Cinema has portrayed nature and its multiple expressions since its early manifestations. The conflictive relation between human beings and nature, the consequences of human action in the different ecosystems, has also been filmed in fiction and documentary films. Only in the last decades, film studies have adopted an ecological perspective to analyse how films put in scene the relation of humanity with nature. In this sense, as Käpaä (2015) sustains, the approach to the binomial cinema-nature has been done from an anthropological perspective of cinema and did not question the centrality of the human perspective in films. Although the term Ecocinema has theoretically developed by Roger C. Anderson in 1975, it was not until the beginning of the XXI century when there was extension of the field of study (Murray, Heumann, 2009; Rust, Monani, Cubitty, 2012; Pick, Narraway, 2013). Ecocriticism has applied to national cinemas (Brereton, 2004; Käapä, 2015) or to singular films or authors.
From the ecocinema perspective, we will analyse the films O que arde (Fire will come, Oliver Laxe, 2019), Trote (Trot, Xacio Baño, 2018) and Trinta Lumes (Thirty lights, Diana Toucedo, 2017). These three films, part of the production of the Novo Cinema Galego -New Galician Cinema- show the disappearance of rural life in contemporary Galicia and the subsequent transformation in the relation of country people with the natural environment. The national question, problematized in relation with ecology in Käpaä (2015) will be analysed in relation with the representation of nature as a symbol, in danger of extinction, of Galician identity. In this sense, there is a direct correlation between the nation and the nature that could be traced in the representation of environment in previous Galician films. The respect for the environment is also a topic, although never explicit, related to the representation of nature of these films.
Keywords: Ecocinema, Novo Cinema Galego, Cinema, Environmental Issues, Rural.
References
Anderson, Roger C. (1975). Reflections: Ecocinema: A Plan for Preserving Nature, BioScience, Volume 25, Issue 7, 1 July 1975, P. 452.
Brereton, Pat (2005). Hollywood Utopia. Ecology in contemporary American cinema. Bristol: Intellect.
Käapä, Pietari (2015). Ecology and contemporary Nordic cinemas. From Nation-building to Ecocosmopolitanism. London: Bloomsbury.
Murray, Robin L.; Heumann, Joseph K. (2009). Ecology and popular. Cinema on the edge. Albany: State University of New York.
Pick, Anat; Narraway, Guinevere (2013). Screening nature. Cinema beyond the human. NY: Berghahn.
Rust, Stephen; Monani, Salma; Cubitt, Sean (2012). Ecocinema. Theory and practice. NY: Routledge.