Age Of Stupid Research Articles

Precarious Planet: Ecological Violence in The Age of Stupid

Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid is a mosaic structured documentary which explores how human activity may indeed send the planet into ecological breakdown. The fictional and speculative future is conveyed through the dramatic device of a narrator, Pete Postlethwaite, who plays the world’s last archivist. He speaks from 2055, attempting to analyse through the selected documentaries, how humanity caused its own collective suicide. However, the film invites more than a reading that emphasises its politically activist aspects. Rather, through a dialogue with Giorgio Agamben’s concept of ‘bare life’, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921) and Jacques Derrida’s critique of this in ‘Force of Law’ (2002), the film can deliver readings which do theoretical work. The dialogue between the film and the classical theoretical texts can offer a way of re-working the applicability of Benjamin’s concepts of ‘mythical’ and ‘divine’ violence and the invocation to which they point. Namely, Benjamin’s suggestion that it is important to declare a ‘state of emergency’ (1940).

Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid

ABSTRACTIn March 2013, after six years of consultation, an Australian Labor government launched the national cultural policy document, Creative Australia. In July 2013, a Coalition government was elected, Senator George Brandis became Minister for the Arts, and the policy was dumped. With it went cross-party consensus about funding rationales and measurement strategies, with disastrous consequences for the cultural sector. This cautionary tale of gaffes, pay-back and abrupt changes of direction, highlights the fragility of policy memory that condemns artists and arts managers to a never-ending reinvention of the evidentiary wheel. Our paper examines the problem of collective understanding (“world”) in cultural policy-making in Australia, exacerbated not only by the short-term electoral cycles which undermine long-term cultural outcome timescales, but by a fixation on what Hannah Arendt calls “the peculiar and ingenious replacement of common sense with strict logicality”. Evidence of value is only meaningful when it occurs in a policy memory that can fully avow it and respond in appropriate ways. Measurement methods are over-determined by epistemology and by experience. We argue that the balance between these determinants of effective cultural policy-making has been lost. An emphasis on numerical data – especially economic data – has forced arguments for culture into a decontextualised register of quantitative proof. Recent events in Australia suggest that different, more direct ways of engaging with cultural policy-making are required for the problem of collective understanding to be successfully assayed.

A critical review of popular technological solutions for climate change as evident in the movie industry

This paper critically reviews four selected movies dealing with climate change and the resulting ecosystem deterioration, namely, The Day After Tomorrow, An inconvenient Truth, The 11th Hour and The Age of Stupid. It scrutinises the limitations, the hypocrisy and the dilemma embedded in the technological solutions to climate change suggested in the movies, such as reduction in fossil fuel consumption, use of energy efficient technologies and adaptation of renewable energy. Movies’ failure to discuss crucial phenomena such as the ‘rebound effect’ of efficiency improvement technologies, ‘well-to-wheel lifecycle assessment’ of renewable energy technologies, and their power to reverse the capability of chosen technological solutions to combat ecosystem deterioration are highlighted. The review also stresses on the need for movies to place emphasis on moving away not only from egocentrism, as illustrated by reference to selected footages from the movie Amelie, but also from human-centrism towards eco-centrism to save the ecosystem on which all lives depend upon.

Cinematic climate change, a promising perspective on climate change communication.

Previous research findings display that after having seen popular climate change films, people became more concerned, more motivated and more aware of climate change, but changes in behaviors were short-term. This article performs a meta-analysis of three popular climate change films, The Day after Tomorrow (2005), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and The Age of Stupid (2009), drawing on research in social psychology, human agency, and media effect theory in order to formulate a rationale about how mass media communication shapes our everyday life experience. This article highlights the factors with which science blends in the reception of the three climate change films and expands the range of options considered in order to encourage people to engage in climate change mitigation actions.

Bridging the Political Deficit: Loss, Morality, and Agency in Films Addressing Climate Change

This article examines the emotional rhetorical strategies of 3 films—The Day After Tomorrow (2004), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), and The Age of Stupid (2009)—that attempt to create engagements with the “postpolitical” problem of climate change. In all 3 films the experience of personal loss, the potential for future loss, and the emotions associated with loss are fundamental to affective engagement. The emotional loading of representations of environmental problems derives partly from concerns about human political agency and subjectivity. It is not so much that emotional or moral appeals are simply added on in order to bolster a political message, but rather that autobiographical narratives of loss and morality occupy the space once dominated by modernist forms of politics.

Film Review: The Age of Stupid

Film Review: The Age of Stupid

Troubling spaces: Ecological risk, narrative framing, and emotional engagement in The Age of Stupid

Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid (2009) presents itself as a documentary about ecological risk and environmental injustice in different geographical regions, while at the same time appealing strongly to our emotions by showing us something we are not yet able to see: the possibly catastrophic future consequences of our present behavior. Through the use of spatial and temporal framing, Armstrong creates a strong cognitive and affective link between the documentation of current social and environmental practices and the imagination of future ecological devastation. Drawing on the pioneering work of cognitive film theorists and other scholars interested in the emotional appeal of non-fiction film, I investigate how The Age of Stupid mediates threatened ecological spaces and associated environmental risks in order to provoke strong affective and cognitive responses from viewers and, ideally, move them to action.

Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future – Ritual, Reflexivity and the Hope for Renewal in Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Climate Change Communication Film "Home"

Spectre of the Past, Vision of the Future – Ritual, Reflexivity and the Hope for Renewal in Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Climate Change Communication Film "Home"

Hybrid Pedagogies for Sustainability Education

In the pseudo-documentary The Age of Stupid (Armstrong 2009), a historian from 2055 scans the remnants of civilization and asks why, in the early twenty-first century, we didn't save ourselves when...

Transcending the Age of Stupid: Learning to Imagine Ourselves Differently

Education has an important role in helping young people understand the sociopolitical and technological roots of our current environmental unsustainability problem. However, instrumental analysis is not sufficient; an informed activist orientation is required. Scientific and technological education that ignores issues of justice, equity, and economic power that underpin unsustainability is at odds with the common good. This article argues that educators need to redouble their efforts with young people in ongoing educational acts of disclosing and defiance with respect to the political ecologies supporting the status quo.

The Age of Stupid

The Age of Stupid Written and Directed by: Franny Armstrong Produced by: Lizzie Gillet Released in September, 2009

The Age of Stupid (2009)

The Age of Stupid (2009)

Film: The Age of Stupid

The Oscar nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite plays “the archivist,” looking back from his high tech Arctic base in 2055. Climate change has run amok, and this rocky outpost is one of the last habitable places on Earth. From the devastation of New Orleans, after hurricane Katrina, the shrinking of an alpine glacier near to the Mont Blanc road tunnel, the establishment of India’s first budget …