At the Collège des Bernardins in Paris, films to convey a complex vision of nature

Documentaries with an ecological content have, over the past twenty years, multiplied on the big screen. To the point that the aesthetic question, which should remain central, has often seemed to be forgotten. It is the whole concern of these “Manières d’habite la terre” – a series of seven films presented each evening at the Collège des bernardins, from December 3 to 9, followed by a discussion with a specialist – to try to spare aesthetic and ecological interest.

Even more precisely, to see how films that do not respond directly to a vocation of ecological construction have been able, better than those that claim to be, to convey a complex vision of nature. More, in any case, than that, irenic, that “green cinema” offers us, as defined, pugnaciously as we will have understood, the authors of this program, the critic Jean-Michel Frodon and the historian of the environment Grégory Quenet.

One could therefore think, following them, of the films that are offered to us as a way, specific to cinema precisely, of experiencing and questioning the physical ties that bind us to this land that carries us. An Italian abyss probed by speleologists (He drunk by Michelangelo Frammartino, 2022), the destruction of the Amazonian forest as seen by an indigenous girl (Eami, the memory of the forest de Paz Encina, 2021), women to the rescue of a drought-stricken village in Burkina Faso (The Perimeter of Kamsé by Olivier Zuchuat, 2021), a lyrical poem on the violent mutations of the Chinese habitat (Behemoth of Zhao Liang, 2015), an abandoned mining town in eastern France (Back to Forbach by Régis Sauder, 2017), a migrant fantastically transformed into an organic element of a Tunisian forest (The Last of Us by Ala Eddine Slim, 2016).

carnal relationship

So many remarkable films that establish a carnal, concrete, consistent, somewhat egalitarian relationship between man and nature, consciously involving the very form of their staging. Starting with the oldest and rarest of them, The Forbidden Volcano by Haroun Tazieff, produced in 1966. The famous volcanologist evokes his expedition to the Nyiragongo volcano in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Congo), while the commentary, written by Chris Marker, evokes the place of volcanoes in our collective imagination . The film will be presented on December 5 at 8 p.m., followed by a discussion with Jérôme Gaillardet, professor of earth sciences at the Institut de physique du globe in Paris.

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