The Climate Crisis and Its Roots in Cinema - PART 2 in a series by Turkish film critic Ms. Tugce Dizici

 

 

The Climate Crisis and Its Roots in Cinema

BY TUGE DIZICI IN TURKEY
''FILM GUIDE''
part 2 IN HER RECENT SERIES ON CLI-FI NOVELS AND MOVIES IN TURKISH TRANSLATED HERE TO ENGLISH. -- db

When there is a stir in the political arena and the scientific world in the world, the reflections of this have been seen in the cinema and continue to be seen immediately. Cinema has also addressed the issue of climate crisis, which also helps it expand its artistic content, by instrumentalizing itself in a beneficial way and has played an important role in raising awareness. We can say that films dealing with climate crisis, environmental disasters, and global warming and cooling have taken place on the screen since the 1970s and these Hollywood films are concerned with the anxiety and fear of the future of humanity. Here are all these environmental issues and the films about the climate crisis, we should collect the films under the heading of Cli-fi.

Cli-fi coiner and promoter since 2011 Danny Bloom

Let's talk cli-fi, shall we?  I met the American  writer Danny Bloom online, who contacted me after  reading last week's part 1 in the series of my writing and who told me he started promoting the word Cli-fi in the  2011 and I hope to have an interview with him soon.

"Cli" is produced with the first three letters of the word "climate" and "fi" is produced with two letters of the word fiction (fiction) in English, and a word meaning climate-fiction is created. There is also reference to science fiction.

Cli-fi is an important term for novels and movies that deal with the climate crisis and global warming concerns, or in which the climate crisis or the frosts that point to it. In order to define a novel or a movie as a cli-fi, it is not necessary to have a main theme as a climate crisis.

Many sci-fi movies only touch on climate-related issues, especially in Cli-fi concerns about climate change. In fact, they are roughly close to sci-fi and cli-fi.

Cli-fi in Literature

The climate issue is also important for John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" (1939). In the opening part of the novel, drought and dust storms are mentioned that continue until the end of June. The ecological and agricultural disaster is intertwined with the Great Depression period in which the economic collapse was experienced, which is the biggest factor that forces the Midwest farmers to migrate to the climate.

In the books of J. G. Ballard's "The Burning World" (1964) and John Brunner's "Sheep Look Up" (1972), scientists depict worlds destroyed by environmental disasters before fully revealing man-made climate change.

Margaret Atwood's dystopian trilogy Antelope and Flurya (2003), Flood Time (2009) and MaddAddam (2013) will be the best examples to discover the Cli-fi genre.

In this trilogy in the near future, we find outbreaks, floods and genetic engineering have completely changed the world we know today.

Cli-fi in cinema

I sampled the Soylent Green movie in part 1 of this series.

Another important Cli-fi example of 7190's Hollywood films that worried about the future of humanity is Robert Altman's 1979 post-apocalyptic movie called Quintet.

As a result of scientific developments, we see the results of global cooling in this film, where we see the right fear of the 1970s on the climate crisis. As I said before, the main theme does not only have to be about climate change, but to describe a novel, a movie as Cli-fi.

For example, the fact that it is constantly raining in the Los Angeles depiction in the movie Blade Runner (1982) is entirely Cli-fi. The film, which also touches on important topics such as dense population, globalization, climate change and genetic engineering, literally belongs to this genre.

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar movie is clearly Cli-fi from this point of view.

In the film in the distant future, we see the extent of ecological and agricultural damage of globally burning products and Dust Bowl, that is, severe dust storms. In this era, when all the world's food sources are destroyed, scientists watch that they are trying to go through the wormhole in the galaxy to find a new planet in which humanity can survive.

Another example of Cli-fi is the 2012 movie directed by Roland Emmerich. In this disaster movie, we see that volcanic eruptions and severe earthquakes have begun to occur all over the world and the radiation coming from solar storms is threatening the earth. If we cluster the movies we watch in this way, we will see that there are a significant number of Cli-fi movies.

The 3D animated movie Wall-e begins its story in a dilapidated dirty world that has become uninhabitable due to the misuse of the environment.

Mad Max: Fury Road makes us watch Furiosa looking for the Green Realms in the world of collapsed civilizations where the world is deserted and the problem of thirst is at its peak.

In the movie Danny Boyle Sunshine, he tells us a story in a distant time when the sun's rays are not enough to heat the Earth.

British spy movie Kingsman: In the Secret Service, a wealthy villain (villain) is preparing to destroy people to save the planet from pollution, population density and climate change.

Cli-fi, which can be elaborated with numerous examples, hopefully a student will choose and study this highly comprehensive and even interdisciplinary subject as a thesis topic.

 

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bonus notes re:

Emily Atkin aka @emorwee on Twitter, is a climate activist with a popular daily newsletter titled HEATED (by subscription only) and she recently did a cli-fi themed newsletter

 

emily atkins with a climate fiction themed newsletter at her newsletter called ''HEATED''

 

HER EMAIL NEWSLETTER THE OTHER DAY WAS HEADLINED:

Let's talk about climate fiction, y'all

 

Emily Atkin aka @emorwee on Twitter, is a climate activist with a popular daily newsletter (by subscription only) and she recently did a cli-fi themed newsletter. SHE ASKED readers and I am also asking YOU HERE: "What's your favorite or least favorite climate-related storyline in fiction? What makes it so good or bad?" (I will pass on your answers to Emily via email)... DAN

***"Curious, empathetic, compassionate: What we should be as human beings."***

THE ''Cli-Fi ''REPORT:
100 academic and  media links:
http://cli-fi.net