ABSTRACT
The essay examines how recent British cinema is responding aesthetically to the contemporary environmental and climate crisis by critically examining the notion of “realism” in the environmental humanities and ecomedia studies through a close reading of Dark River, written and directed by Clio Barnard in 2017. How does the film use the mode of social realism to frame the environmental realities of our time? Typical of social realism, Dark River is a drama with an anthropocentric focus on blame and responsibility within a family. This central drama is placed within a wider, social context of farming in a time of environmental crisis, specified as a decline in biodiversity. At key moments, the possibility of ethical considerations beyond the human is afforded, as the film uses metonymy to connote wider issues of care, responsibility, and how to live in a precarious rural environment. The film also demonstrates stylistic hybridity by augmenting social realism with melodrama, particularly in the climactic scene of violent retribution. Melodrama adds both a psychological intensity and a sense of cosmic scale difficult to achieve through social realism alone. The analysis of “realism” in the essay draws on Timothy Clark’s discussion of scale in fictions about climate change and is also informed by theories of agency and realism in new materialism and critical realism, thereby moving beyond an anthropocentric bias towards a consideration of the complex roles played by nonhuman participants in the social realist construction of living environments.
