Teaching Ecocinema and Environmental Humanities: A Ready-to-Use Syllabus
As environmental crises continue to transform global culture, Ecological and Environmental Turns: (Re)mapping China’s Sociocultural Landscape through Ecocinema by Professor Shuqin Cui, the Bowdoin Professor of Asian Studies and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College, offers an innovative framework for teaching and studying film, ecology, and environmental humanities. Bridging ecocriticism, cinema studies, and cultural analysis, this groundbreaking work demonstrates how ecocinema can deepen awareness of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. To support teaching and course adoption, Professor Cui has provided a ready-to-use syllabus, adaptable for courses in film studies, environmental humanities, or global cultural studies, using China as a central case study.
COURSE DESCRIPTION
In the face of ongoing global environmental crises, this course explores China’s social, cultural, and ecological landscapes through the lens of ecocinema and the critical framework of ecocriticism. Questions we’ll address: How can we rethink the relationship between nature and culture to move beyond human-centered perspectives? How might environmental issues be understood as part of global and transnational systems? In what ways can teaching and learning in the humanities help us better grasp the urgent environmental changes shaping our world?
In response to these questions, we will examine four “eco-environmental turns”:
The Environmental Turn – Reconsidering history from environmental perspective, addressing the interdependence of humans and the natural world.
The Landscape Turn – Investigating how economic growth and globalization have radically transformed physical environments.
The Material Turn – Questioning how culture has traditionally been valued over nature, mind over body, and words over physical realities.
The Animal Turn – Challenging conventional human-animal boundaries and highlighting the ethical importance of non-human life.
Through the shared experience of film screenings, readings, and conversation, we will journey into ecological ways of thinking—opening our eyes to the interwoven ties between humans and the natural world and cultivating both the critical insight and creative imagination needed to engage with our planet’s changing stories.
TEACHING AND LEARNING GOALS
Upon completion of the course, you will be able to:
- identify key ecological and environmental issues in China against a global context.
- explain the concept of eco-environmental turns, using eco-criticism as a theoretical framework and eco-cinema as a visual language.
- develop and employ cinematic vocabulary to craft analytical writing and engage in critical, rhetorically informed discussions about motion pictures.
Week 1 – Introduction
The author proposes several “pragmatic turns” in thinking about the environment. How would you define these turns in your own words? How might they help shift our worldview away from being human-centered?
Ecocriticism is our main theoretical framework, and ecocinema is the medium we’ll use. How can ecocriticism shape the way we see films? How might cinema encourage new ways of thinking about environmental issues?
Week 2 – Chapter 1: Back to 1942 – Forgotten History and Lost Memory
Historical framework: How does the film situate itself in China’s history and politics of the time? How does it represent that history through the tension between the national and the personal?
Faming narrative: How does the film address historical trauma through multiple narrative perspectives? Consider the role of the voice-over at the beginning and end, and the figure of the man with a camera.
Week 3 – Chapter 2: Aftershock – Ecological and Psychological Trauma
Disaster discourse: The Tangshan Earthquake sets the framework for the film narrative. How does the film reconsider that history—the natural disaster and its post-traumatic effects—where the victims are torn between memory and reality, past and present?
Traumatic memory: Considering the idea of traumatic memory as the driving force of the film narrative, describe how that memory is erased and reconstructed.
Family melodrama: Melodrama serves as a powerful means for expressing interpersonal relationships within the confines of the family and also in the social community. How does the film generate psychological as well as ecological trauma via mother-daughter conflict?
Week 4 – Chapter 3: Waking the Green Tiger – Environmental Activism through Social Media
Environmental history: how/why does the film present the controversy of Nujiang dam project against China’s environmental history, especially ideological concepts in Mao’s China?
Documentary mode: how does the film juxtaposes between history and reality through multiple documentary modes? Please identify a specific mode and explain its significance.
Citizen activism and green movement: how does the film mobilize citizen activism and green movement through incorporations between local villagers and environmental activists via social media?
Week 5 – Chapter 4: Still Life – Bodies in Ruins and Landscape in Disappearance
Parallel narrative structure: How does the film juxtapose its narrative via parallel structure and why?
Four material symbols: cigarettes, wine, tea, and candy: Why does the film punctuate its narrative via these four material objects? How does each object carry both narrative and cultural meaning?
Mise-en-scene of migrant bodies and ruin landscapes: How are migrant bodies positioned within ruined landscapes? What does this contrast suggest?
Week 6 – Chapter 5: Manufactured Landscapes – Mediation and Meditation between Film and Photography
Visual Aesthetics and Cinematic Techniques: How does the film’s opening tracking shot through the factory set the tone for the documentary? In what ways do Burtynsky’s photographs differ from the moving images of the documentary?
Environmental and Ethical Inquiry: How do Burtynsky’s images and B’s camera frame their film subjects? Are they individualized or anonymized?
Globalization and the Human Cost: Does the documentary critique, or simply document, the environmental and human costs of globalization?
Week 7 – Chapter 6: Behemoth – A Poetic Vision of Ravaged Landscape
Why does the film draw on Dante’s Divine Comedy and its three realms (Hell, Purgatory, Paradise) as its narrative structure?
How does the slow death caused by black lung disease generate slow cinema through the documentary modes of extreme long take, minimal editing etc.?
How does the film contrast the Mongolian grasslands with the ravaged industrial landscapes?
Week 8 – Chapter 7: Under the Dome – A Multimedia Documentary in the Digital Age
Personal Narrative and Documentary Strategy
Why does Chai Jing begin with her personal story about her unborn child? How does this connect to ecofeminism?
How does the film blend investigative journalism with emotional appeal? Is this effective or manipulative?
What stylistic or rhetorical choices make the documentary feel urgent and persuasive (interviews, statistics, social media ….)
Environmental Knowledge and Political Power
What main causes of air pollution are identified in the film, and how are they connected to government and corporate actions?
How does the film critique government regulators and state-owned enterprises? What risks did Chai take in speaking openly?
Media, Censorship, and Public Impact
Why do you think the film initially went viral in China and was then swiftly censored?
What is the significance of Under the Dome being released online rather than through traditional media channels?
How does its online release shape its role as “civic environmentalism”?
Week 9 – Chapter 8: Plastic China – Transnational Trash Flow and Documentary Narratives
Transnational Trash Flow: How does the circulation of waste create a “transnational trash discourse” that links different countries?
Between the local and global: how are global consumption patterns connected to the lives of those depicted, especially women, children, and the marginalized?
Documentary Storytelling: what type of documentary modes that the film director uses for his storytelling, observational or participate or explorative? Give examples of moments that stood out to you.
Week 10 – Chapter 9: 76 Days & Days and Nights in Wuhan – The Lockdown Narrative and Post-Pandemic Documentaries
Days and Nights in Wuhan intends to highlight “ordinary heroes” fighting a national war against the virus and to celebrate their victory over the outbreak.
Do you agree with this framing? Why or why not? How might the official term “ordinary heroes” be both inspiring and problematic?
76 Days highlights the life-and-death struggle against a frightening plague, mourns those who lost lives, and pays tribute to those who saved lives.
Do you agree with the claims and explain why (support your viewpoint with evidence).
Comparison and contrast of the closing sequences: pickup shots in Days and Nights in Wuhan but air-raid siren in 76 Days.
Which ending will leave the audience an alarming impact or claim that “life is back to normal”?
Week 11 – Chapter 10: Kekexili: Mountain Patrol – Tibetan Antelopes and Wilderness through the Camera Lens
Man/journalist with a camera: How does the “man/journalist with a camera” function as a way for viewers to see the Tibetan wilderness and environmental crisis?
The land and animals as gendered other: Kekexili as the virginal terrain and Tibetan antelopes the slaughtered bodies. Can we draw a connection between the “exploitation of women and exploitation of nonhuman animals?”
Poachers and patrollers: What does the film suggest about blurred boundaries between poachers and patrollers, and about Tibetan identity?
Week 12 – Chapter 11: Wolf Totem – A Romantic Elegy to Exterminated Animals and Endangered Ethnicities
How does the film give the wolves—especially Little Wolf—their own voice or perspective?
How do views of human–animal relationships differ between nomadic Mongols, Han Chinese, and settler farmers?
How does cinematography of the Mongolian steppes add emotional and philosophical depth?
Week 13 – Chapter 12: Kung Fu Panda – Anthropomorphic Animated Animals and Computer-Generated Kung Fu Masters
Animation: how the anthropomorphized narrative of Kung Fu Panda reimagines human-animal relationships within the virtual realm of animation, blending animal forms with human behaviors and personalities.
How does the film transform a CGI-generated Panda into kung fu master and turn an American narrative of personal ambition and self-fulfillment through Chinese visual/cultural elements?
Week 14 – Reflection and Reviews
Does the proposed idea of eco-environmental turns sound persuasive to you, or has it shifted your worldview as we conclude the course?
To what extent does China’s socio-cultural landscape appear different after (re)mapping it through an eco-environmental lens?
Does the science-fiction film The Wandering Earth offer a powerful vision—or a chilling reflection—of an environmental future still dominated by human forces, or does it position a superpower as the ultimate savior of the planet?
Through this syllabus and her book Ecological and Environmental Turns: (Re)mapping China’s Sociocultural Landscape through Ecocinema, which includes 44 images, Professor Shuqin Cui provides a model for how film and the environmental humanities can intersect in meaningful, transformative ways. Her framework invites instructors and students alike to reflect on how cinema can illuminate ecological questions that transcend national and disciplinary boundaries. Together, the book and syllabus offer an invaluable foundation for teaching, discussion, and further research on the vital relationship between culture and the environment.
Learn more about this book https://www.cambriapress.com/EcologicalEnvironmentalTurns/. Available in hardcover and ebook. Available for course adoption. Discounts available for bulk purchase.
See also books in the Cambria Sinophone World Series and the Cambria Sinophone Translation Series Books.