“Dark ecologies” name a range of historically maligned environments, associated with ideas of darkness, unruliness, danger or disease, such as swamps, forests, polluted fields, bushes, urban ghettoes etc. These diverse environments oftentimes  inhabited by marginalized populations as sites of refuge, survival and life-making, have also been targeted by ruling classes for removal, destruction or neglect. Placing in critical conversation film studies and geography, this multidisciplinary course provides an overview of cinematic engagements with dark ecologies, with a focus on how cinematic ideas and approaches to the concept of darkness partake of a wider material production of dark ecologies. Students will interrogate the fraught relationship between cinema, spectatorship and ecology, focusing on environments that resist legibility and visibility. Each week is structured around a body of films, supplemented by textual materials. Examples will primarily drawn from filmmakers hailing from alternative or oppositional cinematic traditions, such as Third cinema, experimental cinema, feminist cinema, queer cinema, Black cinema and postcolonial cinema.

Learning objectives

• Understand diverse approaches to ecology in ecocinema, Black studies and geography
• Interrogate the racialized histories of the camera in relation to genealogies of persistent ecological metaphors (i.e. “the dark continent,” or the concept of “black holes”)
• Interrogate the materiality of film, as sensorial, ecological objects as well as powerful discourses and imaginations that shape environments
• Develop a critical vocabulary and tools to analyse arthouse, experimental films

Provisional syllabus (subject to change)