In an era when many businesses have come under scrutiny for their environmental impact, the film industry has for the most part escaped criticism and regulation. Its practices are more diffuse; its final product, less tangible; and Hollywood has adopted public-relations strategies that portray it as environmentally conscious. In Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret, Hunter Vaughan offers a new history of the movies from an environmental perspective, arguing that how we make and consume films has serious ecological consequences.

Bringing together environmental humanities, science communication, and social ethics, Hollywood’s Dirtiest Secret is a pathbreaking consideration of the film industry’s environmental impact that examines how our cultural prioritization of spectacle has distracted us from its material consequences and natural-resource use. Vaughan examines the environmental effects of filmmaking from Hollywood classics to the digital era, considering how popular screen media shapes and reflects our understanding of the natural world. He recounts the production histories of major blockbusters—Gone with the Wind, Singin’ in the Rain, Twister, and Avatar—situating them in the contexts of the development of the film industry, popular environmentalism, and the proliferation of digital technologies. Emphasizing the materiality of media, Vaughan interweaves details of the hidden environmental consequences of specific filmmaking practices, from water use to server farms, within a larger critical portrait of social perceptions and valuations of the natural world.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/hollywoods-dirtiest-secret/9780231182416

Popular films and television shows have grown more environmental on the surface, but we rarely think of the environmental ramifications of how they are made, distributed, maintained, watched, and archived - the natural resources they require, the energy they are dependent on, the manufacturing processes they are a part of, the global e-waste they produce - and the environmental justice implications of every stage.

Much of my work involves the materiality and resource dependency of media culture. Among other projects, I am PI with Pietari Kaapa (University of Warwick) on a two-year international AHRC grant to develop a Global Green Media Production Network. We work with leading experts across the world to develop approaches to environmentally sustainable media practices - including economic incentives offered by local governments, initiatives designed by private companies, and strategies for embedding environmental values in education.

Hunter co-founded and is Editor, with Meryl Shriver-Rice, of the interdisciplinary Journal of Environmental Media (Intellect Books).

“The Journal of Environmental Media offers a scholarly platform to bridge work in environmental studies, issues of social justice and science communication through the prism of screen media. In particular, the journal will promote studies in the technology, messaging and reception of environmentally themed content, policy and activism through the mediation of digital mobile screens. As both the general population and academic world experiences a growing awareness of how integral visual and digital culture are to our understanding, discussion, and behaviour around the natural environment in an era of accelerating climate change, this journal responds to an urgent cultural, scientific and scholarly intersection.”

https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-environmental-media

Recent recaps and upcoming talks:

Boulder Bookstore, Boulder CO (January 30, 2020)

Boston Film & Media Speaker Series, Wellesley College (Sept. 26, 2019): https://www.wellesley.edu/newhouse/events/node/167691

Books & Books, Coral Gables FL (April 17, 2019): https://booksandbooks.com/event/hunter-vaughan/

“Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.”

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/where-film-meets-philosophy/9780231161329