (USA: Terrence Malick, 1978: 94 min)

Terrence Malick’s second film—after the monumental Badlands and before taking two decades off from filmmaking—is a stunning and affecting portrayal of the American landscape. It tracks the movement of an itinerant family in 1916, from the factories of emerging industrial cities to the cornfields of the Midwest, eventually centering on a love triangle on a remote farm in the Texas panhandle. But like all of Malick’s films, Days of Heaven is a film about landscape, nature, and beauty. Featuring a score by Ennio Morricone and striking cinematography by Nestor Almendros, Days of Heaven is a beautifully rendered look at the development of the American West.