Environmentalist Cinema And Principles Of Just Society

Abstract

The UN Summit on Climate Change in Paris was held in 2015, at which the Framework Convention was signed by many countries around the world, including Georgia. The document is the basis of the EU Green Agreement, which was approved in 2019 and which doubles the commitment of Georgia, a member of the Eastern Partnership, to promote a green economy and culture, which not only is not the case but on the example of Namakhvani HPP reveals the fact that the country has been arranged according to a wrong economic model.

Cinema is the medium that has the most outstanding ability to reorganize the world and, therefore, has great potential.Cinema, as the screen of discourses best reflects a culture that stands out from the point of view of consumer values alike to ordinary people and nature, the environment, ecology. Marx's theory of fetishism, which has evolved since the advent of the term ideology, well explains the attitude of the culture towards natural (or human) resources.

We must not forget that a culture that is a conglomerate of discourses, and like discourses, it is produced by ideology (superstructure). Ideology possesses the intellectual levers through which the dominant forces, the classes, are established by presenting the values of this class as the "norm". Culture, therefore, is directed to save the verticals of power by concealing problems, or by telling incomplete truth. Nevertheless, it is a culture that implies confrontation with the laws of nature and discourses based on those laws. However, first and foremost, capitalist ideology seeks to adapt thought systems to itself, including culture.

Georgian cinema has always had an ideological line, but in the 1960’s the process of devaluation of communism in intellectual and creative circles shifted the focus to the problem of individualism. For example, in several of Merab Kokochashvili's films, the mainline is drawn between the relationship of the individual and the environment, where the apparatus (state) is presented only as a clear source of evil. It is regulations that create the environmental context that is the only way to stop profit-oriented destructive systems. Neither competition nor individual or corporate responsibility can solve ecological disasters and human exploitation problems.

In modern Georgian cinema, there are more and more attempts to extract a broader holistic picture of the impact on the environment. Salome Jashi explores the whim of the richest Georgian - the passion for arranging a dendrological park with centuries-old trees, which is a class catastrophe along with an ecological catastrophe. Alexander Koberidze's "What do we see when we look at the sky?" asks the main question, "What do we answer our children" when they discover that they live in an unjust world that is sacrificed to the greed of a small number of people in power.