10 - Climate on Screen

Summary

While literary texts rely on words to help readers imagine climate change, film relies on a different narrative toolset of images, motion, and sound, pre-packaging our perception, if not our affective response. In climate change cinema, such pre-packaging has tended toward the dark and disastrous as filmmakers are torn between the desire to forewarn and the need to entertain and make money. It has thus become a critical commonplace that cinematic depictions of climate change offer a spectacle-driven, apocalyptic vision that is at odds with the diffuse experience of climate and the slow violence of climate change. Some critics fear such dark visions might prove detrimental to addressing the issue because people end up disengaging from it. The first part of the chapter explores emotions cued by dystopian depictions of climate doom. The second part turns to two films that have tried an entirely different affective approach – Cyril Dion and Melanie Laurent’s Demain and Damon Gameau’s 2040 – by presenting possible solutions to the climate crisis along with desirable futures, in a mode that is often humorous, witty, and uplifting. The chapter argues that both strategies have their place in climate change cinema, and both can be effective with some audiences.