Tag: Film

A living thing – the Barrier Islands of North Carolina

The only constant is the creed of the Barrier Islands of North Carolina according to marine scientist Orin Pilkey. In his introduction to this PBS documentary from the 1980s, Pilkey provocatively comments the image of beach houses slowly being swallowed by the sea with the following words: “For some this is a tragic and an ugly sight. But I think it’s beautiful. Because surrendering this house to the sea represents a bright promise for our future.” He later says “I’ve really come to think of these islands as living things. They are constantly responding in sensible and even intelligent ways to the forces of nature.”

Video link

The evocative title of the documentary refers to the slow movement of these islands over millennia. But as Pilkey makes clear, islands lie these will continue to move and need to move in order to sustain. So called “hard stabilization”, the effort to stabilize shore lines by sea walls and other massive concrete structures, Pilkey calls “a recipe for disaster”.

In contrast to today’s buildings and infrastructure the early settlements on the islands were much less permanent. Some of the early settler’s houses on these islands were equipped with a trap door in the house, in order to let flood water flow through to limit the damage to the house’s structure. Many houses were even built in ways, so that they could be easily moved away from the shore. Houses but also whole villages, like Diamond city, appeared and disappeared across the islands over the course of it’s history of settlement.

This film and Pilkeys argument are actually pre-climate-discourse at least as public opinion is concerned. This makes it a fascinating document of the development of environmental thought. Basically all the worries, warnings and arguments of today’s coastal climate adaptation discourse are here – but without sea level rise! It’s simply ill guided real estate development and false landscape planning.

Tides (2021)

“Tides” (alternative title “The Colony”) is a sci-fi movie from 2021 about a post-apocalyptic world at the moment the first human communities are about to re-settle again. The only territory suitable is a coastal strip that is covered by tides twice a day. The area is a tidal zone, not quite land and not quite sea, with little to no vegetation and natural shelter for the people to build a more permanent habitat.

The landscape and weather in the story are the same as on the location, the movie was filmed. “Tides” was largely filmed outdoors on the small island Neuwerk in the German Tidelands, situated between the estuaries of the rivers Weser and Elbe.

Neuwerk during low tide

Director Tim Fehlbaum explained in an interview how this landscape inspired the movie plot in the first place:

“For the outdoor scenes we went to the German Tidelands, which was where the idea for the film started. I’m a very visual director and my ideas often have a visual trigger. I had never been to the Tidelands and having grown up in the Swiss mountains being at the low point of Germany was eye-opening. Looking out at this expanse of water was so interesting because in an hour or so, everything you just saw becomes covered in water. The floods in the film are real, and they come in twice a day. Shooting there was exceedingly difficult because we could never shoot much longer than two or three hours, and I always wanted to keep shooting, but it becomes a question of minutes before the water is at your knees and suddenly up to your chest.”

You could say, the movie is really an exploration of this landscape and the living conditions and the atmosphere in tidal zones. That human renewal after the partial retreat and ecological meltdown takes place in such a tidal zone is interesting as it references this landscape as a realm of opportunity, transition and change – a liminal space full of potential rather than decay.

I find this inspirational in regard to our current situation of ecological and social transformation. Author Kim Stanley Robbinson made a similar reference to the “intertidal” as a space of opportunity and renewal when sketching his “Super Venice” in the post-apocalyptic novel “New York 2140” four years earlier. It is striking how both works are set in tidal zones, how both interpret them as spaces of renewal, and yet how radically different they paint this landscape. You can read my post on Robbinson’s book here.

The “Lost River”

Ryan Goslings 2014 movie “Lost River” is most of all a portrait of urban decay and our fascination with decay in a broader sense. The film juxtaposes the stylized display of bodily mutilation and destruction in a Grand Guignol style cabaret on the one side and the at once slow and dramatic decay of urban environments in the US rust belt on the other.

While buildings on fire – an image particularly indicative of the Detroit situation in the 1980s and 1990s – or urban structures overgrown by vegetation are the two main visual ciphers for urban decay in the movie, a flooded town also plays a central role.

As one protagonist explains, the town is called Lost River, because a section of it was once purposefully submerged when a water reservoir was built. Beneath the river lie the remains of that city and also a prehistoric theme park. Pre-historic monsters are said to live in the deep water. The idea of a prehistoric past lurking underneath the water’s surface is reminiscent of J.G Ballard’s 1962 novel “Drowned World“, where global climate change and flooding causes nature to regress into an early state of evolution.

The movie pays little attention to this submerged town. Instead it effectively uses one rather simple image in several scenes: the street lights that stick out of the water and create an eerie sense of displacement and confusing proportions.

Children of the Sea

2019 Japanese anime movie “Children of the Sea” (original title: 海獣の子供, which translates roughly as “Children of Sea Monsters”) is set in a fictitious island in the Okinawa region of Japan. The movie directed by Ayumu Watanabe puts a lot of effort into creating the image of a culture and a way of life, that is aquatic or located in a fluid continuum between dry land and water, the city and the sea. Here are screen shots from two scenes of intense tropical rainstorm that blur the distinction between land and sea.

Another noteworthy scene is the following, set on a pier that is aligned with concrete tetrapopds. These tetrapods have been used since the 1950s all over the world to protect coasts against erosion and flooding. They are particularly prominent across Okinawa and have come to define the look of the coasts there. (See the wiki article here)

Since the movie’s plot is about the meeting and friendship between two brothers born in the sea and a city girl and the girl’s eventual emergence into the underwater world, the tripods here seem to symbolize the community’s effort to maintain the separation between land and sea and protect it’s people from the forces bur also the allure of the ocean.

Dive to “Dryland”

In the post-apocalyptic action movie “Waterworld” from 1995, all human settlements have drowned as global warming has melted the ice caps. At the time in 1995, “Waterworld” was the most expensive movie ever made and it was not a huge success. Maybe the prospect of a drowned world was not a hot topic at the time? Or maybe open sea sailing and a virile but lonesome yachtsman boating around in the sunset was a too elitist scenario to appeal to a larger audience. (much of the movie appears like a tourism commercial for a Future-Punk-Cape Cod. It is still today regarded as one of Kevin Costner’s campier acting efforts.)

The plot, set in 2500, revolves around the quest for “Dryland” the mythical last unflooded piece of land. The lead character is a sailor with amphibic abilities, one of the first mutated humans to have adapted to live in waterworld. (He has small gills behind his ears and adnated toes.) Because of his abilities he is able to dive down to the drowned cities and bring back soil and other valuable objects that he trades above water without disclosing their origins. He thus strengthens the common believe in a hidden land above water and becomes a target for adventurers and pirates searching for Dryland.

Eventually he agrees to disclose the secret to his companion and takes her on a dive. At this point in the story, it becomes clear to the character that there is no sacred refuge to go to but that humanity is stranded on boats and floating cities with nowhere else to go. (As the plot continues they do however eventually find dry land, which pretty much turns the story from a drama to a soap opera.)

This is the scene of the dive to the drowned city and it is the only scene in the movie set in the drowned world.

“Waterworld” was clearly an effort in eco-fiction. The original script was written in the 1980’s. In 1989 the oil tank ship Exxon Valdez spilled it’s cargo off the coast of Alaska, causing the second largest oil spill in US history. In the 1995 movie the ship features prominently as the setting of the final fight between the mariner and the pirates. “Waterworld” was clearly informed by climate politics and the knowledge of continuous sea level rise already apparent in the 1980s and ’90s. It’s unfortunate that due to a questionable directing job and unconvincing plot twists the movie is today much less recognized for it’s political message than for it’s costly antics.

Atoll Settlement from Waterworld (1995)

Image of the swimming settlement in the movie “Waterworld” from 1995. The settlement is called “Atoll” in the movie but in fact it is a human made swimming construction. There is no natural land left known to the population of waterworld.

This sequence from the movie clearly shows the allusion to the Dutch cultural heritage with a windmill and a manually operated large weir mechanism featuring prominently.

Rear View

An image from the movie “The Wave” from 2015.


In “Being Ecological” Tim Morton wonders about the prevalent mode of climate writing, which he calls “information dump”, “dumping massive platefuls of facts on to us” over and over again. Morton wonders, why we do that and finds the following analogy:

“Imagine that we are dreaming. What kind of dream would it be where the characters and plot vary, sometimes significantly, but the overall impact—where the dream leaves us, its basic color or tone or point of view (or what have you) —remains the same? There is definitely an analogy from the world of dreaming: these are the trauma dreams of sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).” According to Sigmund Freud, Morton writes, “the PTSD sufferer is simply trying to install herself, through her dreams, at a point in time before the trauma happened. Why? Because there is some safety or security in being able to anticipate. Anticipatory fear is far less intense than the fear you experience when finding yourself, all of a sudden, in the middle of a trauma. If you think about it, traumas by definition are things that you find yourself in the middle of—you can’t sneak up on them from the side or from behind, and that’s why they’re traumatic. You just suddenly find yourself in a car crash, for instance. If you had been able to anticipate, you might have been able to swerve out of the way.”
“By analogy, then,” Morton concludes, “information dump mode is a way for us to try to install ourselves at a fictional point in time before global warming happened. We are trying to anticipate something inside which we already find ourselves.”

The Loen Rock Slides in Norway in 1905 and 1936

Just 31 years lie between two disasters of the same nature along the shores of a lake in Western Norway destroying twice the two lakeside villages.

Lake Lovatnet is considered one of the most beautiful lakes in Norway. In the first decade of the 1900s and again in the 1930s large fissures in the rock formation above the lake appeared and eventually rocks repeatedly fell into the lake. In 1905 a massive piece of the mountainside loosened and fell into the lake, producing waves of up to 40 meters in height that completely destroyed the two farm villages on the shore. “61 people lost their lives, half the population of Bødal and Nesdal together. Only ten were ever found.”

The villages were rebuilt, only a little bit higher up the shore. In 1936 daily rock falls happened again before eventually in September that year “one million cubic meters of rock fell down from 800 m height into Lake Lovatnet, pushing up the water and creating three waves; the highest a more than 74 meters high.” The two towns were once again completely destroyed.

Only a hundred kilometers away in a fjord called Tafjord the same thing happened in 1934: a massive piece of rock fell off the mountianside and sent a tsunami wave 17 meters high, reaching up to 300 meters inwards land, crushing houses and other buildings, moving large boats inwards land and killing 23 people.

This threat of rock slides resulting in tsunamis and floodings is common to this region of Norway. In 2015 director Roar Uthaug made a film based on the assumption that a similar event is expected to occur anytime in the future on the Åkerneset mountain, not far from Tarfjord. The movie entitled “The Wave” was so successful, two consecutive films were produced in 2018 and 2022.

The village of Bodal after the Loen Rock Slide. Click on the image for online source.
Image from the movie “The Wave”.
The fjord today. Click on the image for online source.
Image from the movie “The Wave”.

There is an excellent article about the Loen disasters by Christer Hoel online here. The quotes in my post are all from his text. I used another image from the movie here.

Sinking Hy-Brasil

This is an image from the famous sinking scene from the movie “Erik the Viking” from 1989. the movie plot is built on the medieval saga of the explorer Erik the Red. In one part of the saga Erik and his comrades arrive at the mystical island Hy-Brasil (or simply Brasil) west of Ireland. But the movie combines this Irish myth with two other popular myths: the sinking of Atlantis and the peaceful Minoan culture in the Mediterranean Sea. In a comic climax, the inhabitants of Brasil cheerfully and confidently drown in the sea.

The scene also obviously quotes the very similar scene from the 1961 movie “Atlantis – The Lost Continent”, that can be found here.

Here is the full video excerpt:

Atlantis: The Lost Continent (1961)

This movie is certainly not of the greatest to have come out of Hollywood. But made in 1961 it is one of the first movies about Atlantis and has been influential in popularizing the myth in the 20. Century. Made with a lot of stock footage from the movie company MGM, particularly from “Quo vadis” filmed ten years prior, the movie is not concerned with Atlantis as a sunken or submarine civilization, but with the downfall of a civilization and an oppressive political system and class. Really, the so called Lost Continent the story is set on could be any ancient empire or city.

The only remarkable feature of the movie I found to be the destruction sequence towards it’s very end. It’s filmed and edited in a very classic structure giving a good example of the Hollywood aesthetics of destruction. In a shot-and-reverse-shot-sequence the viewer is put in the position of the refugees in three boats and a safe distance from the desaster site. Here are the last 3 minutes of the movie (without sound):

And here is what director John Landis has to say about the movie: