Welcome from Thomas Shevory and Patricia Zimmermann Festival Codirectors
One question erupts repeatedly around the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival: How is FLEFF an environmental film festival? Our answer is simple: join us in reimagining the environment.
Popular culture figures the environment in a dualistic way, positioning the human and the natural as opposing forces. Nature is privileged as a pastoral fantasy. Nature functions as an edenic ideal, a projection of desire into the uncontaminated and uncontrolled. Nature is protected and romanticized. Nature can only be understood through science.
Many media works about the environment - for example, An Inconvenient Truth - present a safe, depoliticized, neutral view of global warming. As a result, they fail to analyze the pressing, but hidden, questions of power. These popular culture representations of the environment - whether from Al Gore, the Discovery Channel, or March of the Penguins - oversimplify the complex issues at stake. For example, this more truncated view of the environment would ignore the question of war.
This limited definition of the environment represses the constantly moving vectors, which both close down and open up issues of equality, freedom, social justice, aesthetic innovation, and access to health care. It also sets up false dichotomies between the human and the natural, between the social and the scientific, between the argumentative and the empirical, between the United States and the globe.
These popular culture representations of the environment are too confining, too safe, too tame. They quarantine nature. They paralyze critique. And they often imply a white, American-centric, economically privileged position. Outside the confines of the United States, the terms environment and ecology mobilize a quite different set of coordinates and actions.
In a more global intellectual and political conversation, the term environment exceeds these simple binary oppositions and reductionist assumptions. Environment and ecology signify a complicated nexus of the social, political, aesthetic, technological, economic, physical, and natural. An ecological way of thinking, then, demands tracing these complex intersections in order to understand them-and then act on them. Ecology means understanding how things, people, and ideas are interconnected.
Rachel Carson was one of the first writers to deploy the term ecology. But Carson, too, rejected the equation of ecology and natural. She used the term to subvert closed thinking, static systems, and narrow categories. The concepts of ecology and environment, then, are deeply subversive because they dislodge categories that are presumed to be stable. An ecological and environmental perspective is anticategorical; it mines and explores the conflicts and intersections between human and natural systems. An ecological and environmental approach would, by necessity, also provoke the question, Why is this an environmental film festival?
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival moves from the idea of a fixed, stable, and unified environment to an endlessly fluid, open, and plural notion of environments. FLEFF is programmed to open up ideas about the environment rather than to close them down. We do not presume to define the meaning of the term environment. In this period of global crisis, it is not productive to be too inert, closed, or blinded.
As you engage with the 2007 FLEFF program, we invite you to reconceptualize the environment in ways that might disrupt these popular culture misconceptions. We invite you to dislodge stable categories about nature and humans by plunging yourself into our 2007 programming streams: maps and memes, metropoli, panic attacks, and soundscaping. We invite you to enter this year's matrix of works and streams that dismantle and stretch all of our preconceived ideas about the environment.
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival opens up a broader argument about the environment. The festival does not confine its definition of the environment to nature. It also rejects these confining binary oppositions. Rather, it provokes audiences into asking the question, what is the environment? It is our hope that this year's programming opens up dynamic dialectics between human systems and other environments.
If your queries about why FLEFF is an environmental film festival just won't go away, we invite you to immerse yourself in as much of this year's programming as possible. Let maps and memes, metropoli, panic attacks, and soundscaping take you down unexplored paths and into unknown vectors. Try to attend the myriad events in this year's festival-installations, live music with archival films, poetry readings, ambient media on plasma, musical events, art exhibits, screenings, talks, forums, workshops, feature films. Let them rattle your preconceptions. Let them expand your speculative horizons.
And when you are done experiencing these various works and sessions, again ask yourself the question, how is this an environmental film festival? See if you have the same answer. Our bet is you won't.
Message from Tanya Saunders
Assistant Provost and Dean of the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is quite special-it is an annual multimedia program at Ithaca College that facilitates communication across disciplines while it challenges us to reimagine the environment and our connections to it. A complex of events and opportunities, FLEFF invites our interaction with ideas, perspectives, and with each other; it reveals the larger environment to be a global proposition in a constant state of flux. This year's FLEFF programming streams direct us to re-map the metropoli and soundscapes of our imagination, so to avoid the panic attacks brought on by fear, ignorance, isolation, and defensive borders. They urge our collaboration in the understanding and evaluation of new knowledge and ideas.
FLEFF provides a time and space for realizing the interconnections between scholars and artists, artists and activists, and students and prominent guests from around the country and the globe; faculty connect with each other and their students, and the Ithaca campus connects with the larger off-campus community. It is a time when intellect and experience combine for learning outside the structures of classrooms, syllabi, and examinations.
FLEFF offers all of the schools, divisions, programs, departments, and offices of Ithaca College the opportunity to come together for cross-disciplinary discussion, collaboration, and the exploration of ideas that connect the curriculum to global issues beyond the campus. In so doing, FLEFF advances the goals of Ithaca College to engage internationally, to explore interdisciplinary solutions to global issues, and to create new communities of inquiry with invited guests. FLEFF provides a time for building on the known, the tried, and the true to accommodate new ideas, new artistic expressions, new writing, new media practices, new musical performances, new digital art, new plasma installations, and new films. The weeklong festival underscores the role of Ithaca College as an incubator for intellectual and artistic expression and insists that each of us redefine the environment as that place where all must gather to view, discuss, experience, debate, and plan for positive change. Ithaca College invites all students, faculty, staff, and the Ithaca community to join the global conversation about the urgent issues that bind us together.
We hope you will be revitalized by your participation in Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and that the connections you make will strengthen your understanding and your actions in service to the global community.
Message from Dianne Lynch LYNCH
Dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is truly an event for and of its times, as participatory and inclusive as the new media ecology it celebrates. Media critic Henry Jenkins describes contemporary culture as characterized by low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creative production and distribution, a culture of mentorship and social connection, and a fundamental belief in the validity of each voice-an equally apt description of FLEFF's operating assumptions and principle beliefs.
Unlike its legacy film-festival counterparts-focused on a single artistic form-FLEFF engages creative expression across media platforms, contesting both semantic and artistic boundaries to propose new possibilities of participation and synthesis. In a media environment in which relevance and authority are grounded not in presentation but in participation, FLEFF is, indeed, a shimmering opportunity to abandon compartmentalization and embrace convergence-of politics, of art, of media, of ecologies.
The Roy H. Park School of Communications is delighted to be associated with FLEFF and its community of artists, musicians, writers, scholars, and activists. It is our hope-and our expectation-that the program's exuberant innovation and embrace of multiplicity will become the standard bearer for media festivals everywhere.
One question erupts repeatedly around the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival: How is FLEFF an environmental film festival? Our answer is simple: join us in reimagining the environment.
Popular culture figures the environment in a dualistic way, positioning the human and the natural as opposing forces. Nature is privileged as a pastoral fantasy. Nature functions as an edenic ideal, a projection of desire into the uncontaminated and uncontrolled. Nature is protected and romanticized. Nature can only be understood through science.
Many media works about the environment - for example, An Inconvenient Truth - present a safe, depoliticized, neutral view of global warming. As a result, they fail to analyze the pressing, but hidden, questions of power. These popular culture representations of the environment - whether from Al Gore, the Discovery Channel, or March of the Penguins - oversimplify the complex issues at stake. For example, this more truncated view of the environment would ignore the question of war.
This limited definition of the environment represses the constantly moving vectors, which both close down and open up issues of equality, freedom, social justice, aesthetic innovation, and access to health care. It also sets up false dichotomies between the human and the natural, between the social and the scientific, between the argumentative and the empirical, between the United States and the globe.
These popular culture representations of the environment are too confining, too safe, too tame. They quarantine nature. They paralyze critique. And they often imply a white, American-centric, economically privileged position. Outside the confines of the United States, the terms environment and ecology mobilize a quite different set of coordinates and actions.
In a more global intellectual and political conversation, the term environment exceeds these simple binary oppositions and reductionist assumptions. Environment and ecology signify a complicated nexus of the social, political, aesthetic, technological, economic, physical, and natural. An ecological way of thinking, then, demands tracing these complex intersections in order to understand them-and then act on them. Ecology means understanding how things, people, and ideas are interconnected.
Rachel Carson was one of the first writers to deploy the term ecology. But Carson, too, rejected the equation of ecology and natural. She used the term to subvert closed thinking, static systems, and narrow categories. The concepts of ecology and environment, then, are deeply subversive because they dislodge categories that are presumed to be stable. An ecological and environmental perspective is anticategorical; it mines and explores the conflicts and intersections between human and natural systems. An ecological and environmental approach would, by necessity, also provoke the question, Why is this an environmental film festival?
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival moves from the idea of a fixed, stable, and unified environment to an endlessly fluid, open, and plural notion of environments. FLEFF is programmed to open up ideas about the environment rather than to close them down. We do not presume to define the meaning of the term environment. In this period of global crisis, it is not productive to be too inert, closed, or blinded.
As you engage with the 2007 FLEFF program, we invite you to reconceptualize the environment in ways that might disrupt these popular culture misconceptions. We invite you to dislodge stable categories about nature and humans by plunging yourself into our 2007 programming streams: maps and memes, metropoli, panic attacks, and soundscaping. We invite you to enter this year's matrix of works and streams that dismantle and stretch all of our preconceived ideas about the environment.
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival opens up a broader argument about the environment. The festival does not confine its definition of the environment to nature. It also rejects these confining binary oppositions. Rather, it provokes audiences into asking the question, what is the environment? It is our hope that this year's programming opens up dynamic dialectics between human systems and other environments.
If your queries about why FLEFF is an environmental film festival just won't go away, we invite you to immerse yourself in as much of this year's programming as possible. Let maps and memes, metropoli, panic attacks, and soundscaping take you down unexplored paths and into unknown vectors. Try to attend the myriad events in this year's festival-installations, live music with archival films, poetry readings, ambient media on plasma, musical events, art exhibits, screenings, talks, forums, workshops, feature films. Let them rattle your preconceptions. Let them expand your speculative horizons.
And when you are done experiencing these various works and sessions, again ask yourself the question, how is this an environmental film festival? See if you have the same answer. Our bet is you won't.
Message from Tanya Saunders
Assistant Provost and Dean of the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is quite special-it is an annual multimedia program at Ithaca College that facilitates communication across disciplines while it challenges us to reimagine the environment and our connections to it. A complex of events and opportunities, FLEFF invites our interaction with ideas, perspectives, and with each other; it reveals the larger environment to be a global proposition in a constant state of flux. This year's FLEFF programming streams direct us to re-map the metropoli and soundscapes of our imagination, so to avoid the panic attacks brought on by fear, ignorance, isolation, and defensive borders. They urge our collaboration in the understanding and evaluation of new knowledge and ideas.
FLEFF provides a time and space for realizing the interconnections between scholars and artists, artists and activists, and students and prominent guests from around the country and the globe; faculty connect with each other and their students, and the Ithaca campus connects with the larger off-campus community. It is a time when intellect and experience combine for learning outside the structures of classrooms, syllabi, and examinations.
FLEFF offers all of the schools, divisions, programs, departments, and offices of Ithaca College the opportunity to come together for cross-disciplinary discussion, collaboration, and the exploration of ideas that connect the curriculum to global issues beyond the campus. In so doing, FLEFF advances the goals of Ithaca College to engage internationally, to explore interdisciplinary solutions to global issues, and to create new communities of inquiry with invited guests. FLEFF provides a time for building on the known, the tried, and the true to accommodate new ideas, new artistic expressions, new writing, new media practices, new musical performances, new digital art, new plasma installations, and new films. The weeklong festival underscores the role of Ithaca College as an incubator for intellectual and artistic expression and insists that each of us redefine the environment as that place where all must gather to view, discuss, experience, debate, and plan for positive change. Ithaca College invites all students, faculty, staff, and the Ithaca community to join the global conversation about the urgent issues that bind us together.
We hope you will be revitalized by your participation in Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and that the connections you make will strengthen your understanding and your actions in service to the global community.
Message from Dianne Lynch LYNCH
Dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications
The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) is truly an event for and of its times, as participatory and inclusive as the new media ecology it celebrates. Media critic Henry Jenkins describes contemporary culture as characterized by low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creative production and distribution, a culture of mentorship and social connection, and a fundamental belief in the validity of each voice-an equally apt description of FLEFF's operating assumptions and principle beliefs.
Unlike its legacy film-festival counterparts-focused on a single artistic form-FLEFF engages creative expression across media platforms, contesting both semantic and artistic boundaries to propose new possibilities of participation and synthesis. In a media environment in which relevance and authority are grounded not in presentation but in participation, FLEFF is, indeed, a shimmering opportunity to abandon compartmentalization and embrace convergence-of politics, of art, of media, of ecologies.
The Roy H. Park School of Communications is delighted to be associated with FLEFF and its community of artists, musicians, writers, scholars, and activists. It is our hope-and our expectation-that the program's exuberant innovation and embrace of multiplicity will become the standard bearer for media festivals everywhere.
