You Can’t Say They Didn’t Try: Environmentally Conscious Documentaries — Part 2 (Marsha Gordon)
Channel: Wolfpack Solutions
Date: 2021-08-24

In this video (Part 2 of 2) Marsha Gordon, Ph.D. explores the way documentary films targeted at young people — one each from the 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s — have for decades tried to help us to comprehend what failure to prevent catastrophic climate change might mean for us.  

Links to films discussed:
The Unchained Goddess (1958, Bell Science Hour): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1ph_7C1Jq4 

Countdown to Collision (1972, Airlie Productions) streaming via the National Library of Medicine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bzNp-z6tKU

This video was originally produced for an audience of entering first-year and transfer students at NC State University as a part of an interdisciplinary experience. It is available for noncommercial reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

Marsha Gordon is professor and director of film studies at NC State, a recent Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and an NEH Public Scholar. She is the author of Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (Wesleyan University Press, 2008), and co-editor of Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019). She has co-directed three documentaries, Nesting (2020), All the Possibilities… (2019), and Rendered Small (2017).