Description
In this video (Part 2 of 2) Marsha Gordon, Ph.D. explores the way documentary films tried to help us comprehend what failure to prevent catastrophic climate change might mean.
In this video (Part 1 of 2) Marsha Gordon, Ph.D. explores the way documentary films tried to help us comprehend what failure to prevent catastrophic climate change might mean.
In this video (Part 1 of 2) Marsha Gordon, Ph.D. explores the way documentary films targeted at young people — one each from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s — have for decades tried to help us to comprehend what failure to prevent catastrophic climate change might mean for us.
Marsha Gordon is professor and director of film studies at NC State University, a recent Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and an NEH Public Scholar. She is the author of Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), and co-editor of Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019). She has co-directed three documentaries, Nesting (2020), All the Possibilities… (2019), and Rendered Small (2017).
Nathaniel Rich, “Losing Earth,” New York Times (August 1, 2018)
Streaming versions of the complete films discussed in Dr. Gordon's talk:
Joyce, M. (Director). 1940. To Conserve Our Heritage [Film]. U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Carlson, R. (Director). 1958. The Unchained Goddess [Film]. Frank Capra, Shamus Culhane.
Francis, C.E. (Director). 1972. Countdown to Collision [Film]. Airlie Productions.