Policy Approaches to Green Film Practices: Local Solutions for a Planetary Problem

Abstract

Over the last three decades, environmental issues have become increasingly visible in mainstream screen culture, with narratives and messaging around climate change, species extinction, and environmental justice woven into the popular outlets of film, television, streaming content, and online short form video. Concurrently, the screen industries responsible for producing these texts have embraced various sustainability slogans, practices, and on-set and -lot practices. These industry shifts can be seen in a variety of ways: as public relations strategy to avoid governmental regulation, as timely corporate responsibility, or as rebranding for popular appeal—or some cocktail of the three. (Maxwell & Miller 2012: 84, Vaughan 2019). To now they have been understood mostly in terms of the contradictions of globalization and according to best practices across major studio initiatives; as such, discourse around green filmmaking has stayed at the level set by those in hegemonic positions of power. With aims of subverting this dynamic, I lay out here a range of potential localized and regional stakeholder coalitions and policy formations that may offer models for resisting the status quo maintenance wrapped in green packaging by the larger institutions of global media culture. By laying out the historical emergence of green production practices and studies, delving into illustrative case studies from around the world, and identifying promising collaborations between academia, industry, and policy development, I argue here for future strategies to mitigate screen media production’s contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel and other natural resource exploitation, and ecosystem disruption. More specifically, I argue for targeting mobile productions and incentive programs to leverage such initiatives, as these production culture dynamics both tend to pose heightened environmental risks and, historically, to have underestimated the potential for leveraging financial and aesthetic appeal for sustainability and preservation demands.