OU Film & Media Futures

Title:

From Horror to Harbinger: The Evolution of Dinosaurs in Film

Abstract:

This lecture will examine the representation of dinosaurs in film and consider how these depictions speak to our evolving cultural relationship to biodiversity, ecology and extinction. This lecture will give a brief overview of Western attitudes to dinosaurs and the onscreen representations which cemented their status as pre-historic monsters, before considering the representational shift which has occurred in the past twenty-five years, indicated by works such as The Land Before Time, Walking with Dinosaurs and the Jurassic Park franchise. This lecture asks whether depictions of dinosaurs can be considered an effective means of considering deep time and extinction events or whether they enforce anthropocentric conceptions of our global ecologies.

Speaker:

Rachel Gough is a PhD researcher at the Department of Film and Screen Media at University College Cork. Her research focuses on representations of rural Ireland’s ecologies in film, television and video games. In 2023 she was awarded the Lord Putnam Scholarship. She is an award-winning filmmaker and published short fiction writer. In 2022 she was the recipient of the Editor’s Choice award from the National Flash Fiction Anthology.