Silent Running (Douglas Trumbull, 1972)

Location: Monica Partridge A03
Date(s): Wednesday 21st June 2023 (16:00-18:30)
Description: Following their mass extinction, botanist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern) is tasked with preserving Earth's last remaining ecosystems in large pods attached to a spacecraft. Lowell defies orders to destroy them so the spacecraft can be turned over to commercial interests, working with robots to ensure the survival of the final vestiges of Earth's natural world. Silent Running is certainly a product of its moment: its existentialist, melancholy perspective drew clear inspiration from the intellectual and spiritual turn in the science-fiction genre following 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), demonstrating the capacity for mainstream cinema at the time to engage in substantive debates about the future of the species and the planet on which we live (much like Planet of the Apes, also released in 1968). It also resonates explicitly with our own ecological reckoning: a few months after taking office in 1977, President Jimmy Carter was handed a memo explaining the looming catastrophe of human-made climate change. Now confronting the consequences of our inability to prioritise the natural world over our consumerist desires, Silent Running presents us with a vision of our possible future even though it was made more than fifty years ago.

Centre for Research in Visual Culture

University of Nottingham
Lakeside Arts Centre
Nottingham, NG7 2RD

email: mark.rawlinson@nottingham.ac.uk