Environmental Challenge

Water, Water Everywhere

This post comes to you from Cultura21

Film still from Shifting directed by Michael Varisco

The Museums of Los Gatos hosts a Film screening of select films from the traveling media exhibition: “Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource“, curated by Jennifer Heath.

Thursday, September 27, 7-9pm

Location: The Art Museum | 4 Tait Avenue

All other films from Water, Water Everywhere will  be exhibited in conjunction with the current exhibition Shaped by Water: Past, Present and Future at the History Museum of Los Gatos from August 1-December 30, 2012. Visitors will have to opportunity to view films not featured in the screening throughout the duration of Shaped by Water.  These films will be  juxtaposed with historic film footage of Santa Clara Valley waterways.

Media Exhibition Description:

Water is the world’s most crucial commodity and the basis for all earthly life. Its preservation and protection may be our greatest environmental challenge.

WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE is comprised of 30-second to 30-minute videos from 40 artists worldwide exploring water issues from the political to the personal and from ethics to aesthetics, with works that are documentary, experimental, educational, humorous, solemn, animated or acted. WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE is designed to be a platform for discussion and action to bring to light the world water crisis and the sanctity of water and its sources.

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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Framing the World — An art & ecology notebook

Excerpted From Cathy Fitzgerald’s An Art & Ecology Notebook:

Twelve essays  in four parts, focusing on ecocinema as activist cinema; the representation of environmental justice issues in Hollywood; independent and foreign films, the representation of animals, ecosystems, natural and human-made landscapes and readings of two mainstream eco-auteurs, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Peter Greenaway, Framing the World; explorations in ecocriticism and film, edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010

At last, a book on ecocriticism for film that is more than a review of films with environmental themes (though there are so very few of the latter as well). Lots of very valuable and timely essays on both mainstream cinema but also identifying key experimental filmmakers who have developed ecocentric approaches to film-making, for eg. in the work of independent Slovenian film/sound artist Andrej Zdravic. Also an excellent chapter on the very real limitations and lack of critical awareness in the director Herzog’s popularly regarded environmental films.

Also of note and just published this year is ‘Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Challenge‘. I think its great to have this perspective of film from a region that has endured vast ecological destruction and is producing many poignant environmental films. This book is much more academic but again an excellent resource for those interested in the critical development of ecocinema. It’s also made me eager to search out the films mentioned in the book, like this one centered on  the 3 Gorges dam – ‘Still Life’

via Framing the World -two timely new books on ecocriticism and film — An art & ecology notebook.