Incorporating ecocritical perspectives into introductory film production pedagogy

Introduction

Ecocritical perspectives on cinema, sustainable production methods, and films about environmental concerns are not secondary subjects appropriate only for more advanced coursework, but rather they are critical elements of early film-making instruction. As emphasised throughout the extensive body of work on eco-cinema, all films produce material impacts on the world, new experiences of environments and new socio-material realities (Bozak, 2011; Ingram, 2004; Ivakhiv, 2013; Rust et al., 2012, 2023). Correspondingly, all film production pedagogy imparts specific models of resource consumption, environmental relationships and social relationships. Current models of industrial film production are imbricated with extractive practices and entrench harmful ways of relating to the world. Beginning students’ film-making education by implicitly accepting these models of production builds problematic ways of sensing, feeling, thinking and acting into students’ foundational conceptions of cinema.

This article considers ways in which we might disrupt this legacy by integrating ‘ecomaterialist’ perspectives into introductory film production coursework. Vaughan (2019: 13) defines this term as:

an approach that does not limit its environmental scope to the question of representation … but explores the material environmental impact of film practices, from the extraction of minerals to the chemical waste of its process, the centrality of natural symbolism in its marketing and crossover merchandising, and the restructuring of urban communities based on production culture ebbs and flows.

Introductory production courses can present students with an opportunity to learn film-making as a relational, socio-material process, rather than as a set of predetermined craft skills and aesthetic concepts. Introducing students to film through challenges of perception, care and collaboration emphasises the relational aspects of film-making in early coursework.

Recent publications on environmental and green film-making articulate the reasons for this pedagogical revision. One central concern of much of this scholarship is the material and environmental impacts of the film industry. Critical perspectives on these impacts include Nadia Bozak’s (2011) The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, camera, natural resources, Hunter Vaughan’s (2019) Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret: The hidden environmental cost of the movies and Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller’s (2012) Greening the Media. Alongside – and at times responding to – these critical perspectives are industry organisations that publicise various initiatives for reducing the material impacts of large-scale productions. Vaughan (2019) discusses some of these at length. In the United States, projects such as the Producers Guild of America’s Green Initiative, and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance’s ‘Production Toolkit’ detail best practices and accounting measures for all phases of production (Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, 2024). Additional resources such as the Production Environmental Actions Checklist include practices that each department can implement throughout production (Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, 2024). Similar work has been done in the European Union (Green Toolkit, 2023). While these initiatives are often little more than greenwashing, here, I would like to pivot from the necessary critique of their goals and results to instead use these acknowledgements of the film industry’s environmental impacts to inspire – and justify to reluctant colleagues – a more thorough incorporation of eco-materialist theory and practice in undergraduate production coursework.

An emerging body of work applies these critical and industry perspectives to develop sustainable film-making pedagogy. Kent Hayward’s 2025 book, Green Filmmaking, focuses primarily on commercial narrative film-making, outlining best practices across departments and offering practical ways to reduce resource consumption, such as managing transport more efficiently, hiring local crews, reducing expendables and being more thoughtful about the energy use of cloud data storage. The book includes chapters dedicated to professional career tracks, including sections on production design, camera, grip, lighting, craft services, transport, sound and post-production. Throughout, Hayward’s perspective is on relatively minor changes to existing production practices, rather than a wholesale reconsideration of film-making’s environmental impacts. He positions this work alongside the Green Film School Alliance and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance in their shared goal to ‘make green production just production’ (Hayward, 2025: xiv). As mentioned above, these initiatives may be cynically using green discourse merely as a mode of ‘rebranding, riding the wave of public sentiment but not really altering their profit motive and making minimal adjustments to their material practice’ (Vaughan, 2019: 175). Again, rather than critiquing its efficacy, I would like to leverage this work to orient a shift in pedagogical focus, towards a ‘green film-making’ that might grow to produce more fundamental changes to film industry practices.

Working towards more comprehensive changes to film production, Noélie Martin and Jacopo Rasmi (2023) rethink the material basis of moving images, surveying experimental film labs that produce analogue film stocks, developers, and processing techniques that generate as little environmental harm as possible. These labs refigure the process of producing moving images around concerns including the local availability of materials, low energy inputs, and minimal impacts on surrounding environments in all phases of a film’s life cycle (Martin and Rasmi, 2023). Martin and Rasmi (2023) situate this work in relation to larger social, ecological and economic trajectories, framing experimental film labs as a way of incorporating degrowth perspectives into technologies of film production. A very different, but complementary, approach is exemplified by the Small File Media Festival, hosted by Simon Fraser University, Canada, which critiques the material consumption of streaming by restricting data rates of films to one megabyte per minute (https://smallfile.ca/). The festival features works that creatively use extreme compression and low-resolution formats, exploring the aesthetics of limited resource use through their ‘lo-fi intervention’.

Finally, another body of work considers the reception of environmental films. Initiatives such as American University’s Center for Environmental Filmmaking’s ‘Impact Media Report’ focus on best practices for impact producing and ‘outreach strategies for nature, environmental, science films’ (Center for Environmental Filmmaking, 2025: n.p.). In addition to these initiatives, there is a significant amount of work being done to amplify environmentally themed films, including environmental film festivals in many cities around the world. Salma Monani (2012: 256) highlights these festivals’ role in ‘forward[ing] agendas that collate cinema and environment’. Monani (2012: 269–71) explores these festivals’ communication strategies and finds them ‘less interested in information exchange than in information dissemination’, often limiting audience engagement through their design. Both impact reports and festival studies orient critique towards what films do, and how they circulate, engage, and produce publics. This emphasis on film-as-process recurs throughout this article, and it is central to reconsidering what ecocritical film-making pedagogy can and should prioritise.

Together, the perspectives above illustrate the imperative for an eco-materialist film production pedagogy that can harness some of the energies currently applied to greenwashing and impact studies to better prepare students to make fundamental changes to the ways film production produces and reinforces relationships with our more-than-human environments. Instead of focusing primarily on craft skills such as camera operation, editing, lighting or sound recording, I suggest that introductory pedagogy can prioritise students’ attentiveness to their experiences, collaborative abilities and communication skills. This change shifts our focus from a specific set of technical knowledges to a relational process that can promote mental health, social engagement, community building, political mobilisation and resilience. By giving students space to take on these challenging questions, and by resisting the instrumentalisation of our courses as technical career preparation, we can serve a wider range of students intellectually and creatively, while helping them build communities and connections that are invaluable in preparing them for their futures. The observational, critical and organisational abilities that students cultivate can help them build skills useful far beyond film-making, making these approaches particularly beneficial for non-majors and early film production courses.

This article develops a model for introductory film-making pedagogy informed by three overlapping concerns: (1) trauma-informed pedagogy; (2) affect studies; and (3) ecocritical perspectives on film. Scaffolding them in this order emphasises ways in which foundational work in trauma-informed pedagogy supports explorations of affect, and how both come together to inform an ecocritical perspective on film. Below, I explore each of these concerns at length, illustrating their value in introductory film-making pedagogy with example exercises and discussions of ways in which each layer can be leveraged to support the others.

Trauma-informed film-making

Film production pedagogy is entangled with – and often confounded by – students’ mental health crises, social media addictions, and a wide range of systemic and personal traumas. At times these challenges threaten to overwhelm the classroom and become the primary focus of our energies. In addition to these challenges, US universities are increasingly a target for ‘culture wars’ and other reactionary measures aimed at restricting inclusive and equity-focused pedagogy (Cantwell, 2021; Unglesbee, 2024). Finally, when teaching about ecological issues, students’ anxieties, anger and overwhelming despair intersect with their own experiences of a changing climate to further trouble our teaching strategies. In this section, I suggest that our pedagogy can address these issues by drawing on trauma-informed methods, which serve not only as tools for empowering students, but also as a starting point for engaging affect and ecocritical thinking. Below, I outline applications of trauma-informed practices in film-making and climate justice pedagogy, and then use these frameworks to develop a set of practices for introductory film production courses.

In film-making, the Documentary Accountability Working Group’s (DAWG, 2021) From Reflection to Release: Framework for values, ethics, and accountability in nonfiction filmmaking exemplifies the use of trauma-informed practices in film production. Natalie Bullock Brown, the current director of the working group, emphasises the critical importance of ‘centering the care and well-being of film participants … particularly when participants are from marginalized communities, and especially when the story to be told about those communities is marked with trauma’ (Brown, 2021: n.p.). In teaching film-making, not only is this concern for trauma in film subjects critical, but we must also be aware of the flows of trauma among crew, classmates, faculty and school communities. By prioritising care for crew and participants from pre-production through production, post-production and distribution, these guidelines reflect the powerful work that films perform in establishing systems of relating to one another. Further, by prompting us to consider the impacts of films on broader communities, these guidelines lead us to think more carefully about who benefits from specific representational practices and why.

In parallel to its utility in film-making, trauma-informed approaches are equally important for climate justice pedagogy. Students arrive in our classrooms already overwhelmed by climate anxieties. Trama-informed approaches can support students’ abilities to navigate the complex and overwhelming emotions that emerge from attention to the pasts, presents and futures of our changing climate (Atkinson and Ray, 2024; Prabhu and Carello, 2022). As eco-pedagogy moves past ‘doom and gloom’, we need to reconsider the most effective ways to engage the emotions that are central to students’ understandings of – and ability to act within – the changing worlds around them (Atkinson and Ray, 2024). As Atkinson and Ray (2024: 1) explain, ‘It is no longer morally or strategically appropriate to berate students with dire forecasts and reports of the sixth great extinction, to teach case studies of slow violence and ecological destruction, or present problems so deep and entrenched that solutions appear elusive.’ Instead, contributors to The Existential Toolkit for Climate Justice Educators: How to teach in a burning world advocate focusing on subjects such as empathy and care, incorporating affect into climate justice, somatic speculation, and cultivating imagination using creative projects (Atkinson and Ray, 2024).

Responding to the need for trauma-informed approaches in both film production and climate justice coursework, trauma-informed pedagogy can guide our design of students’ early film-making experiences. Students need room to fail, to evaluate these failures, and to share these insights with one another as an integral part of their early experiences of learning to produce films. The frameworks below provide conceptual and practical methods for incorporating trauma-informed pedagogy into an ecocritical approach to film-making. This work can foster safety and help students begin to explore flows of sensations, affect and emotions that can guide new ways of making films, relating to one another, and moving towards climate justice. A scaffolded approach to trauma-informed film-making will encourage and support students in developing these skills. Rather than peripheral considerations for advanced coursework, these components of the film-making process are foundational – starting points for understanding the work films do in the world. If students understand from their early coursework that films are not simply products containing narratives and information, but, rather, systems of care for the world around them, students will be less likely to cultivate extractive and exploitative relationships through their films. Rather than course-correcting after students have learned film-making craft skills, it is critical to build this work into their earliest experiences as film-makers. Below, I outline priorities for a trauma-informed film-making pedagogy that cultivates safety, peer support, collaboration and agency. Throughout this section, I rely significantly on Thompson and Marsh’s (2022) thorough framework in ‘Centering equity: Trauma-informed principles and feminist practice’.

Safety is a foundational element of trauma-informed pedagogy. Explicitly prioritising safety highlights its importance and primes students to attend to their own safety and that of their peers. While some may misunderstand safety to imply avoiding challenges altogether, such avoidance may further isolate students from one another. By leading by example and taking on challenging, potentially uncomfortable discussions early in the semester, instructors can support their students in differentiating between safety and avoidance. As Thompson and Marsh (2022: 22) explain, ‘discomfort and the fear of danger are not the same … fear shuts us down physiologically and psychologically in a way that intellectual discomfort does not’. As instructors, we can explicitly engage these distinctions between discomfort and fear. While not mental-health professionals, we know our students and their behaviours. By attending to these behaviours and encouraging students to discuss their feelings with each other while stakes are low, we can help them build habits that will cultivate safety in the classroom.

Not only is safety a critical starting point for their work, but students’ personal experiences of the borders of safety can help them more richly understand humans and non-humans in the world around them. By first establishing safety and then framing discomfort as ‘a site of rupture, as transformation, as a generative force’, we can help our students cultivate communities of care while also prompting them to consider the disruptive and generative work that their films can perform in the world (Thompson and Marsh, 2022: 23). Addressing these concerns explicitly through observational exercises in early film production courses prioritises the foundational importance of safety, integral to the work on affect and eco-cinema in the next sections.

Exercises on safety can be integrated into a wide range of production courses. For example, in a recent screenwriting class, we began the semester with several observational journaling exercises, including one that asked students to go to a place that felt mildly uncomfortable and take notes on their experiences. They concentrated their attention on their body’s reactions and changes in these sensations over time. Students then moved to a place that they expected to feel comfortable and again took stock of their senses. Small group discussions after this work gave them an accessible starting point for discussing their feelings and sensations. This process began to establish safety and trust in the classroom, grounding subsequent critiques of one another’s work in these shared experiences. In addition, exercises such as these can serve as foundations for future applications of affect-based thinking in more explicitly ecocritical contexts – helping students reconsider the relationships between safety, discomfort, their environments and creative work.

Once safety and trust begin to emerge, students can take on challenges of collaboration. In the early stages of students’ film-making studies, collaboration can be explored by allowing students to work in small groups on all phases of a project. These collaborations avoid forcing students into overly hierarchical production styles, and focus instead on exploring the ethical, aesthetic and collaborative engagements that are foundational to the process of film production. Film-making provides many opportunities for prioritising and valuing collaboration. By clearly emphasising collaboration in grading systems and syllabuses, while empowering these peer interactions to determine aspects of assignments, schedules and grading, students understand that collaboration is not an extra task, but that it is integral to the film-making process.

It is important not only to valorise collaboration, but also to frame it as a site of disruption. Easy consensus is often a shallow agreement between disengaged individuals. While collaboration skills take time, they also reward intentionality. Expecting students to navigate complex decision making without careful training sets them up to fail, completing our courses unable to effectively collaborate, communicate or lead. Acknowledging the importance of this work – and its difficulty – is an important first step in supporting students’ emergence as capable and decisive leaders.

In a recent narrative film-making course, we discussed these challenges explicitly in several early semester classes, and then used the process of producing a shotlist to work on our collaboration, communication and decision-making strategies. In future semesters, I plan to further develop this exercise, requiring each crew member to plan his/her/their own series of shots and then discuss their different strategies. The group will arrive at a final plan, as well as an alternate version. Students will film both versions of the scene and discuss their divergent approaches to the same materials. Introducing collaboration explicitly in early film production courses helps students prioritise its importance, build confidence in their skills, and work towards effective communication strategies that are critical to cultivating healthy and resilient models of relating to one another – and to the planet.

An overarching goal of developing safety, trust, peer support and collaboration in beginning film-makers is to integrate care into their habits, conceptions and practices of film-making. The Documentary Accountability Working Group’s Frameworks articulates ways that care can be fostered at all stages of the film-making process (DAWG, 2021). While this emphasis on the importance of care is critical, Stephanie Springgay (2022) reminds us that care can too easily be defined by neoliberal notions of self-reliance and externalised costs. How should care feel in the film-making process? Whose responsibility is fostering care? When is care uncomfortable? What might change to make it more comfortable? To address these questions in production coursework, I have experimented with several exercises to encourage thoughtful development of care in the film-making process.

In a recent documentary production course, we read the Documentary Accountability Working Group’s Framework (DAWG, 2021) and discussed Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016) in relation to questions of care. Through its inclusion of behind-the-camera sounds, dialogue between camera operator and subject, dialogue between camera operator and director, and the emotions and actions of the people in front of the camera, Cameraperson explicitly calls attention to the integral role of care in documentary film-making. After considering Cameraperson, students conducted a conversational – not recorded – interview with a classmate using a list of predetermined questions chosen to prompt students to discuss things about themselves that might not be immediately comfortable. After the interview, they switched roles and repeated the process. Prior to the interview, students developed specific plans to support the interviewee, considering how they could make them more comfortable before, during and after the interview. Both participants then wrote reflections on their experiences of both sides of the process and shared their findings with the entire class. The class then discussed ways that we might prioritise care for participants in our films.

This work helped the class be more attentive to the experiences of interviewees in their films, and it gave them some experience with practices of care and support. While students may not be ready for subjects as emotionally challenging as those in Cameraperson, the process of reflection and conversation helped them develop methods for caring for participants in their films. Cultivating communities of care in students’ initial film-making experiences begins the process of attuning them to liberatory and anti-oppressive potentials of film production. Rather than training them to join specific cultures of industrial production – which may vanish before they graduate – we can help them learn new ways of being in the world.

In addition to empowering students to develop sustainable and mutually beneficial ways of making films, trauma-informed practices also challenge disciplinary boundaries and oppressive models of thinking and learning. Natalie Loveless (2019: 3) suggests that creative research can ‘work to trouble disciplinary relations of knowledge/power, allowing for more creative, sensually attuned modes of inhabiting the university as a vibrant location of pedagogical mattering … that might help render daily life in the academy more pedagogically, politically, and affectively sustainable’. Loveless (2019) highlights the value of research, creativity, community-building, affect and speculative exploration integral to the film-making process.

Emphasising these collaborative and creative tools helps students resist the turns towards neoliberalism by our universities. By using their films to build communities capable of addressing challenges they collectively face, students can combat both the isolation and the product-driven mindset central to neoliberal models of education. Students can learn to use film-making to subvert the constant, ‘threat, contingency, and emergency’ characteristic of the neoliberal way of life (Valiaho, 2014: xii). This work not only acknowledges the humanity and complex life pathways of the students in the classroom, it also prepares them to more richly engage the affective, emotional and ecological dimensions of films – and the world around them. By equipping students to navigate their varying abilities to feel, notice their bodies, and sit with specific – sometimes uncomfortable – feelings, they will be more able to engage the affect-based work outlined in the next section.

Affect-based film pedagogy

Attunement to flows of affect, and an awareness of the range of ways our bodies sense the world, are central skills of film-making. Introducing these skills in early film coursework leverages the exploratory qualities of students’ first films to expand their perceptions and awareness. Understanding films as flows, intensifications and structurings of affect helps students notice affect around them, while also challenging their reified perceptions of film-as-product by emphasising films’ unfolding as experience and process.

Focusing on affect also provides students with opportunities to explore their experiences without immediately turning to representational, political or ideological arguments. As Kathleen Stewart (2007: 3) explains, affects can help us understand ‘what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present … [Ordinary affects] are a kind of contact zone where the overdeterminations of circulations, events, conditions, technologies, and flows of power literally take place’. Stewart (2007: 4) emphasises the importance of slowness and patience in her practice of attending to affect, explaining her goal as being to ‘slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us’. Students’ films help create what Stewart (2007: 5) describes as a ‘contact zone for analysis’. We can help students develop that contact zone by drawing on Laura Marks’s (2024) notion of ‘enfolding/unfolding’, articulated in The Fold: From your body to the cosmos.

Marks (2024) gives us a rich theoretical framework for incorporating affect and film into our pedagogy. She develops a concept of ‘the fold’ as an emergent connection between the cosmos and the smallest levels of human – and more-than-human – experiencing (Marks, 2024). The process of ‘enfolding/unfolding’ then becomes an act of poiesis which can be enacted by human, non-human or more-than-human ‘soul-assemblages’ (Marks, 2024). Marks’s (2024) assertion that flows of experience co-produce the worlds they emerge within asserts the cosmological importance of learning to better ‘enfold and unfold’ the world within which we move, think and create. The Fold outlines a processual, relational and emergent model of the universe, and it includes examples to help readers apply these ideas to critical and creative practices. Marks’s (2024) work builds on Stewart’s (2007) affect studies to articulate a potent model of relational and ecological thinking, encouraging us to notice ways that affective flows structure the worlds around/within us.

Marks (2024: 152) contrasts her process with Stewart’s (2007), explaining, ‘Stewart’s evocative writing describes [affects] all at once, while I attempt, painfully and unnaturally, to draw them out’. Marks (2024: 152) breaks down perception by ‘comparing the affect and percept that arise together at a specific moment in order to create a concept’. Marks (2024) emphasises the power of slowing this process, focusing first on affect, then on perception, and finally on concept, as they emerge within our experiences. By slowing down and shifting the order of our awareness, we may more richly consider ‘the encounter between bodies’ from which affect emerges (Marks, 2024: 153). Marks’s analysis also helps delineate the affects, percepts and concepts that are enfolded in the production of films. Marks (2024) helpfully models how one might use her concept of unfolding/enfolding in the analysis of film, connecting what may initially seem to be esoteric concepts to students’ medium of choice. By learning to unfold these experiences with their peers, students not only slow down their encounters to unpack layers of their consciousness; they also build community around this process by comparing their findings. This community-building is supported and enhanced by the trauma-informed practices discussed above.

In an introduction to film-making class for non-majors, I incorporated some of these ideas in an exercise in which small groups of students took a short, silent walk, paying attention to affects and changes in their sensations. After returning, they wrote notes about their experiences and then discussed them as a class. I worked to help them consider connections between the more-than-human environments around our classroom and the flows of affect that they noticed. This exercise also began orienting them towards difference – noticing differences between one another’s perceptions, noticing differences in sensations over time and space – which set a foundation for further work in thinking about and with affect. While students were somewhat reluctant to take this work seriously, it proved a good basis for beginning the semester’s work together by establishing a more neutral basis for noticing affect, sensation and emotions during discussions of one another’s films.

A second exercise inspired by Marks’s (2024: 209) chapter ‘The feelings of fabulation’ uses archival media to prompt students to search for ‘a future fold that pulls the past in a different direction’. In this exercise, students watch an archival film excerpt, moving very slowly, considering each shot, sound and image. They then write an account of their experiences, working to suppress judgements, generalisations or analyses. In a second phase of the project, they edit the archival material, focusing on ways that their affective analysis might produce new pathways through the material, disrupting the continuity, coherence or meaning of the original film. Methods such as enlargements, frame-freezes, time compression/expansion and repetition highlight sensations they find most potent, drawing awareness towards the power of archival and post-production practices.

Incorporating explorations of sensation and affect into a classroom setting presents challenges when considered through a trauma-informed perspective. The emphasis on feeling and embodied experiencing has the potential to destabilise, dysregulate or otherwise disrupt the lives of students not prepared for this work. Psychologist and somatic therapist Peter Levine’s (2010) use of a ‘sensation, image, behaviour, affect, meaning’ model of experience in a therapeutic context overlaps significantly with Marks’s (2024) and Stewart’s work (2007). But unlike Stewart and Marks, Levine’s (2010) ‘somatic experiencing’ techniques foreground the intersections between embodied sensations and past and present traumas.

Levine (2010: 139) suggests that practitioners of his therapeutic methods may help change the impacts of prior traumatic experiences in patients’ lives by working from the ‘bottom’ ‘up’, from ‘sensation’ towards ‘meaning’, in order to reorient their attribution of meaning in specific combinations of sensory experience. Like Marks (2024), Levine (2010) is interested in movements between affect, percept and concept. Levine (2010: 151) explains, ‘Meanings are the labels we attach to the totality of experience – that is, to the combined elements of sensation, image, behavior, and affect.’ Levine’s (2010) model explores ways that these meanings – or Marks’s ‘concepts’ – are constructed out of experiential elements. His therapeutic practice of ‘somatic experiencing’ works to change these processes of meaning-making. As Levine (2010: 154) explains, ‘The therapist’s task as healer is to notice which elements a client presents with are old, conditioned, ineffectual patterns and which are missing completely because they are unconsciously hidden.’ The overlap here with many of the goals of Stewart’s (2007) and Marks’s (2024) methodologies illustrates the power and utility of affective and sensory methods for better understanding – and mending – our lives and worlds.

Levine (2010) proposes several useful practices for therapeutic contexts that may help us navigate the challenges of introducing affect studies in a classroom setting. Levine (2010) highlights: (1) the value of short, focused experiences; (2) the importance of establishing pathways to safety; (3) the benefits of doing this work in the company of others; and (4) the value of complete acceptance of our sensations and emotions. These four principles can guide the incorporation of affect, sensation and emotion into our film-making coursework. By first establishing safety, peer support and trust using the trauma-informed principles above – and by incorporating Levine’s (2010) guidelines – we can support students’ experiences with affect-based observation.

In an upcoming cinematography course, I plan to use the following two-part exercise to help students incorporate awareness of the affective dimensions of their daily lives into their imaging practices. The first part asks students to choose a place nearby that they feel attracted to or interested in visiting. They then make written observations of their sensory experiences, affects and feelings. After considering these observations, they return to the site to make a short film that focuses on these dimensions, considering tensions between sight and their body, and shifts in both over time. In the second part of the exercise, students discuss their films with classmates, then return to the site and identify sensations that were absent from their film. They describe these new sensations and then make a short film that foregrounds only these new sensations. Exercises such as these help students build confidence noticing, discussing and thinking with/about the flows of affect within which they live. This work establishes a basis for engaging ecocritical perspectives on film by prompting students to pay more attention to intersections between imaging practices, their bodies and the world around them.

Ecocritical perspectives on film

The trauma-informed and affect-based work above prepares students to think more critically about the material, social and perceptual relationships that films produce. Students’ experiences of safety, trust, collaboration and attunements to affect prepare them to notice difference as it emerges. This awareness can ground initial considerations of the many ways that film changes our relationships with the world.

These relationships are a primary focus of ecocritical scholarship on cinema. As the introduction to the second volume of The Ecocinema Reader: Theory and practice explains, ‘It has become increasingly clear … that film can no longer be considered apart from its imbrication in the fabric of the world’ (Rust et al., 2023: 1). The Ecocinema Reader exemplifies the current state of this work, considering subjects such as bicycle-powered cinema exhibitions, mediation of Indigenous cosmologies, imbrications of coal mining and Bollywood melodrama, and intersections between climate trauma and slow cinema (Rust et al., 2023). Early scholarship includes Scott MacDonald’s (2001) The Garden in the Machine: A field guide to independent films about place, which focuses primarily on avant-garde interventions, and David Ingram’s (2004) Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood cinema, which explores ecological ideas embedded in Hollywood films. More recently, Jennifer Fay’s (2018) Inhospitable World: Cinema in the time of the Anthropocene evokes the ‘destructive tension’ between cinema and world, while Helen Hughes’s (2014) Green Documentary: Environmental documentary in the twenty-first century surveys the contributions of environmental documentaries (Ingram, 2004).

Developing a processual account of film can connect these critical perspectives with film production pedagogy. Adrian Ivakhiv (2013: 12) develops a rigorous ‘process-relational’ model of film in Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, affect, nature, explaining:

a film is what a film does … as one watches it … and as the film reverberates across the space between the film world and the real world … injecting thought-images, sensations, motivations, heightened attunements to one thing or another, into the larger social and ecological fields within which the film’s signs, meanings, and affects resound.

Ivakhiv (2013: 12) articulates links between the affect-based approaches to film discussed above and the emergent processes of films in the world, framing film as a force for changing ‘material, social, and perceptual ecologies’. This emphasis on film’s active production of new relationships is a useful framework for developing students’ awareness of how, when, where, and for whose benefit, these relationships are produced. Framing all films – and every film-making decision – as a site of poiesis highlights the critical importance of film-making practices, and it emphasises the value of slowing down students’ adoption of industrial film practices.

Students’ early experiences with film-making are particularly useful for fostering ecocritical thinking, because their inexperience with the specific technological processes of film-making allows them to better perceive the logics, dependencies and contingencies of film practices. The awkwardness, missteps, challenges and discomfort of early experiences of film-making can illuminate film’s problematic – and positive – relationships with the more-than-human worlds around and within us. As Hunter Vaughan (2019) explores, the US film industry’s long histories of extraction and exploitation are sedimented in cultures of film production, the films themselves, and the reception of films. How can film-making pedagogy begin to disrupt these practices?

Ivakhiv (2018: 205) sees new possibilities through the production of video, framed as ‘new vectors of transmission on which future worlds might be borne … where experimentation can occur for carving out spaces in which the A/Cene [Anthropo/Capitalo-cene] could be challenged’. Ivakhiv (2018) outlines ecocritical potentials of film, emphasising the powerful contributions that training our senses can make to the larger project of reimagining our modes of inhabiting the planet. Ivakhiv (2018: Appendix 3) then presents a scaffolded and extensive set of methods for learning to sense, feel and act differently. These exercises share much in common with Stewart’s (2007) attunements to affect, Marks’s enfolding/unfolding practice, and Levine’s ‘somatic experiencing’. The goal in each case is to prompt intentional explorations of affect, sensation and meaning as they co-constitute the worlds within which we live.

By integrating this work into students’ first experiences of film-making, we can set the stage for a broader eco-materialist revision of film production practices that may be better equipped to produce new social and material practices than the industry’s current green production initiatives. Production models emphasising film as a system of care for human and more-than-human participants will be less inclined to consume the massive amounts of resources used by Hollywood films, such as the blockbusters analysed in Vaughan’s (2019) study. These models will be less likely to produce – and reproduce – colonial relationships and exploitative ways of seeing. These models can also inform students’ understandings of all the media with which they interact daily. Introductory film-making courses can prime students to understand the important role of screen media in shaping our relationships with the world around us.

An example exercise that I have not yet tried asks students to think critically about the flows of media within which they live. First, they choose a favourite activity, hobby or other interest, and then they collect a set of images and videos related to this activity. Students then take notes on their affective responses and what desires arise from interacting with this material. Next, they identify an element of the activity that they have experienced but that is not in these images. Finally, they make a short film focusing only on that element of the activity. This exercise can help students notice the elisions, omissions and suppressions enacted by media around them. They can build on these observations by considering who benefits from the absence of these elements, and what relationships and dependencies may be suppressed by this media.

Developing these critical perspectives may help students articulate the significant changes to images and video that are occurring around them. They are already acutely aware of the powerful role of digital media and its circulation in defining the world in which we live, but students do not always have adequate models for critiquing this media. As Joanna Zylinska (2023) explains – in relation to AI – during this moment of rupture in the ontology of the image, creative explorations of the limits and boundaries of image-making can be a powerful mode of engaging difficult questions that accompany networked and algorithmically generated media. Zylinska (2023: 192) does not frame this situation negatively, but rather considers these media flows as ‘our civilization’s constitutive element’. By training students to inhabit these flows more thoughtfully, and by teaching them powerful ways of unfolding, enfolding and analysing these media, they can begin to engage these ‘constitutive elements’ more critically and creatively.

When combined with the trauma-informed and affect-based work discussed above, the ecocritical and processual account of film developed in this section prepares students to challenge problematic imbrications of power and extractive socio-material practices. The process of film-making can help students explore the entanglements of the media that co-constitute our world, not by critiquing its modes of representation or by challenging its indexicality, but by unfolding and interrogating its conditions of emergence. These conditions of emergence are often enmeshed with logics of capitalism, military industries, settler colonialism, petrocultures and White supremacy. Students can use their own film-making processes to explore other logics as a form of resistance (Ivakhiv, 2018; Valiaho, 2014). Intentional engagement with ecocriticism in early production coursework also prepares them to better understand the imbrications between their own technocultural methods of film production and the more-than-human communities that they intend to care for and support through their work, fostering more sustainable models of film and media production.

The sections above outline goals for a trauma-informed, affect-based and ecocritical model of film-making pedagogy. While each area overlaps with the others, addressing these realms independently provides greater clarity when designing assignments, syllabuses and curricula. Although not all of these areas can be emphasised at length in every film-making course, ensuring that beginning students are introduced to these aspects of film production orients their initial work in the field towards considerations that are too often sidelined. Without skills in trauma-informed film-making, students may be emotionally unable to engage difficult materials, or may fall into habits of extractive and exploitative film production. Without building the scaffolding necessary for engaging affect, students will be less prepared to do decolonising work with their films, or to ethically engage more-than-human ecologies. Without ecocritical perspectives on film, students may unknowingly replicate problematic binaries or patterns of extractive imaging. Together, this work comprises fundamental techniques of film production, arguably more critical – and powerful – than craft skills in cinematography, sound recording or editing.

Conclusion

These slow, intentional encounters with processes of film-making draw attention to the flows of affect that shape our experiences of the world, giving students new ways of sensing, acting and making change. Students can begin to understand films as sites of the emergence of ethics, perception and communication – and as a basis for building community. This approach to film-making values questions, collaboration and open-ended experiments. While there are many positive outcomes of the work outlined above, there are also real dangers. The persistent emphasis on affect and emotions is critical, but this work presents potential difficulties for students experiencing personal or community traumas. If overwhelming emotions and potential re-traumatisation are only addressed through trigger warnings, allowing students to opt out of assignments, or directing students to campus mental health resources – despite the good intentions of these approaches – a student’s life is disrupted, and they are sent elsewhere for care. This model of outsourcing emotional labour does not support movements towards justice. Yet, given the constraints of the classroom setting, the semester schedule, faculty time limitations, and lack of training in mental health, anything beyond basic check-ins often will be dealt with by students outside of the classroom. While there is not a simple solution to these issues, building mental health into the classroom in more substantial ways is a critical first step towards supporting forays into difficult subjects.

Another challenge to the pedagogical strategies outlined above is students’ desire to professionalise by learning craft skills that can help them forge careers in film and media industries. Despite the theoretical emphasis above, I do acknowledge the importance of supporting students in developing rigorous approaches to cinematography, sound recording, lighting, editing, research and production management. The practices discussed above may be balanced with more technical goals, helping students to understand that these exercises are a platform within which they will learn more sophisticated models of producing and manipulating moving images. I believe that the process of making films can foster healthy and productive relationships between students, and that it can build the resilience and organising abilities that they will need to address the many challenges they face upon graduation. These perceptual, conceptual, creative and communicative skills translate far beyond the borders of film-making, equipping students to navigate many career options – and industry upheavals – after completing their studies.

Declarations and conflicts of interest

Filmography

Cameraperson (US 2016, Kirsten Johnson)