Green documentary: environmental documentary in the twenty-first century 9781783201839, 9781783202553, 9781783202560, 9781783200528, 1783200529, 1783202556

Table of contents :
Introduction : contemplation, irony, argument --
The institutional context --
The contemplative response --
The ironic response --
The argumentative response --
The material response.

Citation preview

Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century

GREEN DOCUMENTARY

Helen Hughes

Green Documentary

Green Documentary Environmental Documentary in the Twenty-First Century

Helen Hughes

intellect Bristol, UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2014 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK First published in the USA in 2014 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Cover designer: Holly Rose Cover image: Still from Sleep Furiously (2007). Gideon Koppel, courtesy of the film-maker Copy-editor: MPS Technologies Production manager: Jelena Stanovnik & Claire Organ Typesetting: Contentra Technologies Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-183-9 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-255-3 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-256-0 Printed and bound by Hobbs, UK

Contents Acknowledgements Chapter 1:  Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

vii 1

Chapter 2:  The Institutional Context

21

Chapter 3:  The Contemplative Response

41

Chapter 4:  The Ironic Response

83

Chapter 5:  The Argumentative Response

115

Chapter 6:  The Material Response

135

Works Cited

143

Index

157

Acknowledgements This project developed out of a personal interest and has involved the discovery of an engaged and inclusive community of film programmers, scholars, activists and film-makers. I have benefited greatly from the work of colleagues who have screened films in London at the BFI Southbank, the Goethe-Institut, the Austrian Institute, the French Institute and Curzon cinemas. I am also grateful to colleagues who have founded and run the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA), as well as the Association for Literature and the Environment (ASLE), the UK and Ireland version ASLE-UKI, and the European Association for Studies of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (EASLCE) all of which have provided a context to engage with current debates. I would like to thank Axel Goodbody in particular for organising the conference Environmental Change, Cultural Change and the AHRC Landscape and Environment network ‘The cultural framing of environmental discourse’. At the same time I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of Surrey, particularly Rachel Fensham, Hing Tsang, Bella Honess Roe, and Lois Davis, for many a useful reference and for some great conversations on documentary film. I’d also like to thank Tarla Rai Petersen and Anabel Carvalho for directing my thoughts towards the politics of environmental communication. I’d like also to thank Salma Monani and other members of the Ecomedia Studies group for their friendship and companionship at conferences. I thank all the students who have chosen to take my course in Green Film at the University of Surrey and have helped me to experiment with various ideas. I should also acknowledge and thank my husband Martin for pointing out many of the films that sparked and maintined my interest in this documentary phenomenon and my sons Alex and Sam who have kept me up to date with Internet sites and the syllabus in UK schools. And finally thanks to Jelena Stanovnik, Claire Organ and Intellect Books for taking an interest in this project.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

Introduction Towards the beginning of the film Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010), the director Michael Madsen, standing in pitch darkness, strikes a match and, with half of his face lit and his name and signature reproduced on screen, he speaks the words: ‘I am now in this place where you should never come’. He continues to deliver a kind of concrete poem, with his clearly enunciated words also reproduced onscreen in subtitles. The poem is about ‘Onkalo’, the place where he is standing. He explains that ‘Onkalo’ is a Finnish word translated as ‘hiding place’, and it refers to the place just entered, a massive tunnel leading down out of woodland and deep into bedrock. As Madsen speaks, the match he is holding burns down so that with the last question the light source goes out and his face disappears: ‘If you, some time far into the future, find this, what will it tell you about us?’ (Into Eternity: A Film for the Future, 2010) With this line it becomes clear that he is not speaking to this audience here in London in 2012 but to our descendants some 100,000 years hence. As an audience we are asked to undertake alongside Madsen and the team working on Onkalo an extended thought experiment about the connections between ourselves and the people of the far-distant future. In this thought experiment strange things happen to the reference potential of communicative gestures. In this final sentence the referent of ‘you’ is unknown. We don’t know what our descendants will be like after 100,000 years of evolution. But the place seen in the film, the ‘this’ that they will find, will, it is hoped, be the same, having lain, as predicted, undisturbed by earthquakes or other natural events. From the modality of the words it can be understood that the film itself cannot be conceptualized as a vessel to communicate with

Figures 1abc:  Michael Madsen holds up a match while he addresses generations thousands of years into the future in Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010). He is standing in a tunnel designed to hold nuclear waste that, according to European Law, must be kept away from people for 100,000 years. The film explores the consequences of having to think long term. DVD captures.

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that future, but for the present it is a way to think and emote and experiment with the idea of communicating a message about the environment and about ourselves across time. Into Eternity, subtitled A Film for the Future was released at the end of a remarkable decade for documentaries about environmental change. As a film it is typical of the ever more imaginative and thoughtful use of the theatrical documentary to explore and convey the impact of human civilization on the planet. Framed by this thought experiment, the film goes on to give space to contemplate the images and sounds of nuclear power production and the carefully considered arguments about how to store nuclear waste in such a way that it will not cause harm. The film is about the reality of the issues as they are framed in the present, and it uses documentary footage and interviews with experts to advance its points, but it does not shy away from the emotive use of these elements nor from the techniques of fiction film-making to encourage the imagination to engage with the problems. The aim of this book is to give sustained critical attention to such award-winning and critically acclaimed cinema documentaries on environmental themes made in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The argument will be made that these documentaries represent significant developments in social and activist documentary film-making. Through their explorations into the creation of an environmental focus such films do not only raise public interest in important themes of the decade, they also extend the formal possibilities for factual film-making. The chapters in this book all focus on environmental documentary films made for the cinema that have been produced in the first decade of the twenty-first century or earlier films that have provided significant models for the techniques used in contemporary documentaries. The films focussed on have all been given cinema releases and have gained audiences through festival awards, public television broadcasts, DVD and online release. During this decade different documentary strategies pursued in Europe and North America – the ethnographic film, the art film, the historical archive film and the campaigning film – emerge as models for documentarists with environmental subjects. At the same time documentary has achieved the visual and formal qualities that have made it possible for environmental films to be enjoyed for their cinematic achievement as well as their informative, sometimes controversial, content. This process of popularization is complex and often closely linked to the rise of subjective activist film-making and the public sphere politics of anti-capitalist globalization campaigns. While the idea of the emergence of an environmental documentary subgenre is compelling, at the same time it is clear that there are many different ways to approach the question of how to categorize it. A combination of a pragmatic approach to genre combined with the documentary ‘modes’ of participation and reflection is appealing, but it is clear from the many different lists of environmental documentaries in film catalogues online that to do the field justice there must be subgenres within this subgenre and no clear-cut distinction between the different techniques used by film-makers exploring subjects without an environmental purpose or theme. 4

Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

The approach that has been developed in this study has been to seek out a less formal and more subjective way to characterize the environmental documentary in keeping with its emergence as a response to the issues raised by the problem of the impact of humans on the planet. While the environmental documentary can be understood as instrumental – as a means to disseminate knowledge and encourage debate – what is clear is that the theatrical documentary has not defined itself in terms of a role as information film but in terms of a variety of contexts more or less defined by the film projects themselves. The central aspect of the environmental documentary is the subject of the environment, however conceived. In this study the environmental documentary is understood not as a means to disseminate knowledge but as a response in itself to the ideas, beliefs and emotions that emerge in the process of audio-visual research into the environment. This process, like many other social documentary themes, involves the film-maker understanding herself as not only engaged but involved. In making a film about the environment, understood as a political subject, the film-maker is involved in a special way. Film is a medium that is imbricated in the modernity that it critiques, and thus film-makers can do no other than acknowledge involvement in the theme of environmental change on both a professional and personal level. Thus the film-maker must attempt to limit as well as justify the role of film-making in environmental degradation through what films offer to the global dissemination of environmental consciousness. However, the perception of the eco-doc as a response to the dilemma of engagement in modernity leads to a different kind of categorization. Here documentaries that engage with environmental themes can be differentiated according to the tone of response they represent. In the discussion about genre and mode the environmental documentary is defined through aesthetic categories and strategies of engagement with the subject. However, such films may be more profitably defined as a communicative response in dialogue with the many debates taking place in the fields of environmental communication, environmental education and environmental psychology. In this case the film may be understood as an ambivalent or contemplative response, as ironic or as argumentative in response to the consciousness of the complexity of the issues. In making such a shift the eco-doc is here conceptualized in a slightly different way. To place documentary in the context of communication rather than aesthetics is to take sides on the question of agency or intentionality in film and possibly to claim intentionality as a fundamental for environmental documentary. The kind of intentionality involved in ambivalent, ironic or argumentative communication is complex. This book is about the communication through documentary film of what the researchers in environmental psychology Kollmuss and Agyeman (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002) have called ‘environmental consciousness’. The film Into Eternity does not only inform its viewers about some of the facts regarding the storage of nuclear waste. The role of film as a vehicle for communication between people separated in space and time is used to draw attention to the wider significance of the questions about long-term storage and the need to communicate with generations far into the distant future. This can be seen as an extension of what 5

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Willoquet-Maricondi has described as ‘ecocinema’ (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010), as it allows the materiality of film-making to be acknowledged as part of the environmental impact of human behaviour. Documentary revival and the environmental theme in film studies Part of the context for the development of environmental documentaries has been general growth in interest in the creative possibilities of the documentary form. In the middle of the decade at the Grierson Awards in 2005 Nick Fraser, Storyville series editor at BBC Four, spoke about the extraordinary revival of documentary. In an interview on the series homepage online he put this down to ‘a reaction against the platitudes and stereotypes of television’, ‘the steadily lowering cost of equipment’ and the fact that young people want to make and watch documentaries: ‘It has become a very convenient form of self-expression and a contemporary cultural form’ (BBC Storyville, 2004). Although Thomas Austin has pointed out that the increase in audiences for documentary was probably not as high as it appeared, the perception in the middle of the decade was that documentary had emerged as an exciting popular form after a period of decline (Austin, 2007). In parallel with the documentary surge, the perception that film as a medium was increasingly being used to convey environmental ideas also became steadily more prominent in film studies research. In the preface to his book Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema, David Ingram writes, ‘In September 1990, the Hollywood Reporter announced the arrival of a new movie genre: “film vert”. When Audubon magazine confirmed “the greening of Tinseltown” in March 1992, the “green” movie, it seemed, had become an identifiable cycle within Hollywood film production’ (Ingram, 2000, p. vi). Ingram’s book deals with Hollywood feature films from the 1950s to the end of the twentieth century that raise environmental issues and turn them into stories or the background for melodrama or disaster movies. Ingram argues that ‘Hollywood environmentalist movies are ideological agglomerations that draw on and perpetuate a range of contradictory discourses concerning the relationship between human beings and the environment’ (Ingram, 2000, p. viii). Three books appeared focussing specifically on ‘green’ feature films in popular, largely Hollywood, cinema: Ingram’s book mentioned above and Pat Brereton’s Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in American Cinema (Brereton, 2005) that drew out the ways in which a variety of films, not necessarily only the explicitly ‘green’ ones, insert ecological thinking into their narratives, particularly into their resolutions. Sean Cubitt’s EcoMedia (Cubitt, 2005) differed from these two studies in putting forward a theory about developments in contemporary media forms at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries that reflect the reciprocal communicative relationship between human society and the environment. Avant-garde and experimental films from the 1950s up to the late 1990s that can be interpreted in terms of their connectedness with an ecological history of American painting and literature were the subject of a book-length study by Scott MacDonald: The Garden in 6

Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (MacDonald, 2001). The role of large-format landscape photography and the documentary films of the New Deal era by Pare Lorenz and Robert Flaherty are discussed in Finnis Dunaway’s Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Dunaway, 2005) that takes its story up to the late 1960s and then continues in an epilogue up to the late 1990s. Confirming the many insights in these studies, environmental themes have continued to be developed in film studies in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann’s Ecology and Popular Film (Murray and Heumann, 2009) presents a series of case studies from Oil Wells of Baku: Close View shot in 1897 to 28 Weeks Later (Fresnadillo, 2007) further exploring the ways in which ecology has been reflected in the popular sphere in a range of different genres. Furthermore Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi’s edited volume Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge (Lu and Mi, 2009) with its ‘ecocinematic’ analysis of environmental issues in China, including Hong Kong and Tibet, providing an analysis of China’s political and economic history as the context for its analyses of a wide variety of examples has ensured that the focus in the English-language literature on the subject has an increasingly global reach followed up by Pietari Käpää and Tommy Gustafsson’s Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation (Käpää and Gustafsson, 2013). Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s edited collection Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010) has also offered a variety of approaches to both fictional and documentary films adapting the discourse of literary ecocriticism to critique the efficacy of cinema as a means to ‘retrain perception’ in the development of a new ecocentric consciousness. At the very end of the decade John Blewitt’s Media, Ecology and Conservation: Using the Media to Protect the World’s Wildlife and Ecosystems (Blewitt, 2010) demonstrated the ways in which television, film and the Internet have responded to the need to expose industrial practices that threaten the future of species and the habitats they depend on. His book represents an important development in the literature on wildlife film that since Derek Bousé’s book on the subject has consistently pointed to the ways in which the wild is distorted by the filming and editing techniques of wildlife narratives (Bousé, 2000). The effects of this severe discrepancy between the experience of the wild and its representation have become a significant field of research, circling around the issues of documentary representation, truth and reality. These studies in ecocriticism and in media analysis draw film studies into the interdisciplinary fields of environmental communication and environmental justice studies. The journals Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture and the Journal of Environmental Education Research, for example, have both devoted special issues to film and media research and regularly publish articles on audio-visual issues. The concern in this interdisciplinary space is to find ways to bring together the many insights of separate disciplines in their own integration of environmental concerns. Salma Monani’s introduction to the cross-fertilization of the term ‘ecosee’ (Dobrin and Morey, 2009) and environmental justice debates is an exemplary case in point as she writes: ‘Communication 7

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theory is rich with more empirical approaches that can consider questions of audience reception, participant interactivity, and discourse analysis, all of which can focus on questions of spatial justice and just sustainability in cinema and new media’ (Monani, 2011, p. 144). The collection Ecocinema: Theory and Practice coedited by Monani, Stephen Rust and Sean Cubitt is set to become a standard text in the field (Rust et al., 2013). The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen in particular the appearance of increasing numbers of environmental documentary films intended for theatrical distribution, these have managed to gain attention beyond special interest groups. Many have been made in North America and Europe but by no means only there. The aim of this book then is to study the nature of these environmental documentaries as they have developed in North American and European examples and to consider their contribution to environmental communication and to documentary film more generally. Although they cover a variety of themes, explicitly activist documentaries, like environmental feature films, have tended to display a shared structure, a consistent set of characters and a recognizable iconography. Like the fiction films that by 1990 were seen as a new genre cycle in Hollywood, they are peopled by good and bad scientists, passionate but rational campaigners, committed journalists, farmers and agricultural workers, enlightened consumers, politicians of all kinds, die-hard and reformed entrepreneurs and good and evil corporate managers. The iconography includes big and ingenious machinery, gigantic starkly colour-coded factories, global transport connectivity, impressive images of mass production and consumption, spectacular waste and landfill sites, crowds of people, cities, landscapes, both beautiful and scarred and animals, domestic and wild. Through this iconography it becomes possible to speak of a documentary subgenre, but it is not only the images and the themes that characterize the significance of the documentaries as a group.1 Part of this study is to explore how this trend in film-making has emerged as a response to various questions relating not to documentary in particular but to the communication of environmental ideas in general. If one speaks about the environmental documentary, or ‘eco-doc’ as it has become popularly known, as a ‘genre’, two models, one used for feature film genre and the other for documentary ‘modes’, might be used. The eco-doc as a subgenre Rick Altman’s semantic/syntagmatic/pragmatic approach developed in his book Film/Genre understands a genre as emerging when the conflicting interests in the construction of a form attain an acceptable balance (Altman, 1999). Environmental documentary film-making, particularly the twenty-first-century version, or eco-doc that might be labelled ‘bright green documentary’ displays and seeks to resolve these conflicts in paradigmatic ways. The interests involve the scientific community, the activist community, conceptual artists, the documentary film-making community, consumers, governments and corporations who all 8

Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

have an interest in developing communicative forms that influence the public sphere. In the attempts to create a global community in response to environmental threats, regional and national interests can also be seen to be emerging within the film texts. The balance between these many points of view may be found in a further significant point of view, the non-human or post-human perspective, that arises out of the combination of wildlife and landscape photography with social/ethnographic film-making and environmental advocacy. In discussing the relationship between genre and nation, Altman describes genres as ‘regulatory schemes facilitating the integration of diverse factions into a single unified social fabric’ (Altman, 1999, p. 206). In this Altman argues that genres operate in a similar way to nations and ‘other complex communities’ (Altman, p. 205), making a link between genre formation and Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Anderson’s theory of the imagined community. The competing perspectives of all the communities listed above are in part balanced through utilitarian arguments based on self-interest, but the ‘green’ aspect of environmental documentary comes through in the way that these arguments themselves are balanced against the planetary perspective developed by environmental thinkers. In his Introduction to Documentary Bill Nichols (Nichols, 2001) provides both a diachronic and synchronic structure for documentary film-making in his discussion of six different documentary ‘modes’. He introduces the idea of the mode as somewhat akin to the idea of genre, a collective tendency in the making of films that creates a recognizable form and a community identity. In the case of environmental documentary two of the modes can be seen to be merging – the poetic and the participatory – in a further mode that can be linked to developments in the documentation of conceptual art. This might be termed the ‘conceptual mode’ to be added to the list of documentary forms. This mode is one in which the documentary film-makers make use of part or all of the process of fundraising, production, marketing, cinema exhibition and TV and DVD sales of documentary films to create an extended event related to a concept that is wider than the individual work itself. This process derives from the use of film as documentation developed by conceptual artists, particularly land artists, from the 1960s through to the present day. For conceptual artists the film material became an ambiguous object, not permitted to be ‘the work’, that itself existed either as the concept of the whole process of production/creation or out in the landscape, often ephemeral. An argument in favour of adding this category to documentary film-making is that it accounts for a new kind of energy that can be seen in documentary film-making as an activity in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Many of the participatory strategies of conceptual art find an obvious counterpart in documentary film in the form of recorded street actions carried out by individuals or groups. The poetic, with its decentring of the human and focus on scale and pattern can be seen in the post-human perspective mentioned above. Above all, the shift of emphasis away from the film itself and towards the film as one ‘event’ among many, including Internet campaigns and fundraising screenings in environmental festivals, can also be captured in this way. 9

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The toxic materiality of the eco-doc Contemporary environmental documentaries or eco-docs represent a complex negotiation between the issues raised by environmental awareness and the demands of documentary film-making in the twenty-first century. Like other forms of public environmental communication, such as the print media and in particular the photograph, the eco-doc is fraught with contradictions that come to the surface of the film text and the discourse around it. Julie Doyle, for example, points out, in the context of Greenpeace campaigns against global warming, not only that atmospheric change is invisible, but also that the photograph can only record what has already happened (Doyle, 2007) (Doyle, 2009). The photograph, extensively used as a campaigning tool intended to prevent disaster, is, as Barthes and Sontag have argued, a momento mori, rather than a means to inspire hope (Barthes, 1982) (Sontag, 1977). A different angle on the contradictions of the environmental photograph occurs in Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary film Manufactured Landscapes where the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky notes: At one point I was shooting a mine, and it was a silver mine. I arrive in my car, made of iron, filled with gas. I pull out a metal tripod, and grab film that’s loaded with silver, and start taking pictures. So everything I’m doing is connected with the thing I’m photographing. Looking at these ships in Bangladesh, the connection was clear. At some point, I probably filled a tank of gas from the oil that was delivered from one of these tankers. (Manufactured Landscapes, 2006) In this moment of shared reflection Burtynsky provides a key to understanding the enigmatic nature of the images he makes of landscapes that have been transformed by human industry and, with the clarity of the large-format photograph, he directly addresses a problem for all public representations of the environmental debate. Mediated public representations are material things, they are always incorporated in a physical medium, and the various forms of media themselves have developed as a defining part of modernity.

Figures 2abc:  The image turns to black and white footage of shipbreaking in Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes (2006). The footage was shot while the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky prepared to make some still photographs. The scene prompts Burtynsky to reflect on the material consequences of his activities as a global photographer. DVD captures. 10

Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

The materiality of a medium such as film shares in the toxicity of industrial development. It has its own specific toxicity in the manufacture and concentration of plastics, metals and chemicals to produce, preserve and distribute moving images. Burtynsky’s photographs and the film Manufactured Landscapes draw attention to the changes in the landscape that come about as a result of these activities. They also draw attention to the brief lifespan of such articles and the effects of disposal. A more recent film that directly refers to issues around the materiality of media is Blod i mobilen/Blood in the Mobile (2010), which draws attention to the international political and social questions around the sourcing of raw materials for phones and computers in areas of conflict such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. Contemplating his mobile Paulson sadly admits that he is unable to forgo using it to connect to his family, friends and colleagues but he asks why it is not possible for the large and powerful corporations such as Nokia to monitor and ethically source their materials. Of course it is by now acknowledged that the film industry and the media industries as a whole contribute considerably to environmental damage (Maxwell and Miller, 2012) and, as in other industries, organizations have been formed to make practical steps towards reducing its impact. The Environmental Media Association set up in 1989 has been giving out Green Seal Awards since 2004 (Environmental Media Association, n.d.). Schemes such as Green Screen in Toronto also itemize the costs of the production process (Planet in Focus, 2011). In the UK the UK Film Council sponsored the creation of an environmental strategy for the industry in 2006 producing a document referring to the resources used in film production, distribution and exhibition that is now incorporated into the BFI (UK Film Council, n.d.). All of this activity is an acknowledgement of the participation of the film industry in the phenomena that environmental documentary films set out to profile. Although one might be sceptical about the efficacy of voluntary schemes, and, as Maxwell and Miller (2012, p. 68) point out, ‘this is Hollywood so the awards are self-nominating’, it is clear that there is an attempt to be consistent in both ‘harnessing the power of the entertainment industry and the media to educate the global public’, as the EMA website puts it, and ‘promoting sustainable production methods’. Nevertheless, the necessity to do both is an indication of the issues that confront the project of raising environmental awareness through film and indeed of raising environmental awareness at all. At the London Film Festival in October 2009 a panel discussion was held entitled Can Cinema Ever Be Truly Green in the context of the release of the film The Age of Stupid (2009) directed by Franny Armstrong (Tidman, 2009). Most of the discussion was taken up with debate about the Pinewood Studios’ attempt to build on prime land in Buckinghamshire outside London, protected by green belt legislation, claiming that the project was an attempt to make film-making more sustainable by building a permanent set (BBC News, 2012). The proposal was rejected during the Film Festival and also on appeal in January 2012, but the participants in the meeting were most upset by the fact that the proposal had been made in the first place. For participants this represented a cynical attempt to exploit awareness of environmental issues to promote a project that violated principles set down in law as long ago as 1947.2 11

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The theme of the meeting, however, presented a clear problem. Early on in the debate the chair ruled out the possibility that cinema might not ever be truly green and steered the discussion towards the film tents powered by alternative energy used for the premiere of The Age of Stupid or alternative means of film distribution via video-on-demand systems developed by another participant Nicola Giuggioli. Giuggioli duly acknowledged the increasing energy issues raised by the growing numbers of servers as well as by the fast pace of change in the computing industry leading to vast quantities of e-waste. Bringing the subject back to current issues, the audience also insisted on pointing out such details as the number of first class flights purchased for high profile attendees at the Film Festival. One member of the audience took another tack by asking whether the films watched were worth the environmental damage they caused and offered the idea that green films should offer primarily a vision of an alternative way of living. Of course, at an international film festival it is not possible to suggest that much film-making is not worth the environmental damage it causes. This idea is taboo, because it tends towards restriction of the freedom to engage in film-making activities, the exact reverse of one current trend towards citizen film-making, often seen as the democratization of the industry. The toxic materiality of the eco-doc is a matter of a complex network of social and material effects involving not only the immediate material of the DVD or film strip but also the design and mass manufacture of technology, travel and transportation, land use and accessibility. It concerns a material and social media ecology in which the medium is used to draw attention to the problem of its own sustainability knowing that the disappearance of the media would lead to radical change in human social interaction. Environmental awareness ‘Environmental awareness’, defined by Kollmuss and Agyeman as ‘knowing of the impact of human behaviour on the environment’ (Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002, p. 253), is a key term for environmental educators and the goal of many different kinds of activity concerned with education about the impacts of human activity on the environment. A further goal of environmental education is the promotion of pro-environmental behaviour that, as Kollmuss and Agyeman put it in their survey of approaches to the subject, means ‘behavior that consciously seeks to minimize the negative impact of one’s actions on the natural and built world (e.g. minimize resource and energy consumption, use of non-toxic substances, reduce waste production)’ (2002, p. 240). However, according to Kollmuss and Agyeman’s account, one of the earliest findings of environmental behaviour research in the 1970s was that knowledge and awareness were not sufficient to lead to changes in behaviour and yet, they argue: ‘today, most environmental Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) still base their communication campaigns and strategies on the simplistic assumption that more knowledge will lead to more enlightened behavior’ (2002, p. 241). 12

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Although there is still some truth behind Kollmuss and Agyeman’s assertion about public information campaigns, the use of the media to promote environmental awareness has become more complex than this. The transmission of knowledge rarely if ever takes place without some form of context that itself influences the reception of the information. By looking at documentary, work in environmental communication that pays attention to the medium through which environmental information is conveyed can be included. The same issues raised by Kollmuss and Agyeman on the barriers between knowledge and pro-environmental behaviour have been played out in debates about the use of ‘traditional media forms’, a practice that was called for in 1972 after the Stockholm Conference on the human environment (United Nations Environment Programme, 1972). A wide variety of fictional and factual forms of environmental communication has developed together with a significant debate on the compatibility between such public service aims and public entertainment. Kollmuss and Agyeman elaborate on environmental awareness as having ‘both a cognitive, knowledge-based component and an affective, perception-based component’ and as being ‘constrained by several cognitive and emotional limitations’ (2002, p. 253). The cognitive limitations are listed as (1) ‘the non-immediacy of many ecological problems’, (2) ‘slow and gradual ecological destruction’ and (3) ‘complex systems’. The emotional limitations are listed as (1) ‘emotional non-investment’, which is divided into (a) ‘lack of knowledge and awareness’ and (b) ‘resistance against non-conforming information’ and (2) ‘emotional reactions’ such as distress, denial, distancing, delegation and apathy and resignation. The model they develop groups these cognitive and emotional aspects under the term ‘environmental consciousness’ rather than ‘environmental awareness’ indicating the shift from the linear model knowledge = awareness = pro-environmental behaviour, to a temporally more complex model in which behaviour is influenced by several distinct internal and external factors. All of these categories relate to awareness of information about the human causes of environmental degradation as well as environmentally sustaining actions that necessarily will include the problem that the means of raising awareness (the film) has an environmental impact. This, however, creates a kind of paradigm for the human situation of the sort expressed in the slogan ‘consume less’. This sense of awareness makes clear that the difficulties of engaging in pro-environmental campaigning concern the problem of being inside rather than outside an ecological system. Contemplation One of the ways in which the ecologically minded documentary has reflected on the complexity of environmental consciousness has, paradoxically, involved slowing down the presentation of the phenomena in order that the viewer has time to hold in mind and contemplate the interconnections between knowledge and emotions about the environment. 13

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The materiality of the film here is its status as a form of preservation and it justifies itself as it always has done as the keeper of lost cultures. The awareness of the film as part of the modern world is maintained through its mechanical nature, uninvolved in the romance of landscape, with the capacity to show the ancient and the modern, the polluted and the pristine, as beautiful. Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes has already been mentioned as a film that reflects on this frame of mind. The chapter on contemplation takes some further films for analysis to develop the idea of the documentary as a means to reflect on the ambiguity of contemporary responses to changing landscapes. One of the first film-makers to engage in contemplation of this kind was the Austrian film-maker Nikolaus Geyrhalter who made Pripyat released in 1999 about the no-go-area around Chernobyl. He followed this up with a wordless study of industrial farming, Unser täglich Brot/Our Daily Bread in 2005. Most commentators on these films note the ways in which they implicate the viewer in the worlds they represent by allowing time to think about the images and by refraining from occupying the space for thought and feeling with commentary, dialogue and music (Hughes, 2012). Geyrhalter’s landscapes, like Baichwal’s and Burtynsky’s, are profoundly changed by technology and the actions of human society and the contemplation of them is of material change. A similar technique but slightly different angle is provided by films that focus on changing social worlds in unchanging landscapes. A model for such films can be found in Michael Pilz’s Himmel und Erde/Heaven and Earth (1980), a four-hour contemplation of life in a mountain village in Austria during the energy crisis of the late seventies. Films about the changing landscapes of rural work are not always clearly signalled as environmental documentaries but they frequently appear in environmental festivals on lists of environmental documentaries and are discussed within the framework of environmental concerns. A thoughtful and ambivalent framing of people and environments can thus be found in Raymond Depardon’s La vie moderne/Modern Life. Released in 2008, it is a study of farming families in the Cévennes in France. In the same year the enigmatically titled film Sleep Furiously directed by Gideon Koppel told another story that went against the grain of romantic landscape photography. Focussing on a sparsely populated area in South West Wales the development here is from a tightly-knit Welsh-speaking community of farmers to a more cosmopolitan population that brings a different kind of life to the ancient hills. Sweetgrass, a recent American film produced and directed by the anthropologists Ilsa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, premiered in 2009 and filmed for nine years from 2001, observes the last American ‘cowboys’ at work herding sheep over a mountain in Montana. Here a contrast between the beautifully framed shots of landscapes and of humans and sheep is juxtaposed with the dialogue picked up at a distance on radio mikes, tempering the romanticized or heroic view of the lifestyle with the strain of maintaining it in contemporary America. Characteristic for these contemplative films is the recognition that although the ways of life associated with earlier stages of the industrialization of farming may be environmentally sustainable, they are not socially or economically sustainable under current conditions. 14

Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

They do not argue for the preservation of the past, but rather than presenting the future they dwell in a present that is in a kind of limbo. As Nikolaus Geyrhalter puts it in relation to his film Unser täglich Brot/Our Daily Bread (2005), I always see my films as archive which will be dug up in 50 or 100 years when someone will look at it and think ‘they already did this back then, or they were still doing it like that back then’. Something has begun or something has come to an end. I try to make it as timeless as possible in its form so that in future they will not comment so much on how films looked back then. For me it is important that the film is a piece of preserved time, a piece of preserved history. (Icarus Films, 2006) The environmental consciousness that these contemplative films involve is one in which the relationship with the environment is caught between the past and the future in a present that seems unsustainable. The philosopher and literary critic Timothy Morton sees the creation of this kind of ‘ambient’ present as a means to mourn what we already recognize as irrevocably changed (Morton, 2007). Irony In the distance between the image and the mechanism lies the possibility for an entirely different tone of response. In the chapter on irony, links between anti-corporate globalization films and environmental documentary are drawn. They are typified by the work of Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold who label their films Blue Vinyl (2002) and Everything’s Cool (2007) ‘toxic comedies’. Helfand and Gold deal with the tension between the individual’s acknowledgement of environmental crisis and the sense of an inability to act individually through the development of irony. The cognitive linguist Deirdre Wilson has analysed the spectrum of irony from pastiche through to sarcasm as operating through the ‘echoic’ that is used in this chapter to discuss a wider range of films that reflect not only on the ironies created by some environmental concerns but also on the distortions of the issues as they are presented in the public sphere. The chapter introduces as the model for the ironic film Mark Lewis’s Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1987) – in its time a remarkably new approach to the subject of species migration – linking its tone to postmodern experiments with pastiche. The film The Corporation (2003) is also discussed as a postmodern ironic version of the anti-globalization documentary that attacks corporations for the global spread of poor pay and working conditions as well as environmental exploitation and degradation. The film puts forward the idea that it is the job of communities to reframe the understanding of what corporations are and how they work. This is a task that is programmatically carried through by the satirical ‘identity correctors’ featured in the Yes Men films (The Yes Men, 2003) (The Yes Men Fix the 15

Green Documentary

World, 2009): a group of performance artists who use a Swiftian form of satire to entertain audiences at the same time as pointing the finger at the damaging attitudes fostered by contemporary corporate environments and international non-governmental organizations such as the World Trade Organization. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007), a film that reflects the director’s absurdist take on human life more generally and reflects on the ironic response as an attitude that reveals a need to transcend the alienated position of irony through emotion and affect. Recourse to argument A strong contrast with irony is to be found in another set of documentary films that is probably the most recognizable as the eco-doc. This is the argumentative form that lies somewhere between exposition and propaganda. This chapter situates the argumentative environmental documentary within a broader context of debate about the practice of politics that has taken place in the course of the decade, as well as within the debates about strategies used by environmental activists to make their campaigns more visible. The chapter also introduces the ‘argumentative theory of reasoning’ developed by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (Mercier and Sperber, 2011) as a means to explore the nature of the arguments put forward in documentary films. The significance of this kind of documentary film lies in the considerable resources it has to assemble arguments. Moving image media have developed the capacity of the lecture accompanied by magic lantern slides developed in the late nineteenth century. John Grierson, often seen as the conceptual founder of documentary as a form, was interested in the ways that documentary film could represent an advance on the lecture through the development of a particular form defined as ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, but, as John Corner and many other documentary theorists have argued, it has proved impossible to pin the documentary film down to a fixed form or idea (Corner, 2008). In the twenty-first century, however, the capacity of the lecture with slides has been demonstrated as similarly powerful by the success of Al Gore’s famous slide show transformed into a documentary by Davis Guggenheim to make the most widely viewed and known environmental documentary, An Inconvenient Truth (2006). An Inconvenient Truth is an important film for many reasons. For this discussion the defining aspect is the focus on the arguments supporting the view that the atmosphere is warming as a result of the development of modern industrial societies. Although the film is framed as a biography and was criticized by some commentators for only putting forward the arguments rather than providing solutions, its enormous success is in part down to the clarity of its limited aims and the fact that the arguments had not been as coherently and as unequivocally presented to a mass audience before. The chapter on argument does not aim at coverage of the many films that have created hybrids out of narrative, action and argument. Instead it looks briefly at the three 16

Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

Oscar-winning documentaries of the decade, March of the Penguins (2005), An Inconvenient Truth and The Cove (2009), and more extensively at a fourth film Gasland (2010) made at the very end of the decade that represents a highly combative return to the naked expression of the clash of values. This film has provoked an entirely new context of online audio-visual argument and counterargument. The materiality of the eco-doc The toxic materiality of film-making, like all other industrial activities, means that it is deeply embedded in debates about the future, but it is also a capturing of the present. This final chapter, a discussion of an exchange in Agnes Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (2000), demonstrates the ways in which such cultural production justifies itself through its imaginative recycling of materials and ideas. The contemplative, the ironic and the argumentative responses to environmental questions are assessed as ongoing experiments with the potential for documentary filmmaking to act as a reformist force in environmental debate. In his essay on ‘Documentary as Critical and Social Research’ Wayne (2008, p. 94) argues that cultural production can be seen ‘as a special prefiguring of what emancipated cognition and feeling might look like in future.’ This is a utopian idea but it could also be said that the documentary film examples attempt to demonstrate what emancipated cognition and feeling might look like now. Through understanding these films it is possible to show human beings interacting in idealized forms in a fully democratic world. The chapters in this book thus group the films in terms of their response – contemplative, ironic, argumentative, material – to environmental issues. At the same time there is a chronology moving from the beginning of the decade through to a high point around 2006 and to consolidation at the end of the decade. These phases are linked to specific films but also to the emergence or re-emergence of environmental themes in the media more generally – most obviously, the food crisis, species extinction, climate change and the energy debate. There is also a to-ing and fro-ing between examples of documentary films produced in the European nations of France, Austria and Britain and North American films produced in the United States and Canada. The films are understood and analysed for the ways in which they have evolved the form of documentary so that it can make a contribution not only to raising awareness about the impacts of human activity on the planet but also to the continuing debate about the future. In the environmental version, documentary film more generally has been mobilized as a form that embodies the fluidity of the boundaries around human existence. The number of films produced that could be seen as environmental is very high, testimony to the enormous mental energy generated by environmental debates. Environmental issues come into documentary works about wildlife, about evolution, about developments in science and technology. This book is about films that seek to 17

Green Documentary

confront the questions and to find adequate expression for and responses to the state of mind that ensues. Back to Into Eternity To return to the film discussed at the outset of this introduction, Into Eternity is a film that reflects on the evolution of humankind by looking far into the future. The questions posed in the film are specifically related to problems that must be resolved in the present because the analysis of the future indicates that the current means of storing nuclear waste are increasing risk. As with the TV documentary and series Life After People (2008) broadcast by the History Channel the hypothetical scenarios relate very specifically to contemporary engineering and environmental management projects, so that much of the interest of the film lies in learning about how expert knowledge has been built up to create and maintain the infrastructure of the contemporary world. However, while Life After People considers what would happen if these management systems were no longer to be maintained through human presence, Into Eternity represents an active and current environmental management problem, assumes the survival of humanity, and speculates about what might happen to the population in the course of 100,000 years. The discussion about where to put nuclear waste thus prompts a thorough analysis of possible future environments from the perspective of risk to future generations of human beings: do we risk contaminating the ocean from whence life emerged? Can we ‘guarantee stable conditions above ground for 100 years let alone 1000 years?’ (Into Eternity: A Film for the Future, 2010) Into Eternity is a typical eco-doc in its examination of the incursion into the landscape presented, both in terms of short-term developments – the possibility of economic depression, famine, war, earthquakes and other natural disasters – and in terms of the slower pace of geological time. It is not typical in its general degree of detachment from the politics of the place where the nuclear storage facility is being built. Its choice in using English as the language of communication implies a global rather than a local approach, and its failure to situate the place where the nuclear storage facility is located, beyond showing the trees and fences that surround it, means that it is not intended as an engagement with the particular questions of place or those surrounding the revival of nuclear energy implied by the investment in the waste storage solution. In this way as a film it exemplifies another aspect of contemporary cultural production explored by Ursula Heise in her book Sense of Place and Sense of Planet where she seeks to adjust the notion of how individuals actually engage with environmental concerns giving as examples people who are ‘stirred into curiosity and sometimes into action by seeing a documentary about orangutan extinction on television’ or people who ‘spend most of their time in front of a computer screen rather than in protests outside the local nuclear plant’ and ‘turn out to know a great deal about statistical trends in global agricultural production, population growth, or economic development’ (Heise, 2008, p. 56). Whereas 18

Introduction: Contemplation, Irony, Argument

the environmental movement may be associated with the defence of particular natural landscapes and with a concern with traditional encounters with nature, contemporary environmental politics has come to reflect the ways in which contemporary ‘deterritorialized’ communities are defined by more than the place they are located. She argues, [i]n a context of rapidly increasing connections around the globe, what is crucial for ecological awareness and environmental ethics is arguably not so much a sense of place as a sense of planet – a sense of how political, economic, technological, social, cultural, and ecological networks shape daily routines. (Heise, 2008, p. 55) Heise argues that this definition is a work in progress: Eco-cosmopolitanism […] is an attempt to envision individuals and groups as part of planetary ‘imagined communities’ of both human and nonhuman kinds. While the cultural mechanisms by means of which allegiance to national communities is generated, legitimated, and maintained have been studied in depth, ecocriticism has only begun to explore the cultural means by which ties to the natural world are produced and perpetuated, and how the perception of such ties fosters or impedes regional, national and transnational forms of identification. (Heise, 2008, p. 61) As Heise argues, environmental identities do not emerge ‘naturally’ but are, like national or regional imagined communities, abstractions, and so the project is to understand how environmental communities have formed or might form, including the ties that have brought people together and the problems that have threatened cohesion. She uses the term ‘network’ to capture the multiple starting points for the identification of communities and their lack of definite closure, not referring directly to Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1991/1993) (Latour, 2005), but with a significant overlap with the social theorist’s approach. Into Eternity, as a creative film-making project, prompts an analysis of how capable human beings are of thinking far into the future and how our cognitive abilities will develop, with Madsen asking in his fantasy dialogue with the future film-viewers: ‘A hundred thousand years is beyond our understanding and imagination. Our history is so short in comparison. How is it with you?’ (Into Eternity: A Film for the Future, 2010) Framed by the sense of intergenerational difference this imagined communication across time expands the idea of environmental consciousness beyond the immediate issue of risk. At the same time, as with many environmental documentary projects that start out from concepts and issues, it demonstrates the concrete nature of the historical imagination and its intersection with scientific observation and the scientific community, with the reasoning of the legal community and the communicative strategies of civil servants who all play a role in the 19

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discussion about the future. It becomes apparent from this project and the ways it draws its network of experts together that these are human activities that, interacting with the physical world, will perhaps lead to developments in which we will not recognize our future: ‘It is possible that we will not be understood by the future, especially the distant future’ (Into Eternity: A Film for the Future, 2010). The management plan is to fill the tunnels with nuclear waste and concrete barriers and to seal it after one century – an awe-inspiring project in itself – but not, in fact, a new one: ‘just like the tombs of the Pharaohs […] the pyramids were sealed a thousand years ago never to be opened again.’ In the insights displayed in this informed expert discussion around the problem of nuclear waste disposal, the film project reveals the complexity of environmental consciousness and the courage, imagination, observational and reasoning powers, as well as communication skills needed to implement projects responding to current risks seeking to minimize future harm. This environmental documentary project then involves both tracing and creating its network of agents involved in questions of environmental management. Each such project in itself is a study of the consciousness of an eco-cosmopolitan community. To study these films is to investigate how this form of media production becomes part of the flow of individual and social responses to the concept of environmental risk and degradation. Each film is both a reaction and a spur to further reaction. While this book concerns itself with the idea of the documentary film as a response – contemplative, ironic, argumentative – it is also an attempt to recognize the agency of the documentary tradition in itself as a significant tool in the ongoing story of the environmental movement. Notes 1 2

John Duvall is developing the idea of the environmental documentary as a subgenre using rhetorical and thematic analysis in his book The Environmental Documentary: Cinema Activism in the 21st Century due to come out in January 2015. Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

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Chapter 2 The Institutional Context

Before there were people that opposed freeways, people that opposed clear-cutting, people that were worried about pesticides. They didn’t think of themselves as having anything in common. After Earth Day they were all part of an environmental movement. (Denis Hayes, Earth Days, 2009)

E

arth Days, a documentary directed by Robert Stone, was first released in 2009 and was first broadcast in April 2010 to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day. It tells the story of environmentalism as it developed as a popular antiestablishment movement in the US. The first Earth Day, founded by Senator Gaylord Nelson and coordinated by Denis Hayes as an educational event involving demonstrations across the whole nation, was celebrated on 22 April in 1970. This compilation documentary, bringing together a plethora of hugely entertaining and enlightening archival clips along with interviews and commentary reflecting on the events and their significance, expresses a reflexive historical understanding of the environmental movement in terms of an accumulation of highly visual and mediatized actions and activities opposed to the development of consumer culture and industrial growth. Like many documentaries produced in this decade it expresses this sense of history as an asset for efforts in the twenty-first century to keep environmental issues in the public sphere. Part and parcel of understanding environmental documentaries as a body of films and as responses to environmental questions involves an analysis of their integration into the broader context of discursive activity. As reactions to ideas and events, documentaries themselves are designed to become interventions in ongoing and growing debates rather than definitive responses to specific questions. In this sense each documentary is an incomplete artefact, like a single utterance in the flow of dialogue, seeking to steer or frame rather than wrap up the issues. In this chapter environmental documentary is explored not by listing its characteristics or functions but by discussing the developing popular and institutional contexts in which such films become meaningful not only individually but as a group or subgenre. This account leads on to a further definition via the nature of the problems that arise in the attempt to use documentary film as a form to raise awareness about environmental issues. From the outset the ‘eco-doc’ becomes defined as a fluid form that attempts to fit into a social space at the same time as it aims to change it. Defining the form via the conditions that have produced it accounts for the difficulties in approaching environmental documentary film purely from the point of view of formal

Green Documentary

or aesthetic analysis and explains why the central debate in visual communication and environmental education contexts has been about whether the visual is in fact the appropriate sense to focus on. Rancière’s ideas about the ‘distribution of the sensible’ is a helpful metatheory here, in that it draws attention to the struggle to change the relationship between what is visible and the invisible as the central function of any form of radical cultural practice (Rancière, 2004). ‘Visibility’ here, of course, refers to what can be sensed or perceived rather than to what can be seen. The debate for visual communication, however, has concerned centrally the limitations and distortions of the visible. Julie Doyle, for example, in her examination of the centrality of photography in Greenpeace campaigns, draws attention to the invisibility of climate change – the most significant environmental impact of fossil fuel burning that has become apparent in the last two decades (Doyle, 2009). Doyle puts forth the question of whether the climate change campaign failed to have an impact in time because its effects are only now becoming clearly visible in the physical world. Her analysis draws attention to the ways in which photography, both moving and still, is integrated into event-based media that are not capable of conveying long-term developments, particularly if they are projected into the future. Such questions and the ensuing debates are part of the dynamic of the development of environmental documentary as well as policy on public information campaigns. The emergence of the eco-doc When was the first environmental documentary film produced? In their article, ‘The first EcoDisaster Film?’, Murray and Heumann discuss the perception of the Lumière Brothers’ film Oil Wells of Baku: Close View shot in 1897 in Azerbaijan by Kamill Serf, as an environmental documentary. On the commentary to the DVD, the film-maker Bertrand Tavernier had referred to it as possibly the ‘first ecological film ever made’ (Lumière Brothers: First Films, 1996). Observing that this comment is made ‘from an ecocritical perspective’, Murray and Heumann pose the question, ‘When do burning oil wells move beyond spectacle to gain the status of ecological disaster, and when do the costs begin to include not only money and human lives but also nature?’ (Murray and Heumann, 2006, pp. 44‒45) This is precisely the nub of the question concerning the genesis of the environmental documentary, adding to it a concern with the increasing role of spectacle in the appeal of contemporary documentary film, ecological film included (Beattie, 2008). The idea that human activity can be damaging to natural resources can be traced back to antiquity if it includes, as it should, an understanding of the health of the soil as critical (Wall, 1994). It is entirely possible that Kamill Serf saw the oil well fires as damage to the landscape, just as the Romantic poets saw the smoke of the potteries as satanic (Wall, 1994). A sensibility that feels for the natural environment is not unique to the modern environmental movement. What is different about the present day, however, is the professionalization of environmental protection within the institutional contexts of modern industrialization, in 24

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particular the development of expertise in the collection and communication of knowledge about how human activities as well as natural occurrences affect ecological cycles and potentially the well-being of human societies. Murray and Heumann capture this difference in their discussion of the post-war fiction film Tulsa (Stuart Heisler, 1949) as another potential early ecological film. Several scenes in this film about the encroachment of the early oil industry on the traditional space of the cattle rancher show the environmental damage caused by the oil industry and critique the failure to conserve the natural beauty of the landscape. Despite this, Murray and Heumann argue, the film cannot be seen as an ecological film because, ‘although Tulsa’s opening spectacle seems to foreground pollution, the film’s main conflict is in fact between oil producers and cattle ranchers, and not between environmentalists and land exploiters’ (Murray and Heumann, 2006, p. 48). The terminology of modern day environmentalism is a demonstration of how the ecocritical eye has been developed in the attempt to check the effects of industrialization. This process is often traced back to the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring that was first published serialized in the New Yorker in June 1962 and then as a book in the same year (Carson, 1962). The utterly new and radical nature of Carson’s contribution is reflected in the hostility of the response to her work and the almost atavistic turn to a highly patriarchal discourse in the attempt to refute the new voice of professional ecology (Matthiessen, 1999). What Carson represents, however, is a new combination of scientific expertise with a developed professional ability to write for a general audience. Her newspaper articles in the New Yorker provide the template for many journalistic careers based around the exposure of environmentally damaging industrial practices. The book Silent Spring also combines a narrative that represents a possibly apocalyptic future with solid scientific analysis in a way that has become characteristic for public communication about environmental issues. The United Nations What is decisive for this development, however, is the transformation of the already growing grass roots environmental movement during the 1960s into a network of non-governmental organizations encouraged by the United Nations, and leading governments into a global process of international negotiation and national education. Two branches of the United Nations, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), have both had an influence on international efforts to encourage and steer public knowledge and action on environmental issues that in their turn have been part of the context of the development of environmental film festivals and environmental documentary production. The 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (the Stockholm Conference) is often seen as the most significant event framing the development of 25

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environmental action through the launching of the United Nations Environment Programme. For the environmental documentary the significance of this meeting lies not only in the institutional developments but also in the rationalization and expansion of environmental assessment or Earth Watch, involving monitoring ‘to gather certain data on specific environmental variables and to evaluate such data in order to determine and predict important environmental conditions and trends’ (United Nations Environment Programme, 1972). It is this monitoring that has created the visible and legible data and insights that inform global discussions on the environment. It becomes particularly prominent in documentary films on climate change in the twenty-first century. In addition to the need to gather data to evidence environmental change and degradation, the Stockholm Conference was also concerned with the public dissemination of information. Among the recommendations coming out of the meeting, a statement is included on educational, informational, social and cultural aspects arising out of environmental concerns. In Part 1 of Recommendation 97 the document reads: 1. It is recommended that the Secretary-General make arrangements: (a) To establish an information programme designed to create the awareness which individuals should have of environmental issues and to associate the public with environmental management and control. This programme will use traditional and contemporary mass media of communication, taking distinctive national conditions into account. In addition, the programme must provide means of stimulating active participation by the citizens, and of eliciting interest and contributions from nongovernmental organizations for the preservation and development of the environment; (b) To institute the observance of a World Environment Day There is also a second part to the recommendation which is particularly significant for the development of environmental documentary in the context of intercultural or ethnographic documentary involving an adaptation of existing development programmes in 1972 to include environmental education: 2. It is also recommended that the Secretary-General and the development agencies make arrangements to use and adapt certain international development programmes – provided that this can be done without delaying their execution – so as to improve the dissemination of information and to strengthen community action on environment problems, especially among the oppressed and underprivileged peoples of the earth. The creation of the World Environment Day on 5 June each year to raise public awareness of environmental issues provided an opportunity to coordinate cultural activities around environmental campaigning (United Nations Environment Programme, 2012). As documentary film and photography already had a strong history of public information 26

The Institutional Context

Table 1: List of World Environment Day Themes, 1974–2011 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011

Only One Earth Human Settlements Water: Vital Resource for Life Ozone Layer Environmental Concern; Land Loss and Soil Degradation; Firewood  Development Without Destruction Only One Future for Our Children – Development Without Destruction A New Challenge for the New Decade: Development Without Destruction Ground Water; Toxic Chemicals in Human Food Chains and Environmental Economics Ten Years After Stockholm (Renewal of Environmental Concerns) Managing and Disposing Hazardous Waste: Acid Rain and Energy Desertification Youth: Population and the Environment A Tree for Peace Environment and Shelter: More Than a Roof When People Put the Environment First, Development Will Last Global Warming; Global Warning Children and the Environment Climate Change. Need for Global Partnership Only One Earth, Care and Share Poverty and the Environment – Breaking the Vicious Circle One Earth One Family We the Peoples: United for the Global Environment Our Earth, Our Habitat, Our Home For Life on Earth For Life on Earth – Save Our Seas Our Earth – Our Future – Just Save It! The Environment Millennium – Time to Act Connect with the World Wide Web of Life Give Earth a Chance Water – Two Billion People are Dying for It! Wanted! Seas and Oceans – Dead or Alive? Green Cities – Plan for the Planet! Deserts and Desertification – Don’t Desert Drylands! Melting Ice – A Hot Topic? Kick the Habit! Towards a Low Carbon Economy Your Planet Needs You – UNite to Combat Climate Change Many Species. One Planet. One Future Forests: Nature at Your Service

Source: http://www.unep.org/wed/2008/english/Previous_Themes/index.asp

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Green Documentary

Table 2:  List of environmental film festivals with location, website address and foundation date Festival Name

Location

Website

EKOFILM – International Film Festival on the Environment and Natural and Cultural Heritage

Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic Formerly held in Ostrava, Czechoslovakia

http://www.ekofilm.cz

1974

International Puchalski Nature Film Festival

Lodz, Poland

http://www.wfo.com.pl/eng/ festival_eng.html

1980

Sondrio International Sondrio, Italy Documentary Film Festival on Parks

http://www.sondriofestival.it/

1987

Earth Vision the Tokyo Tokyo, Japan Global Environmental Film Festival

http://www.earth-vision.jp/ http://www.earth-vision.jp/ english/index.html

1992

Environmental Film Festival Washington DC, US in the Nation’s Capital

http://www. dcenvironmentalfilmfest.org/

1993

FICMA International Environmental Film Festival

Barcelona, Spain

http://www.ficma.com/

1994

Cine Eco – Environmental International Film and Video Festival

Seia, Portugal

http://www.cineecoseia.org/

1995

ENVIROFILM – International Festival of Films, TV and video Programmes dealing with the Environment and Protection

Banska Bystrica, Slovakia

http://www.envirofilm.sk

1995

Eco Vision Festival International Festival of Environment and Cinema

Palermo, Italy, then Fortaleza, Brazil

http://www.ecovisionfestival. com

1995

Green Vision

St Petersberg, Russia

http://www.infoeco.ru/ greenvision

1996

Fingerlakes Environmental Film Festival

Ithaca College, US

http://www.ithaca.edu/fleff/

1997

CinemAmbiente

Torino, Italy

http://www.cinemambiente.it/

1998

Planet in Focus

Toronto, Canada

http://www.planetinfocus.org

1999

28

Established

The Institutional Context

Ecofilms Rhodes International Film and Visual Arts Festival

Athens, Greece

http://www.ecofilms.gr

2000

Earth Vision Environmental Now part of Santa Film Festival Cruz film festival, US

http://scfilmfest.org/section/ earthvision

2000

Media That Matters Film Festival

New York, US

http://www. mediathatmattersfest.org/

2000

Ecocinema – Zakynthos International Environmental Documentary Festival

Athens, Greece

http://www.ecocinema.gr

2001

American Conservation Film Festival

Sherpherdstown, West Virginia, US

http://conservationfilm.org/

2003

Artivist Film Festival

Los Angeles, US

http://artivists.org

2004

Reel Earth Environmental Film Festival (formerly Aotearoa Environmental Film Festival)

Palmerston North, New Zealand

http://www.reelearth.org.nz

2004

EarthDance shortattention-span environmental film festival

London and Berkley and then on tour

http://www.earthdancefilms. com

2004

Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Network

Seattle, Washington, US

http://www.hazelfilm.org/

2007

Tales from Planet Earth

Wisconsin, US

http://www.nelson.wisc.edu/ tales/

2007

Indigenous Earth Film Festival

Santa Fe, New Mexico, US

http://www.ntec.org/ filmfestival.htm

2008

Reduction Festival of Environmental & Green Short Films

Sheffield, UK

http://reductionfestival.org

2008

EFFY The Environmental Film Festival at Yale

Yale, US

http://environment.yale.edu/ film/Home.html

2010

The information was gathered with the help of the websites: http://www.ecofootage.com/forproducers/marketing/film-festivals/index.html http://www.ecomove.de http://www.filmmakersforconservation.org/ The websites and festivals were all functional at the end of 2011. More information on the significance of film festivals for the development of the environmental film can be found in Salma Monani’s chapter, ‘Environmental Film Festivals: Beginning explorations at the intersections of film festival studies and ecocritical studies’ in Rust et al. (2013).

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service it is not surprising that one of the first responses to the idea was the creation of an international environmental film festival, which then began in Czechoslovakia in 1974. The coordination of environmental film festivals, which now happen annually all around the world around themes relating to the World Environment Day, has been a significant factor in the coherence of the body of films produced worldwide. However, before World Environment Day was instituted by UNEP, another, at first nationally, but then also internationally coordinated event devoted to environmental education, particularly in schools and universities, was created in the United States partly in the context of another United Nations organization, the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). This event was given the name ‘Earth Day’ to connect it to other celebrations of the earth centred on the Spring equinox. The Earth Day Network, a follow-up organization that currently maintains the activities of the Earth Day idea, makes the claim on its website that ‘each year, Earth Day – 22 April – marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970’ (Earth Day Network, n.d.). UNESCO has declared 22 April as International Mother Earth Day. Earth Day has also been an important prompt for the establishment of international film festivals as part of a range of activities as well as the sharing of audiovisual Internet resources for educational purposes. This considerable and developing institutional stimulus from global, inter-governmental and governmental institutions for the creation of cultural events linked to environmental communication and education has been the most significant context for the development of environmental documentary film-making. In addition, the very many specialist nongovernmental organizations from Greenpeace to Earth First! to 360.org, as well as communityorganized environmental groups, have generated a history, including an archive of audio-visual campaigning material. Although this history is hugely diverse and expressive of widely differing perspectives it has coherence in its sustained focus on themes that emerge and re-emerge across the decades. The annual creation of a theme or set of issues as part of the UNEP World Environment Day from 1974 to the present, designed to be relevant and inclusive, has generated a list in which some particular themes emerge and which have become persistent foci to define aspects of the debate. In the 1970s we can see the very general ‘one earth’ philosophy out of which the debate about the human environment began. After two recurring themes, water and shelter, we can see a very specific crisis enter – the ozone layer – as well as two themes that become critical for the debate about agriculture in the developing countries – soil degradation and firewood. The problem of how to encourage development without damaging the environment has been the theme that halted international talks on climate change three decades later. In the 1980s a whole range of environmental themes is covered, such as ‘a tree for peace’, that clearly attempt to appeal to a broader public during a period in which interest in environmental issues is in decline. The broad issue of sustainable development alternates with more specific issues related to pollution (toxic chemicals in the food chain, hazardous waste and acid rain), population, water or reforestation. Then at the end of the decade in 30

The Institutional Context

1989 the theme of global warming – Global Warming; Global Warning – brings in a new note between the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by the UNEP and the World Meteorological Society (WMS) at the very end of 1988 (IPCC, 2013) and the publication of the first Assessment Report in 1990 (IPCC, 1990). We can see it recurring in 1991, but then it lies dormant as scientists work on gathering data to counter the arguments against the thesis. The themes return to very broad indications of the ‘one earth’ philosophy in the context of a decade of globalization and deregulation. The theme of biodiversity begins to appear towards the end of the decade under the broad idea of life on earth. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the two themes of climate change and biodiversity become more focussed together with the need for action. The years 2007–2009 all have themes relating to what is now called ‘climate change’, demonstrating that it is now politically acceptable to assert the theme and to link it with policy on carbon reduction. What is created by this institutional infrastructure is a media environment for the dissemination of facts and opinions relating to environmental themes. Taken as a whole, environmental debate is a global exchange so that environmental documentary films come out of and feed back into this ever more complex international institutional arena. This institutional account explains in large part why the films exist and what they tend to be about. Films that are made directly in the context of NGOs or as part of particular campaigns on climate change science or biodiversity can be read as exercises in using the resources of documentary film-making in the service of an institutionally led campaign expressed at several political, institutional and community levels. The films rehearse and disseminate debates that arise in specialist contexts into a broader public sphere. At the same time, rather than leading to directly commissioned films, the institutional context attempts to create a climate in which films emerge from outside environmentally driven institutions and from within the ‘traditional’ media. Films that are made in reaction to the history of the environmental movement go beyond the institutional remit and drive forward new ideas about which issues are important and how best to represent them. Activist environmental documentary Many environmental documentary films made today are connected with local concerns and made and shown in local institutional or activist contexts. They are low budget, sometimes made as part of the budget of a social or scientific project as a means of public dissemination. Sometimes they are made in the context of local activism as part of the process of encouraging participation in activism and awareness-raising. Some environmental documentary films become more visible nationally and internationally through winning prizes at environmental film festivals and general documentary film festivals, through going on general cinema release and through television, but there is some tension between the aim to gain this kind of attention and the grass roots level of environmental documentary film-making. 31

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This tension can be seen in the programmatic view expressed by Robert Greenwald, the creator of a well-known activist hub Brave New Films (and Brave New Theatres). Greenwald’s point of view is best understood in the context of the development of several activist movements that emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. The environmental justice movement, or sometimes the spatial justice movement (Soja, 2010), is closely connected to postcolonial thought. In particular, campaigns for the rights of indigenous peoples displaced and dispossessed by industrial projects raise questions about ownership, custody of land and resources, cultural diversity and human rights, which test the natural justice of existing laws. The Indigenous and Tribal People’s Convention 1989 adopted by the International Labour Organization (ILO), a branch of the United Nations, is an outcome of these campaigns. The anti-capitalist globalization movement, which is focussed on the impacts of decisions and practices of global financial and trade organizations such as the World Bank, the European Union, the World Trade Organization or the Group of Eight (G8), is also concerned with what is perceived as the control of the world’s media by the established powers. The expression of social activism through alternative, independent media such as short and feature-length documentary is part of the programme of such social movements. The theory explaining the existence of such films and the alternative networks for distribution is sometimes expressed in the films themselves. The documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) directed by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick is a precursor to such films as The Corporation (2003) in its representation of Edward Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of the media. This model does not necessarily imply that there are means to subvert established influences. Nevertheless, in combination with other political analyses of social organization such as that expressed in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), Herman and Chomsky’s media model of contemporary propaganda can be used to support the avoidance of traditional media in favour of the creation of new alternatives such as the Internet hub. Robert Greenwald’s own film (Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, 2004) offers an analysis of conservative bias in, for example, Fox News Channel, owned by Rupert Murdoch. Greenwald argues that the purpose of his documentaries is to disseminate information about grass roots issues as they occur. In his article exploring the model created for social activist films by Brave New Films, Christian Christensen writes about the five critical ideas that defined the project: (1) that partial funding for smaller-scale documentaries could be obtained from contributions from regular citizens via the Internet; (2) that high-quality political documentaries could be produced quickly, and on a limited budget, in order to address crucial social and political issues in a timely fashion; (3) that the Internet could be used for direct sale and distribution of DVDs (thus bypassing oligopolistic DVD rental and wholesale outlets); (4) that the Internet could also be used to coordinate wide-scale grassroots screenings of films (thus bypassing oligopolistic film distribution and exhibition gatekeepers); and (5) that grassroots film screenings should be combined with alternative sources of information – such as lectures 32

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by union organizers or peace activists and post-screening debates – as well as coordinated efforts to maintain activist activities well after the screenings are complete. (Christensen, 2009, p. 80) These ideas have become the basis for the development of online audio-visual campaigning that provides an alternative to, but not a replacement for, cinema documentary. It nevertheless has its own effect on the aesthetics of cinema documentaries intended for the film festival circuit and for general release as they too demonstrate an openness to use in public debating contexts. In an interview with Christensen, Greenwald makes the claim that the integration of film-making into community events is the key to their effectiveness as agents of change: [t]o me the most critical social factor, probably, is that we don’t do the traditional screening, and after every single screening […] people are asked to do something. Now, that doesn’t exist if you are in the movie theatres or even if you are on PBS [the US Public Broadcasting System]. With that in mind, that informs many of my decisions about how we make the films and what’s in them, knowing that the goal is people sitting around in a church, in a school, in a bowling alley, watching it, seeing it and then saying, ‘I am going to do this, this and this …’ (Greenwald, personal interview, January 2007) (Christensen, 2009, p. 80) Brave New Films is a website that produces social activist films of all kinds, not just environmental films. Robert Greenwald himself made the film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005), which did gain a short release in the UK and was broadcast on public television channels. The main thrust of the site is the assertion that it is talking about the relevant issues that are suppressed on public television – a perception that gained much ground during the Bush–Cheney years in administration. The model for social activist film-making is critical to the creation of a grass roots role for audio-visual media, and the arguments about the integration of such films into a genuine local debate that leads to action are powerful. The aims of the United Nations Environmental Programme are certainly furthered by the development of this link between social concerns, audio-visual production, dissemination and social action. Indeed, the concept itself of coalition film-making as a process that is not only about the film but more about the community around its production and distribution is a significant contribution to the development of factual film-making generally. Documentary film is currently being profoundly influenced by such process thinking. Eco-docs at the cinema The traditional cinema-going experience is not as obviously appropriate for encouraging environmental behaviour as the more integrated community screening. An audience member pays for a ticket, is informed about disturbing ways in which the environment is 33

Green Documentary

changing and then goes home. The framework of the cinema-going experience is so lacking in environmental thought (film is technology; the cinema is enclosed, shuts out light, is air conditioned) that it is difficult to see exactly how this might inspire. Indeed the many satirical critical responses to eco-docs derive from the insertion of a deeply embedded form of filmmaking into a public sphere that is based primarily on immersive forms of entertainment that draw audiences away from the real-world issues that environmentalism confronts. An article written for an online publication, Salon, gives a refracted satirical view of the documentaries that were given cinema releases in the wake of the success of Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth asking, ‘Did the Davis Guggenheim-Al Gore PowerPoint-based Oscar winner mark a turning point in global climate change, and the beginning of a carbon-neutral future?’ (O’Hehir, 2009) The answer is not that the political world changed but that in 2009 a wave of films were given cinema releases that presented in part ‘fascinating, information-rich and occasionally beautiful film-making’ but that also constituted for O’Hehir ‘a cacophonous roar of competing voices’. O’Hehir’s review is well informed about the social context for the films reviewed, which include No Impact Man (2009), The End of the Line (2009), Food Inc. (2008), At the Edge of the World (2008), The Cove (2009) and Earth Days (2009), as he writes: Most of these movies bring life to the phrase ‘labor of love’, resulting from years of dedicated work and sacrifice at starvation wages. Their directors and producers have defied the odds in getting them released at all, and most have gone on to defy conventional release patterns: They hopscotch from one film festival to the next, screen in church basements and community centers, self-distribute on DVD or online. (O’Hehir, 2009) This introduction takes the part of a cinema-going audience that is not immersed in the world of environmental science and environmental communication and yet that is exposed to such films in part because of the rules for Oscar nomination for Best Documentary that required at the time that a film had a cinema release. And yet, it perhaps exaggerates the disconnect between general and specialist audiences. Cinephilia can operate in strange ways. After all, it is not only environmental documentaries that are about environmental issues. Environmental themes can be found in many cinema genres – science fiction or cyberpunk movies, horror, the Western, drama and melodrama (particularly the courtroom melodrama), anime, experimental film – and they have been analysed in book-length studies by David Ingram in Green Screen (Ingram, 2000), by Scott Macdonald in The Garden in the Machine (MacDonald, 2001), by Pat Brereton in Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in American Cinema (Brereton, 2005), Sean Cubitt in Ecomedia (Cubitt, 2005), Ursula Heise in Sense of Place: Sense of Planet (Heise, 2008), in the collection edited by Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010), and in the books of Murray and Heumann (Murray and Heumann, 2009). Most of these studies are interested in analysing the history of the contribution of film and photography to environmental thinking and behaviour. They can be found cited in the context 34

The Institutional Context

of a branch of literary studies known as ‘ecocriticism’ where the practice has expanded beyond the literary text to include film and other texts. Although, as Greg Garrard comments, ‘Ecocritics generally tie their cultural analysis explicitly to a “green” moral and political agenda’ (Garrard, 2004, pp. 2–3), the object of discussion is not ecology or the environment isolated from the text but these subjects as they are understood and experienced through cultural representation: As ecocritics seek to offer a truly transformative discourse, enabling us to analyse and criticise the world in which we live, attention is increasingly given to the broad range of cultural processes and products in which, and through which, the complex negotiations of nature and culture take place. Indeed, the widest definition of the subject of ecocriticism is the study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, throughout human cultural history and entailing critical analysis of the term ‘human’ itself. (Garrard, 2004, pp. 4–5) Environmental documentary is not like a cyberpunk film or disaster movie in which we can analyse the representation of different branches of the environmental movement – the environmentalists, the deep ecologists, light green or dark green or bright green perspectives. If it is not part of an activist process and it is not imaginative, what contribution does the cinema documentary make? The answer to this question lies in aspects that documentary is often criticized for. It lies in the way that the documentary utilizes the world that sponsors it and agrees to participate in it. The very fact that the documentary is made is itself a statement and can be understood in the present and in the future as a record of the interests and perspectives that made it. But because the cinema documentary is a closed form, not an open one, its deliberate distortions and exploitations of its material also mean that it can be read as symptomatic of its age in a different way to the immediacy of quick Internet campaigns or television. Thus in the first decade of the twenty-first century it is not only the Internet and social activism that has fostered a burgeoning of environmental documentary film-making. The feature-length cinema documentary has also benefited from new ideas about the entertainment documentary and from the digital revolution. Pleasure in images of landscapes of all kinds, in the process of investigation, in hearing and empathising with witnesses, in seeing groups of people collectively achieving an aim – all of these pleasures demonstrate the ways in which the documentary incorporates the whole world of environmental activism, in much the same way that the musical film incorporates the front stage and the backstage of the live show into its narrative. The flexibility of digital cameras has also allowed cinematographers to extend this portrayal, entering and filming in spaces that were too dark or inaccessible for celluloid and VHS. The development of satellite images, remote sensing and aerial and remote cinematography has also increased the range and quality of images available, marrying the quest to survey the world expressed in the Earth Watch programme with the capacity to show audiences the full impact of human activity on the planet. Computer modelling has become a tool for scientists to understand the data generated by monitoring 35

Green Documentary

atmospheric conditions, enabling them also to project into the future. The integration of these models and of computer generated images into environmental documentary film has formed a marriage between the medium and the message in which many films have become not only the mouthpiece of a new ‘bright green’ form of environmentalism (Steffen, 2006), but they can be represented themselves as audio-visual forms of modelling and mass communication and hence as an integral part of that vision. While the focus here is on the cinema documentary, it is clear that this is only one of the many platforms from which the films can be viewed. Most of the films discussed have been seen by the author in the cinema, but also on DVD on television or downloaded on a computer. Some of them have been seen broadcast on television, or as recorded broadcasts, some of them online using a laptop computer or an iPod. It is important to acknowledge that this accessibility to different ways of experiencing moving image material has a significant impact on how it can be used (Blewitt, 2010). The form of the films discussed is still defined via the cinema as featurelength documentary, and this is still the way in which films make their biggest impact in terms of critical reception. Getting a cinema release and possibly prizes for a feature-length documentary means it will be reviewed in print media, online and possibly on radio or television. As reviews relate the content of the film, they are another way in which its ideas can be disseminated. DVD release, which also brings potential reviews, or availability online provides further opportunities for the ideas to be developed and disseminated through extras or bonus material. Although the form is defined by the cinema, this book is really about replayable digital video in the way that a book of literary criticism is about printed books. It provides a context for understanding texts carried by DVDs, watched more than once, with pauses, replayed, reversed, their relationships with other texts, where they have come from, the role they play in current understanding of aesthetic and social issues. The feature documentary, like the feature film, has its length defined by the capacity for an audience to sit and be engaged by what they see for the entire length of the film, and its form defined by the capacity to remember some of the experience afterwards. The discipline of this form is constitutive. The transfer from the cinema to the DVD allows for scrutiny of it, particularly for the identification of key scenes that act a little like the ‘hooks’ in a popular song, as ways to draw in and assist recall. This state of affairs is likely soon to be dated as practices of online downloading take over, reducing the use of polycarbonates in the making of DVDs and the boxes and thin-filmed plastic covers, plastic bags for carrying and all the other aspects such as transport involved in the purchase of a retail item. Nevertheless, the possibility of replay at the very least looks likely to remain in some form and this is bound to have an effect on the critical reception of audio-visual media in the long term. Digitization is part of a more general change in orientation in the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century that has taken place in thinking about environmental issues. This change has involved a re-evaluation of the role of technology in creating, discovering and solving the environmental issues surrounding industrialization. The new orientation is often expressed through the attractive phrase ‘bright green environmentalism’, a term introduced by the sustainability campaigner Alex Steffen, editor of the book Worldchanging: 36

The Institutional Context

A User’s Guide for the 21st Century mentioned above. This is a volume that does not change the message that environmental damage has been significant and that a change in lifestyle is necessary, but reframes it in optimistic terms as a solvable problem using the same kind of human ingenuity that created the industrial revolution in the first place. Documentary film, developing along with the technological media of the twentieth century, has had an awkward relationship with the trends in environmental and ecological thought from the late 1960s. Bright green environmentalism, in its reaffirmation of technology and declaration about the potential of new inventions to solve the problems created by the old, offers the possibility of a more comfortable relationship between audio-visual media and green community activism. There are two ways in which environmental documentary film-making has developed in response to this new climate of debate. The first has been the development of a close relationship between the digitization of audio-visual media production and social networking on the Internet. As mentioned above, Christian Christensen has discussed how this development has brought together trends in coalition documentary film-making with trends in the use of social networking in anti-corporate globalization campaigns, comparing George Stoney’s documentary practice and development of public access television with Robert Greenwald’s Internet distribution of documentaries through Brave New Films as an example. This development is itself a challenge to the other trend, which is the creation of polished feature-length documentary films telling the story of the growth of the environmental movement, of its converts and heroes and their messages about the necessity for change. The development of this latter form has been complex because the story is still ongoing and the text of the eco-doc betrays the struggle to reconcile the antagonisms between the many different interest groups who stand to gain or lose depending on the direction of the debate. However, the form has also benefitted from a resurgence of political documentary filmmaking spearheaded by Michael Moore and just as significantly from the development of spectacular photographic techniques to represent the world as it is today, from audio-visual techniques to represent archive material evidencing the kinds of environmental changes that have taken place, and forms of surveillance and modelling that illustrate – or even simply are – current environmental science. Bright green environmentalism rethinks the relationship between technology and environmental damage by making a distinction between old and new technology and by refusing to condemn old technology as simply immoral. Old technology was invented in a long and complex process that has issued in the stable, high-quality lifestyles of the citizens of prosperous nations. This is the lifestyle that the people of emerging economies aspire to. It was invented without any thought to the environment and it can now be seen that a byproduct of progress is environmental crisis. Now fully aware of the extent of the problems facing the world, Steffen argues: We need to consciously redesign the entire material basis of our civilization. The model we replace it with must be dramatically more ecologically sustainable, offer large increases 37

Green Documentary

in prosperity for everyone on the planet, and not only function in areas of chaos and corruption, but also help transform them. (Steffen, 2006, p. 21) New technology can bring about change and development that is beneficial to humankind just as old technology did, but it will be sustainable, creating a future that is ‘bright, green, and freely available to all’ (Steffen, 2006, p. 18). The debate in the decade after the millennium is about whether this optimism is justified and whether the political structures and popular will is there to make the changes advocated. The bright green documentary is a form that seeks to play a role in helping the public as well as policy-makers to make environmentally conscious and well-informed decisions. The optimistic documentary Jean Rouch’s Madame l’eau (1992) lies outside the decade that this volume is about, but the approach to documentary film-making that it represents is at the heart of twenty-first century attempts to deal differently with the postcolonial situation. Rouch’s ‘shared anthropology’ can be associated closely with the ‘participatory mode’ of documentary film-making described by Bill Nichols in his various books, such as Blurred Boundaries (Nichols, 1994) and Introduction to Documentary (Nichols, 2001). It is also the basis for what has become the dominant gesture of documentary film-making in the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the ‘performative mode’. In their film, Chronique d’un été/Chronicle of a Summer (1960), the ethnographer Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin made a film about life for a wide range of people in Paris at the end of the 1950s in which the two film-makers are seen to participate in discussions and reflections throughout the film. By the end of the film the two of them discuss a post-screening debate that has just taken place among the participants. The debate has brought out some strong criticisms of behaviour and process and the two filmmakers declare that they are ‘in trouble’. Madame l’eau is an example of the kind of film-making Rouch called ‘shared anthropology’ that he went on to develop further during a long career as a ethnographic film-maker in Africa through the 1970s and 1980s. A critical distinction between Chronique d’un été and Madame l’eau is that the latter does not look at the state of things but is itself part of a process of action in response to a specific problem. The film is not activist in the sense of raising awareness, but active, that is, an active part of the institutional and social organization that makes the events happen. In this sense it has moved on from participation to agency to the ‘performative mode’, a way of making documentary that works with the fact that film is a medium that works in the world through its making as well as its theatrical distribution. This makes it prototypical for environmental filmmaking in the twenty-first century. 38

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Madame l’eau recounts the story of how Damouré, Lam and Tallou go to Holland to see if they can use some Dutch windmill technology to help them set up a cooperative farm. They have come to this possibility because the land they wish to use has run dry partly from a lack of rainfall but also because the trees that lined it have been chopped down allowing the sand to get into the river and silt it up. They turn to a lake nearby and consider ways of using the water to irrigate the land that they know is otherwise fertile. The windmills of Holland, used to pump water out of the land, could also be used in reverse, to pump water out of the lake and into the fields to irrigate them. Rouch has been friends with the three men for many years and accompanies them in their investigations with his camera, adding his own voiceover narration, commentary and incantations along the way. The meaning of this film resides in its approach to drought, an environmental problem, which it turns into a story about the relationships between the people who become involved in the project. Although it may be defined as an international development project this process is not framed as such, because it is not the Dutch but the friends from Niger who initiate and guide the process. They comment that they are not prepared to let the Europeans come and build something and then go away. They insist that it is done properly, that the right kind of windmills are built for the terrain, that they have the right training to maintain them, that they are able to build more and in the process learn to design better versions they can build with local materials. In her review of the film for the American Anthropologist, Faye Ginsberg writes ‘Madame l’eau might appear to be the product of a UNESCO development film crew that went happily astray’ (Ginsburg, 1996, p. 836), interpreting it as a gently critical parody of conventional UNESCO sponsored films. As such it does something that twenty-first century eco-docs aspire to: it injects a warm, irreverent humour and local character into the narrative, particularly through the story of Lam’s naughty donkey, who goes to Holland and gets herself pregnant. Rituals and incantations performed by Tallou at various critical points during the film to get the blessing of the spirits for their ventures express the anxieties and triumphs of engineering as the new structures are hauled upright and the howling wind, comically added to the soundtrack, takes to the sails. Rouch’s film, made in the context of long-standing friendship and communal study, is also a profound exploration of the ways in which the imagination itself represents the capacity for human beings to overcome life-threatening problems. At the beginning of the film Damouré carries out a vaccination while he talks about his plan to set up a cooperative. It is mentioned several times that he has had this plan for many years. It has become a dream more than a plan. Throughout the film the participants thus talk about the ‘dream’ that in another context could also be understood as a vision or an idea or a possibility, but for the film this labelling of the ‘dream’ becomes literal, allowing the idea to be associated with fiction. Similarly, because the dream is about the future, the telling of it becomes an incantation, a use of storytelling to bring about a change in the material world through the spiritual world. The film itself, creating its story through images as it goes along, brings a reality into being like magic. 39

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The twenty-first century environmentalists’ arguments about a sustainable world economy represent long-held fears, plans and dreams on a global scale. The documentaries of the decade that communicate the discoveries of environmental science are like incantations addressed to all kinds of audiences: individuals, communities, institutions and gods. They are attempting to fend off imagined apocalyptic futures by replacing them with alternative, often bright green visions.

40

Chapter 3 The Contemplative Response

By 1926, Eastman Kodak was the second-largest consumer of pure silver bullion after the US Mint. The plant was processing five tons of silver in 1936 and remained one of the metal’s largest purchasers in the world even after 2000, when it began to focus on digital photography. (Maxwell and Miller, 2012, p. 73)

E

dward Burtynsky’s acknowledgement of the materiality of photography in the film Manufactured Landscapes is an unusually focussed moment for an industry that, as Maxwell and Miller argue, tends to be highly contradictory in its response to environmental issues. As such Burtynsky’s photographs can be read as a response to the ‘grip of the technological sublime’ that Maxwell and Miller (2012, p. 6) analyse as the background to a contemporary ‘enchantment’ with media technologies deriving from a received history of their development that makes it ‘hard to perceive its material connection to ecological decline’ (2012, p. 4).They see this enchantment as unstable and ‘a point of departure for our investigation and critique of the relationship between the media and the environment’. However, whereas Maxwell and Miller state categorically that ‘there is no place for the technological sublime, technophilia, or technological fads in projects to green the media’, Burtynsky’s photographs and Baichwal’s film remain caught in the fascination of the spectacular landscapes and the capacity for the production of spectacular images that the cycle of production and consumption enables. The materiality of the environment is an inevitably elusive concept in the world of a film, so much so that sociologists of the everyday have tended to view both film and photography with much suspicion. In the mid-1970s Henri Lefebvre, for example, argued: Where there is error of illusion, the image is more likely to secrete it and reinforce it than to reveal it. No matter how ‘beautiful’ they may be, such images belong to an incriminated ‘medium’. Where the error consists in a segmentation of space, moreover – and where the illusion consists in the failure to perceive this dismemberment – there is simply no possibility of any image rectifying the mistake. On the contrary, images fragment, they are themselves fragments of space. Cutting things up and rearranging them, découpage and montage – these are the alpha and omega of the art of image-making. As for error and illusion, they reside already in the artist’s eye and gaze, in the photographer’s lens, in the draftsman’s pencil and on his blank sheet of paper. Error insinuates itself into the very objects that the artist discerns, as into the sets of objects that he selects. Wherever there is

Green Documentary

illusion, the optical and visual world plays an integral and integrative, active and passive, part in it. It fetishizes abstraction and imposes it as the norm. It detaches the pure form from its impure content – from lived time, everyday time, and from bodies with their opacity and solidity, their warmth, their life and their death. After its fashion, the image kills. (Lefebvre, 1974/1991, pp. 96–97) This passage from The Production of Space represents a critical theoretical response to the visual portrayal of the relationship between humankind and the environment. Lefebvre’s discussion insists on the point of view that behind definitions of space lie hidden the economic and political positions of power. Photographic representations of space are merely reproductions of a political and economic order that already exists. From this point of view Burtynsky’s photographs, and Jennifer Baichwal’s documentation of the process of making them, merely reproduce the order that brings about the environmental destruction that is visible onscreen, makes it appear inevitable and inescapable. What will be explored, however, in this chapter on environmental films as contemplative responses to environmental questions, is the capacity of the documentary to create a space for acknowledging ambiguity and complexity. Central to ambiguity is the existence of genuine alternative interpretations and emotional responses. Changes to the environment highlighted by environmental debates can sometimes seem uncomplicated. A film such as The Shadow of Progress (1970) sponsored by BP shows images of the pollution of water and air by industry that became incorporated into the argument that part of the cost of industry should involve cleaning up and avoiding the creation of such pollution. However, environmental legislation brought in during the 1970s to compel industry to cover the costs of such obvious and highly visible environmental damage is still contentious as we shall see with the debates about the development of the natural gas industry prompted by the film Gasland (2010) at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Jennifer Baichwal’s film about Burtynsky’s photographs and films that can be labelled as ‘contemplative’, such as Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Unser täglich Brot/Our Daily Bread (2005), do something different to showing images of environmental pollution to illustrate an argument.

Figures 3abc:  Three screen captures from The Shadow of Progress (1970) directed by Derek Williams for British Petroleum. The images act as highly visible evidence for the impact of industry on the environment, building an iconography for the eco-doc, here embedded in a corporate response to an increasingly politicized issue. 44

The Contemplative Response

Critical to the strategy of Our Daily Bread, for example, is the withdrawal of an authorial position in an attempt to draw the film viewer in to a level of consciousness that responds not only to the immediate images but also to contemplation of the civilization that has brought the image about (Hughes, 2012). An important part of this contemplation is the recognition that the images can represent both utopian and dystopian readings of modernity. Art photography Jennifer Baichwal’s film works with the status of Burtynsky’s photographs as art. There is a crossover here between the artistic strategy of the conceptual documentary and Baichwal’s use of the relationship between still photography and the documentary film. In her review of the film for Film Quarterly Nadia Bozak points out that the film represents not so much the images or the landscapes documented by the images but a response to the aesthetic challenge posed by the photographs: Because Burtynsky systematically aestheticizes industrial civilization’s environmental incursions, his images are marked with an almost insentient detachment and lack of critical positioning that can be troubling. But, as Baichwal explained to me, what she finds provocative in Burtynsky’s work is this very same ambiguity and lack of didacticism, which leads to the experiential ‘horror’ of encountering the ‘detritus of our existence’ in what initially appears to be abstract painting. (Bozak, 2008/2009) In the case of Manufactured Landscapes it is possible to see the film as Bozak does in part as a reaction against the photographs and the photographer. While Burtynsky freezes the moment into an abstraction: The project of [Baichwal’s] documentary is […] one of ‘honoring the individual,’ which, in formal terms, entails showing the ‘back and forth’ between, on the one hand, Burtynsky’s overwhelming abstraction and, on the other, the ‘innumerable small parts’ and ‘teeming organic life’ that also constitute China and its images. (Bozak, 2008/2009) This dialogue between the moving and the still image is an interesting variation on a history of discussion about the visual representation of the environment. In his account of the historical development of environmental photography Finnis Dunaway also points to the use of camera technology as paradoxical: ‘As they witnessed the alternation and loss of particular places, many artists and activists expressed ambivalence or even outright hostility toward technology, blaming it for the destruction of the American landscape. Yet they continued to rely on the camera – a technology of representation – to convey their 45

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ideas about the natural world’ (Dunaway, 2005, p. xvii). Dunaway’s argument that ‘through their embrace of the camera, they tried to unite the technological and the spiritual, to link religious feeling and human emotion to the machine’ (p. xvii) articulates the technological sublime in a similar way to Maxwell and Miller but while these authors seek to apply a medicine to counteract the effects on contemporary society, Dunaway’s task is to interpret how the paradoxical phenomenon of the environmental photograph arose in the first place. Dunaway’s explanation is consonant with the practice represented not only by Burtynsky’s photographs and Baichwal’s film but also with the intense focus of a large number of contemporary artists and film-makers on the paradoxes of technological or industrial sublime. He argues of the artists and photographers he discusses: With a sometimes naive belief in the camera’s mechanical, objective vision, they hoped that photographs and films could record the reality of nature and bring Americans closer to the nonhuman world. They also regarded the camera as a technology of memory, a machine that could preserve threatened landscapes on film. Worrying about the loss of nature, they tried to create visual monuments to vanishing places. (Dunaway, 2005, p. xvii) Tracing the development of links between the ‘panoramic’ view or aerial shot and ecological film during the New Deal era, Dunaway discusses Pare Lorenz’s The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) and Robert Flaherty’s The Land (1942), films that are often seen as precursors for environmental documentary. Dunaway points to the direction to be taken by environmental documentary, arguing, [b]y using a wide-angle lens, Lorentz and Flaherty encouraged spectators to consider not just the isolated parts of a landscape but its entire ecological fabric. Their panoramic perspective created a new aesthetic for environmental reform, an ecological vision, that stressed the interdependence of people and nature. (Dunaway, 2005, p. 35) Such films, focussing on the communication of government schemes to reform the agricultural practices of the day, are evidence of an emerging ecological consciousness, but themselves also bring out the problematic nature of the viewpoint represented. In the case of The Plow that Broke the Plains the purpose of the film’s sponsors, the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration, was to replace the haphazard development of agriculture during the pioneering era with a planned agricultural economy. This form of agriculture is in turn critiqued so that Lefebvre’s point made in the 1970s that the visual media hide the structures of power that create the organization of space rather than revealing them is made in a context in which ‘the grid’ represents the grip of central planning on environmental organization, in its turn represented in films such as the qatsi trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1983), Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation (1988), and Naqoyqatsi: Life as War (2002). 46

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However, the general critique of the image shifts in this analysis to a critique of a particular point of view, the bird’s eye view used for land management and to the consequent contamination of landscape photography with the perspective of the polluters. In his account of the Sierra Club’s invention of the coffee table book as a campaigning tool for conservation, Dunaway describes how Ansel Adams’ ‘panoramic style’ of the 1940s and 1950s associated with the creation of the national parks, is replaced by shot types that reduce the physical distance between the viewer and the viewed. He analyses Eliot Porter’s In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World (Porter, 1962) produced two years after the Sierra Club’s campaigning masterpiece This is the American Earth (Adams and Newhall, 1960) arguing that it ‘combined ecology with abstraction to study patterns of relationship in the natural world, to gesture toward an ecological version of the sublime’ (Dunaway, 2005, p. 150). The ecological sublime in comparison with the technological sublime is a concept that relates to Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s discussion about the differences between ‘environmentalist’ films and ‘ecocinema’ in Framing the World (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010). An important characteristic of this idea is the displacement of the human from the centre to the periphery in order to foreground the environment itself. Dunaway’s analysis of In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World lists as characteristic of the ecological sublime: the focus on ordinary landscapes, a tendency to look up at rather than down upon, a sense of the beauty of decay as well as growth, the lack of human presence, nature as a place to look but not touch, a place of leisure not labour and the idea that the poet is the true appreciator of nature (Dunaway, 2005, p. 165). These characteristics are not as naturally popular and Porter’s work was rejected as too cold and abstract, but they constitute a re-education of the eye in looking at the natural environment, a re-education that Willoquet-Maricondi also captures in her analysis of experimental films. Willoquet-Maricondi, like Scott MacDonald (MacDonald, 2001), sees the mission of the avant-garde as chiming with that of ‘ecological cinema’ in aiming at a ‘retraining of perception as a way of offering an alternative to conventional media-spectatorship’ (WilloquetMaricondi, 2010, p. 109), arguing that ‘experimental and avant-garde ecocinema can help create the conditions for alternative modes of engaging with cinema and with the natural world’ (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010, p. 50). Contrasting two films Riverglass: A Ballet in Four Seasons (1997), which she describes as anthropocentric and environmentalist, and Power: One River Two Nations (1996), which she describes as ecocentric ecocinema, in a utopian reinterpretation of the role of cinema in environmental campaigning, Willoquet-Maricondi argues that the goal is not to use the technological sublime or indeed the ecological sublime to bring audiences to environmental consciousness and action, but to retrain perception by denying the viewer the pleasures of these perspectives and replacing them instead with the slow indifference of ordinary spaces: Perhaps the central predicament that the study of representations enables us to address, as we address specific manifestations of social and environmental degradation and injustice, 47

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is that of perception – or misperception. We have erected a social structure, a civilization based on a perceptual error regarding the place of humans within the biotic community. Since the visual arts deal in matters of perceptions and representations, they might help us regain a proper perspective. (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010, pp. 54‒55) Despite these powerful arguments about representation, the extreme long shot, the technological and ecological sublime in films such as Manufactured Landscapes continues to create a compelling ‘exactitude, clarity, readability, plasticity’, as described by Lefebvre, and as such to demonstrate that environmental still and moving photography is still fully part of the development of modernity, the same development that is perceived as a destructive force in so many of the images presented. Although it is possible to see some reconciliation between the avant-garde rejection of the image and the modernist fascination with its capacity to deconstruct the visual, environmental documentaries of the twenty-first century have tended to work with rather than against the spectacular, taking advantage of the opportunities generated by digital post-production as well as digital shooting. What is more, as noted in the introduction, the managerial perspective represented in the long shot and the aerial view is also that which has driven the collection of data for land management and which is the heart of strategy for understanding and adapting to climate change. This is a point that has been noted by Cosgrove and Fox (2010) in their book on Photography and Flight. Discussing photographers such as Emmet Gowin, Richard Misrach, Edward Burtynsky, David Maisel, David Hansen, Alex MacLean, Angus and Patricia Macdonald, Terry Evans, Ed Ruscha, Olivo Barbieri, Florian Maier-Aichen and Michael Light, they comment: Since the 1970s the aerial perspective seems to have become closely bound to environmental concerns, so that not only is the technology of aerial photography and remote sensing a principal source of data for environmental monitoring and modelling of such phenomena as climate change, ice melting, vegetation loss and species extinction, but, in the popular imagination, aerial images of the earth’s surface and landscapes have come to be framed almost exclusively through an environmental lens. (Cosgrove and Fox, 2010, p. 87) In addition, the expansion of both the long shot and the extreme close-up expands the potential for contextualizing the human body in space and place. The table below taken from Bordwell and Thompson’s standard text Film Art categorizes the shot as it is defined by the human body with the medium shot at the centre:

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Extreme long shot

Long shot

Medium long shot

Medium shot

Medium close-up

Close-up

Extreme close-up

‘the human figure is barely visible. This is the framing for landscapes, bird’seye views of cities, and other extensive entities.’

‘figures are more prominent, but the background dominates.’

‘The plan américain (“American shot”) is very common in Hollywood cinema. Here [...] the human figure is framed from the knees up. This shot permits a nice balance of figure and surroundings. Shots at the same distance of nonhuman shots are called medium long shots.’

‘frames the human body from the waist up [...]. Gesture and expression now become more visible.’

‘frames the body from the chest up.’

‘is traditionally the shot showing just the head, hands, feet or small object; it emphasizes facial expression, the details of a gesture, or a significant object.’

‘singles out a portion of the face (eyes or lips), isolates a detail, magnifies the minute.’

Source: Bordwell and Thompson, 1990, p. 176.

A shift in the spectrum is created by the increasing use of more categories in which the distance between the body and the camera is increased. These categories are: the aerial shot, satellite photography and space photography. The central position becomes somewhere between the long shot and the medium long shot. This shift in perspective from the medium shot towards the long shot reflects a change in narrative position in which the story of place is included in the individual story. The extension of the possibilities of expansion out from the situated individual as well as of the possibilities of zooming in allows for cinematography that expresses individual fate, as well as the fate of communities, in a broader physical context. In their examination of the relationship between photography and flight Cosgrove and Fox point to neurophysiology as the explanation for ‘the attraction of the air photo and its apparent naturalness’ (Cosgrove and Fox, 2010, p. 10). The use of the aerial view in art photography is also the result of the physiology of the eye: Humans are, in short, pattern-fixated, and take great aesthetic pleasure from discerning pattern, seeing it stretched and broken and reformed. While the biological study of vision as pattern recognition suggests that it may be related to survival needs, within the

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Images taken from space allowing the appearance of the whole earth or parts of the earth in which the curvature of the planet’s surface is visible. Humanity all but disappears from view. An extension of this is deep space photography where planet earth is seen in relation to other planets.

Images taken from a satellite, providing a flattened image of the earth’s surface. It is possible to zoom in and out of this image which itself remains the same. Pattern and broad contrasts become more dominant and humanity begins to appear as a species.

Images taken from an aeroplane or helicopter, providing an idea of the topography of the land below. The layout of groups of buildings and landscape features becomes visible in different ways depending on whether the shot is oblique or vertical.

Space Satellite Aerial photography photography shot Medium shot ‘frames the human body from the waist up [...]. Gesture and expression now become more visible.’

Medium long shot ‘The plan américain (“American shot”) is very common in Hollywood cinema. Here [...] the human figure is framed from the knees up. This shot permits a nice balance of figure and surroundings. Shots at the same distance of nonhuman shots are called medium long shots.’

Long shot ‘figures are more prominent, but the background dominates.’

Extreme long shot ‘the human figure is barely visible. This is the framing for landscapes, bird’s-eye views of cities, and other extensive entities.’ ‘frames the body from the chest up.’

‘is traditionally the shot showing just the head, hands, feet or small object; it emphasises facial expression, the details of a gesture, or a significant object.’

Medium Close-up close-up

‘singles out a portion of the face (eyes or lips), isolates a detail, magnifies the minute.’

Extreme close-up

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history of art the interest has been in how these patterns work compositionally in picture making, and it was in the very years that the camera was first mounted on aeroplanes that Modernist artists began to create images that sought to foreground shape and pattern over the conventional forms of figurative representation. (Cosgrove and Fox, 2010, pp. 99‒100) Jennifer Baichwal uses the moving image to reflect on the abstract and concrete qualities of Burtynsky’s photographs. By moving slowly through the factory space she records the actions of individuals at work showing how they both fit in to the environment planned and created for this work and themselves constitute it as bodies with needs. As she records the work of the photographer who sets up a ladder in the space between the buildings to capture the colour-coded precision of the roll call and team meeting, she also allows the viewer to contemplate the symbiotic relationship between the camera as advert for the scene and the pride of the workforce’s response to its presence. In the moment frozen by the image all the ambiguity of modern progress is expressed. For the image to work as an environmental image rather than as an expression of China’s economic expansion, the factory space needs to become part of a wider context. Thus the structure of the series of images becomes an important part of the interpretation of the single image. Burtynsky connects the factory with mining as the source of the materials used; with the growing cities as the source for the expansion in consumption as well as in worker availability; with the mountains of e-waste as the old products are replaced with newer, better ones; with the building of the dam as necessary to the growth of the populations living in the cities; and the expansion of coal mining as a necessary source of energy for the growth of industrial activity. He shows China’s expansion as the very model of industrialization with all its energy and optimism intact right alongside a developing environmental awareness and strategy displayed in experimental cities as well as in variously motivated resistance to change. As a linear form, Baichwal’s film moves to the sources of the images as part of the representation of a physical journey through China showing how access is granted or not granted and how each perspective is achieved. The images of images enhance the conflicting emotions that each landscape shot calls forth creating the kind of cognitive dissonance that Leon Festinger (Festinger, 1957) first described. This dissonance culminates not only in the acknowledgement of personal involvement in the landscapes represented but also in the understanding that there is no easy withdrawal from them. Bozak quotes Burtynsky’s conclusions and notes how the artistic strategy that has evolved to represent the environmental issues in effect mirrors the state of environmental consciousness itself. The uncertainty also mirrors that expressed in the first IPCC assessment in 1990 that ‘there is no single quick-fix technological option for limiting greenhouse gas emissions’ (IPCC, 1990, p. 58): ‘There are no easy solutions or resolutions, which is exactly the state that we are in ecologically and environmentally. If there was an easy solution we would have figured it out.’ So, ‘we have to live with the uncomfortable ambiguity of our own role and also our inability to figure out a way 51

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to get out of it. There are so many gestures you could make towards making things better, but there is no one panacea that is going to solve it all.’ Just like art, from painting to photography to filmmaking, human relations with the natural world are necessarily perplexing. (Bozak, 2008/2009) Farming and Modern Life While Baichwal’s film follows the artist’s and the film-maker’s journey to the manufactured landscapes of contemporary industrialization in China, other contemplative films focus on European landscapes that were once shaped to provide for human needs but that have now become obsolete. These slow environmental films are about observing what it looks like when a way of life changes so significantly that it can be said to be dying out. Raymond Depardon’s La vie moderne/Modern Life (2008) is a film about an aging community of farmers whose way of life is no longer economically relevant so that the next generation will not replace it but will rather constitute a new beginning or concept of rural existence. There are two aspects of such a film, one that is a traditional role played by the documentary film and one that is specific to the environmental context. On the one hand, the task of recording forms of civilization as they die out is older than the documentary form itself and closely connected to the project of anthropological study. There is thus a very close connection between these documentaries, visual ethnography and the ethnographic film in particular. On the other hand, the development of observational documentary and cinéma vérité coincided with the development of critical methods of social observation concerned with understanding the European everyday. Henri Lefebvre, whose work on space is cited above, began his project by developing means to carry out empirical investigations into everyday life and the everyday use of space (Lefebvre, 1947/1991) (Lefebvre, 1961/2002). The project was to counter the tendency of modernism to abstraction with the specificities of life as it is lived. The sociological project continues today in the work of social theorists and activists such as Edward Soja whose work on urban space can be connected with the environmental justice movement via the concept of spatial justice (Soja, 2010). This project can also be found developed in the work of Michel de Certeau and his ground-breaking work The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau, 1984), which theorizes a project of rich descriptions of everyday activities such as cooking and walking as a programme of resistance to forces of conformism inherent in state bureaucracy and consumer capitalism. What is important about this history for the contemplative environmental documentary is its intense engagement not only with the problem of the representation of reality, but also with the utopian quest to help human beings to become more conscious of the reality that is lived and less distracted by the illusions of media representations. The contemplative documentary is thus once again caught up in a contradiction in being used not only as a means to discover the reality of life as it is lived but also to educate people to live life in the here and now. 52

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Heaven and Earth A film that can be seen as a precursor to such contemporary environmental documentaries discussed here is Michael Pilz’s Himmel und Erde/Heaven and Earth (1980), a documentary based around footage shot over two years, largely by Pilz himself, from February 1980 in an Ortschaft called Obdach in the mountains in Steiermark, Austria, with the main focus on the village of Sankt Anna. The film is in two parts entitled Die Ordnung der Dinge/The Order of Things and Der Lauf der Dinge/The Course of Things and is pervaded by the contemplative personality of the director who begins his work with a quotation from Lao Tse translated into German and handwritten in capitals in red on the screen: NIMM DAS, WAS VOR DIR IST, SO WIE ES IST, WÜNSCHE ES NICHT ANDERS ALS ES IST. SEI EINFACH DA LAOTSE Take what is before you, as it is, And do not wish For something different. Simply exist LAOTSE On its release and since, the film has been celebrated not so much as a record of a vanishing way of life – although it is that too – but more as a spiritual experience. Interestingly some critics take it to mean that the film-maker has taken what was before him as it is, while others have taken on that role themselves as viewers, willing themselves to take what the film

Figures 4abc:  DVD captures from Michael Pilz’s Himmel und Erde (1980), an attempt to merge subjectivity and objectivity in its contemplation of a disappearing way of life in the Austrian Alps. 53

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offers as it is and so to gain insight into the everyday life of a small rural community in the mountains. Thus Samo Kobenter for Uni-Actuell cited in the press materials for the film: Michael Pilz has succeeded in producing a classical work of film art – associative cinema in the true sense of the term. To appreciate the film the viewer must do the same as the creator of the film: be able to wait, simply be there, then the images present and represent themselves and stay for longer than the short time it takes merely to watch and think through a film.1 (Michael Pilz Filmproduktion Wien, 1982) At issue for such films that seek to observe the lives of others, however, is the relationship between the film-maker who waits and the filmed who live lives. As Brugner-Rosenbaum put it for the Süd Ost Tagespost in Graz: Pilz does not behave like an authoritarian director who imposes his plans and ideas on people. He allows them to speak and act for themselves and becomes himself an observer.2 (Michael Pilz Filmproduktion Wien, 1982) These comments are an indication of how difficult it is to put the experience of a radically observational documentary into words as well as how new the phenomenon was in 1982. Although at intervals the screen is filled with words taken from the Bible and Eastern spiritual texts that can be read as a structuring narrative, there is no voice-over commentary in the film to explain or label what is seen. As a reward for paying attention in the non-judgemental way recommended at the start, the viewer gains not merely information about how the small farmer’s life is lived in the mountains, but more importantly an altered perception about life itself. Taking things as they come the scenes play out on the road and beside the road, in sheds and workshops, in the fields, inside the school, outside the farmhouse, outside the church, in cow stalls and pig sties and now and again in homes. Although the overall perception may be strongly contemplative and spiritual, it is also concrete and specific to the changing economics of farming in western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. The enthusiastic – indeed almost ecstatic – responses to Heaven and Earth can be read as attempts to articulate the sense that the film promotes a different kind of viewing experience. At the same time, they reveal the difficulty of finding an appropriate descriptive language that does not betray the insights gained. Pilz’s film bears an interesting relationship to documentary debates going on at the time the film was being made and that have continued to be expressed partly through the development of new documentary techniques and partly in the analytic approach of documentary theorists. The debate derives from the intersection between documentary and ethnographic filmmaking, anthropology and social science, explored most famously by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in the film Chronique d’un été and merging in interesting ways with the development of political and observational documentary in the United States. The debates around these films are concurrent with the development of debates around phenomenological approaches 54

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to social science in works such as de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life just mentioned, which itself engages with Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in publications such as The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu, 1980/1990), and Foucault’s analysis of the organization of social reality in The Order of Things (Foucault, 1966/1989). All of these investigations struggle to find ways to theorize the everyday without distorting the object of study, or at least through an acknowledgement of the process of distortion through observation. The ordinary language of documentary De Certeau’s writing on ‘ordinary language’, starting from Wittgenstein’s famous paradigm shift between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations, offers a way to understand the palpable struggle going on in the critics’ attempts to articulate the achievement of Pilz’s film. At the beginning of The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau makes the statement: We are subject to, but not identified with, ordinary language. As in the ship of fools, we are embarked, without the possibility of an aerial view or any sort of totalization. That is the “prose of the world” Merleau-Ponty spoke of. It encompasses every discourse, even if human experiences cannot be reduced to what it can say about them. (de Certeau, 1984, p. 11) In this passage de Certeau expresses the consequences of understanding language as a procession of words entangled in a network of perceptions. Wittgenstein’s use of the deceptively simple phrase ‘ordinary language’ is a means to include language itself within the more general problem of perception. Rather than making a special case out of language so that it can be used as a tool for the positivist sciences, de Certeau sees the submission of philosophy to the implicated practice of word making – what he calls the ‘place’ of utterance – as a potential strength. The documentary practice pursued by Pilz in Heaven and Earth is also a process involving the demotion of the camera from a position outside the phenomena to be observed to a position of involvement in process. To this extent his practice follows that of Rouch and Morin and is part of the debates within French anthropology and ethnography about the status of positivist methodologies. The camera changes its status from a position where it makes recordings of a community to a position where it temporarily – over three or four years – becomes part of the life of the community. Evidence that the change of methodology has an impact on the perception of this representation of everyday life can be found in the fact that the critics all report that it does. The language of the critics reflects the idea of ‘submission’ that de Certeau writes of in the case of ordinary language. As the film-maker, Pilz, like the philosopher, is no longer accorded his own place (outside the community), he: No longer has his own (propre) appropriable place. Any position of mastery is denied him. The analyzing discourse and the analyzed ‘object’ are in the same situation: both are 55

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organized by the practical activity with which they are concerned, both are determined by rules they never establish nor see clearly, equally scattered in differentiated ways of working (Wittgenstein wanted his work itself to be composed only of fragments), inscribed in a texture in which each can by turns ‘appeal’ to the other, cite it and refer to it. There is a continual exchange of distinct places. Philosophical or scientific privilege disappears into the ordinary. (de Certeau, 1984, p. 11) This sense that the film-maker has established a different relationship with his subject or object of study, sometimes turning the object into a subject as when Pilz asks the couple to choose a location for film-making, or the subject into an object as when the children perform a play in their school. The critics express this change of perspective in many ways, firstly through the perception that this is not a ‘documentary film’. But there are also problems that appear as a result of this new methodology. De Certeau claims that the disappearance of scientific privilege: [h]as as its corollary the invalidation of truths. From what privileged place could they be signified? There will thus be facts that are no longer truths. The inflation of the latter is controlled, if not shut off, by criticism of the places of authority in which facts are converted into truths. Detecting them by their mixture of meaninglessness and power, Wittgenstein attempts to reduce these truths to linguistic facts and to that which, in these facts, refers to an ineffable or ‘mystical’ exteriority of language. (de Certeau, 1984, p. 11) In contrast with de Certeau’s claims, it is clear from the critics’ responses to Heaven and Earth that the change of documentary position in no way signifies that there are only facts and no truths. There is on the contrary an attempt to state that the truths of the film derive from the focus on the concrete, the real, the facts, but out of these come ‘truths’ that are even more universal than those of science, with a tendency towards a universalizing of feelings and attitudes. The ‘ordinary language’ of documentary observation does not get rid of ‘truths’ but places them within a different kind of rhetoric. The documentary theorist Bill Nichols argues in Austin’s New Approaches that documentary cannot escape rhetoric (Nichols, 2008). However, there is no denying that the methodology used by Pilz has established itself as a way to approach social and environmental observation. There are variations on the practice, however, which can be observed in films such as Depardon’s Modern Life that both continues and breaks with Pilz’s method. In Heaven and Earth Pilz inserts quotations from foundational religious texts that direct thought from the concrete day-to-day life of the participants in the film towards universal truths. At the same time, however, he inserts material that indicates the contemporary climate for the farming community such as a radio programme playing in a car at the beginning of the film in which a discussion about the oil crisis is being held. This sets up an interplay between the economic environment for farming and a sense of farming as representing something more fundamental about the source of European identity. 56

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Agribusiness: WE FEED THE WORLD and Our Daily Bread In 2005 two Austrian documentary films on the industrialization and globalization of agriculture were released and in a sense provide an update to Pilz’s story. One of them – Erwin Wagenhofer’s WE FEED THE WORLD (2005) featuring Jean Ziegler of the UN – became the most successful documentary film in Austria in terms of audience figures to date. The other one, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Unser täglich Brot/Our Daily Bread (2005), attracted and still attracts copious amounts of critical attention and prizes for its uncompromisingly aesthetic framing of the images and refusal to provide commentary.3 Both films portray the mass-production methods used in modern agriculture – or ‘agribusiness’ as it is usually called in order to locate its practices unambiguously within the world of commerce. Farmers have become workers in the context and are seen in isolation and silence eating or being transported from place to place. Both films are the product of a context in Europe in which there has been increasing discussion of agricultural practices. Wagenhofer’s film and the website as well as the book published to go with it (Wagenhofer and Annas, 2006) explicitly seeks to educate viewers who – as one worker in the film puts it – have lost contact with the reality of food production. Geyrhalter’s film, on the other hand, does not articulate its mission but rather presents the images without comment as evidence to reflect upon (Hughes, 2012) (Murray and Heumann, 2012). It is a film to delight farm- and factory-machinery enthusiasts. A full comparison between these films would be between a more contemplative and a more argumentative response to the environmental issues raised by the modernization of farming during the first decade of the new millennium, but neither of these films presents a fully argued position about agribusiness and the globalization of food distribution. Both films present images of the high-tech exploitation of arable land, of the creation of vast artificial environments for cultivation and of the mass rearing and slaughtering of animals for meat and are at the very least cumulatively striking. Wagenhofer includes agricultural workers speaking about their work, the politics of their area of produce and their feelings about the way it is organized. He also adds interview material with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, and statistics about production, export and waste. The lack of a linking commentary, however, leads to varied interpretations of the purpose of the interview material. Geyrhalter, on the other hand, excludes words and statistics but represents the workers eating and moving on and to sites of work. The images are of production itself, of a mass that pours forth from minutely calculated mechanized processes. These images of incubation, germination, birth, growth, slaughter and harvest are enormously impressive as representations of sheer quantity as well as in the apparently flawless, supermarket quality of the produce achieved. As images they inevitably take on a symbolic quality. The heads of corn swaying in the wind are not only used to represent ‘the equality of all in the face of death’, as Canetti puts it, they also 57

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represent the effort to feed the people, and in their plenitude they are an indexical sign, a measure also of the mass of humanity that needs to be fed (Canetti, 1960/2006). Why is it that these images are not being celebrated unambiguously as evidence of human ingenuity? How are they not symbols for the blessing of miraculous increase as Elias Canetti describes it in his analysis of the symbolism of accumulation in Crowds and Power: [t]he origin of the wheat in the heap of seed is as important and as significant as the heap of grain it ultimately becomes. Whether it yields only seven or a hundredfold, the heaps in which it is stored are significantly greater than the heaps with which it began. By growing and sticking together it has increased itself, and this increase is its blessing. (Canetti, 1960/2006, p. 99) Why should images of plenty indicate that there is something wrong in the world? The combination of concern for the dispossessed farmer with anxiety about the sustainability of the earth’s resources has become a much-repeated feature of contemporary documentary films about the negative effects on the environment of the globalization of food markets. In the case of food, the development of environmental documentaries focussing on agriculture has been particularly resonant because the image of its production has been largely hidden or obscured in recent decades primarily because the urban worker who consumes the product is not the producer and is easily seduced by advertising into placing the production of food into a different category from the production of other goods (Lien and Nerlich, 2004). The workers who produce the food are few and isolated and either part of a dying world or of an increasingly secretive one that has come to feel guilty about its methods. This is not to say that the development of intensive farming, particularly factory farming of animals, has not provoked protest. In particular The Animals Film by Victor Schonfield and Myriam Alaux (1981), broadcast on the United Kingdom’s newly created Channel 4, demonstrated the ways in which the industry’s treatment of animals could become a political problem for agribusiness. There is a significant difference, however, between Wagenhofer’s and Geyrhalter’s images of agribusiness and the portrayal of animal abuse in The Animals Film. The Austrian films are not aiming to reveal examples of illegal practices or even bad practice. They are about the norm or even about the highest quality, certainly the most highly advanced forms of technological progress in agribusiness.

Figures 5abc:  Erwin Wagenhofer’s WE FEED THE WORLD (2005) changes the iconography of food production in the 21st century. DVD Captures. 58

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Wagenhofer’s film is an attempt to capture a worldwide system of food production to show the interconnections that lead to apparently absurd and inhuman juxtapositions. In some cases the argument is straightforward – the fish caught by traditional French fishermen on small boats is better quality than the fish caught by the larger trawlers that fish deeper and spend longer at sea. The traditional fishing methods are also better for the environment. In other cases the argument is more complex. The construction of 25,000  hectares of greenhouses in Almeria has led to the economic transformation of the region. Every year every European citizen eats on average 10 kg tomatoes transported by lorry from the region every day. On the other hand the government subsidies, the diversion of water for irrigation, the concentration of production have also led to the production of an excess that can be sold beyond Europe. This is exported to North Africa and sold off at cheap prices undermining local farmers who are forced out of business and to migrate to Europe. WE FEED THE WORLD uses a slogan from Pioneer, one of the companies involved in introducing hybrid and genetically modified seeds to Rumania, for its own title. A representative from the company explains how the farmers were originally trapped into using the seed that can produce only one crop by government subsidies. In his opinion the attractive visual form of the hybrid aubergine is at the cost of the quality of the taste and indeed it is clear that the traditionally grown version does not look like the attractive supermarket aubergine. Clearly the use of the slogan can be interpreted as irony – Ziegler argues that the central threat posed by genetically modified seed is not the threat to nature but to the farmers who are locked into paying annually for seed that is patented by companies such as Pioneer. This works as long as their crops give high yields and their produce sells but if anything in the system should fail – the weather, the market – the farmer is immediately put into debt and faces losing not only the income from the land but also the land itself. Wagenhofer is keen, however, not to be making a film that is only a critique of capitalism. He ends the book to the film by asserting that the title is not only meant negatively, but also positively. We have to learn to take on the responsibility for ourselves and for the consequences of our actions. [...] And this is the positive message – we can do it. We have to eat, we have to shop and therefore we can decide what we want. This system is not God-given, nor is it a consequence of nature, it was made by human beings and so we can also change it. And for this reason the book and the film are called ‘We feed the world’ and not ‘They feed the world’.4 (Wagenhofer and Annas, 2006, p. 179) The penultimate section of Wagenhofer’s film on food production focusses on poultry, in particular on the eight-week lifecycle of the intensively farmed chickens in Austria that consume imported soya from Brazil. The process is highly organized with every one of the 59

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57,600 eggs stamped to show its origin, placed in a stainless steel hatchery at 32°C (imitating nature, automatically turned once every hour). The eggs in crates become little yellow chicks in crates that are scooped up by workers onto a conveyor belt where they continually seek to reorient themselves as they move along the system – living commodities. They fall off the end of one conveyor belt onto the next, often seeming to turn themselves so that they fall backwards feet down. Some get their wings slightly caught in the edge. The camera position moves to show that they land on a steeply sloping triangle of metal that directs their controlled fall onto the next surface. This then conveys them up a slope, presumably towards another fall. The animals’ attempts to keep themselves balanced anthropomorphizes this sequence of shots that otherwise might be showing the process of vegetables or sausages along a system. As when watching riders on a rollercoaster it is difficult not to identify with the physical position and attempt to right oneself mentally along with the chicks. (See figure 5c. Much has been written about mirror neurones in the context of audiences watching sport. It would be interesting to see whether images of animal movements provoke the same response.) As the process is filmed a worker talks about the grass-roots workers in the industry and the sense of being misunderstood by the general public: The consumer has no idea how it works, how it is done. We work with living goods. They have to be born, to be raised and to be slaughtered. And in this production cycle of eight weeks in total this or that can happen. There’s no understanding of that anymore. People are getting more cut off from the real world, more brutal and hard-hearted. They think ‘if I want it like that, it has to be like that’. Why? At the top there are no people who have worked their way up from the bottom. I’ve got nothing against people with university degrees but they are people who have gone to school and studied. They are out of university and they have a masters in this or a doctorate in that but they don’t actually have any concept of the grass roots, of what it is all based on. They see agriculture like most people do, as it is shown in advertising or was portrayed in earlier times without any connection with reality. The market is only interested in the price. Taste is not a criterion. (WE FEED THE WORLD, 2005) As the worker has been speaking the whole screen has been filled up with peeping chicks laid onto the floor of a vast warehouse. A technician explains how the air, heat and water are controlled by computer, how in order to gain any profit mass production has become essential. The slaughter process is shown taking place at night in order not to stress the animals. Fifty thousand hens are slaughtered each night. It is explained but not shown that the animals are first stunned by having their heads dipped in electrified water. They are slaughtered when their throats are cut by a rotating blade. The chickens are shown hanging stunned and then slaughtered. They are then turned into packaged meat by various machines that remove feathers, heads, entrails, and claws. There are machines to extract legs, wings, breasts, for fast food outlets. At the same time the specialist explains that globalization has become a threat to this enterprise with competition from Asia and South America. The 60

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threat derives not from the lack of efficiency but from the fact that the population eats the cheaper parts of meat leaving the more expensive parts to export to Europe. The final part of Wagenhofer’s film is dedicated to an interview with Peter Brabeck, managing director of Nestlé, who characteristically defends intensive farming, attacks organic farming, points out the lack of evidence that genetically modified food is medically harmful and argues that the idea of a public right to water is an extreme view. Water is a type of grocery like any other with a market value. A market value is helpful in order to calculate what is needed to provide it where it is scarce. The argument that it is the responsibility of the managing director to keep the profits of his company safe strikes a chord in a world in which the collapse of such companies has cost many their savings and pensions. However, the inability to see a broader picture beyond the commodity is demonstrated as a characteristic of the MD in many an anti-capitalist film – Debord wrote in 1987 about the refusal of a French chemicals subsidiary to ban CFCs on the basis of economics announcing: ‘It is highly dangerous to base an industrial strategy on environmental imperatives’ (Debord, 1988/1991, p. 10). WE FEED THE WORLD takes its title from the mission statement of an agricultural seed and pesticide company, while Our Daily Bread uses a religious source in the Christian prayer. These two titles are characteristic for the difference in the concerns that the films appear to have with regard to modern food production. Wagenhofer’s is a political film about the economics and politics of food production and distribution. Geyrhalter’s film appears to be a philosophical reflection on the relationship between mass society and mass food production. The organization of quantity is a central theme in Geyrhalter’s film that demonstrates the process that first isolates each individual agricultural commodity and then gathers it up into a mass. The first shot is a row of carcasses, around thirty-two hanging within the frame to the left and right. The camera dollies down the centre of the aisle behind a man who is spraying the floor with a power-hose. By the end of the shot we have seen some hundred and fifty carcasses and a very thoroughly cleaned floor. In the next sequence the camera is still as a small electrically powered train piled with around a thousand large boxes of tomatoes moves past its position between rows of plants. The subject moves on to cows, two to a stall, pigs, fifteen in shot being transported in a lorry, chicks hatched from eggs stored in crates stacked in steel hatcheries. The chickens are again perhaps the most spectacular of the living produce presented. Their progress from orange egg crates to green chick crates, along conveyor belts into the chicken shed is a surreal image of the journey through modern life: fast, brutal, full of accident and apparently meaningless. The first shot of the chicken shed is so vast that the number cannot be fathomed. All machines, buildings, forms of packaging and transport are designed to deal with quantity at speed – a process that can be seen in museums showing farming practices as far back as the sixteenth century. The ingenuity and inventiveness displayed is palpable – channels of water to transport apples along without bruising them until they are carefully packed into moulded boxes. The self-propelled combine harvester, a celebrated development 61

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in 1950s Europe, increased in size and sophistication to deal with vast fields of grain. A system to package cabbages in the field explains what is behind the claim ‘packed at source’. These two Austrian documentary films bring this contemporary, sometimes startling world of agriculture into the public sphere as a normal and necessary part of the global economy. Showing the mass production of food can lead in two possible directions. Perhaps the images will be absorbed into the society of the spectacle and accepted as part of the cycle of production and consumption.5 As part of documentary films the images have already become commodities after all. Or they will ‘install truth in the world’ as Guy Debord put it (paragraph 221) and help in ‘the search for critical truth about the spectacle’ (paragraph 220) (Debord, 1987). A number of films have attempted to explore the alternatives to the mass production of food for urban populations as part of the organic and local food movement. Current debates about agricultural food production are closely linked to environmental debates about land management but documentary films about contemporary farming vary in the extent to which they allow these debates to enter into the film and thus in the extent to which they can be seen as environmental documentaries. This bears an interesting parallel with nature documentaries that typically have excluded environmental issues, and those that have included them or focussed on them have become re-categorized as environmental films. This ambiguity hovers around several films about the changes in traditional farming environments that can be seen either as documentary portrayals of particular communities, as ethnographic studies or as comments on the far-reaching social and economic effects of globalized mass food production. In a study entitled ‘Risky Science and Savour-faire: Peasant Expertise in the French Debate over Genetically Modified Crops’ Chaia Heller (Heller, 2004) drew attention to the shift in media discourse on genetically modified food away from a reliance on official expertise based in governmental and scientific institutions and towards a focus on local expertise. She analyses the reframing of the debate, from health and risk to quality of everyday life, as the outcome of a concerted campaign by locally based French agricultural organizations. Documentary film has been a significant part of a general tendency in public discourse towards the inclusion of local opinion not only as a means to depict the realities of individual lives but also to demonstrate the articulate voice of people involved in all aspects of the economy. Contested rural space Pilz’s study of change in rural Europe at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s can thus be seen as part of a continuum in which documentary has come to realize its role in the articulation of what, in cultural studies, has come to be known as ‘contested space’. In the course of the decade, films such as Bertram Verhaag’s Der Agrar-Rebell: Permakultur in den Salzburger Alpen/The Agrarian Rebel: Permaculture in the Salzburg Alps (2000) and Kai Krüger and Bertram Verhaag’s Tote Ernte: Der Krief um’s Saatgut/Dead Harvest: the Battle for the Seed (2000) have focussed on eccentric agricultural ‘rebels’ fighting to convey the issues around regulated land use and seed manipulation. Volker Koepp’s Leben auf dem 62

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Lande: Uckermark/Living on the Land: Uckermark (2002) documents the depopulation of rural areas in the former German Democratic Republic in the decade after reunification. With Jonathan Nossiter’s film Mondovino (2004) filmed in Argentina, France, Italy and the United States a whole new approach using digital cameras opened up possibilities for documentary film-makers to become more mobile and self-sufficient. Mondovino focusses on the transformation of the wine industry in Europe brought about by the development of new techniques in the production of new-world wines in the United States, Canada and Australia. This road-movie across France, South America, North America and Italy shows the effects of a culture clash as the traditional methods of French vintners are challenged by the market success of the new wines. Some move over to the new methods but others perceive a loss of values in the emphasis on a small number of grapes and the homogenization of taste. The concept of ‘terroir’, referring to the unique relationship between the taste of the wine and the soil where the grape is grown, comes to represent an almighty battle between large corporate producers and small family-run concerns, both of which claim a morally superior relationship with ‘the people’. As with Agnes Varda’s Gleaners, which will be discussed in the final chapter, Nossiter’s film moves by car from vineyard to vineyard, from winegrower to winegrower, accumulating an account from the grass roots that sets out the conflicts in several variations: new versus old, democrat versus aristocrat, corporation versus little guy, aristocrat and corporation in league against nature. Mostly, however, the representation of family farming is of a struggle to cope with the effects of greater mass production and falling prices right up to the end of the decade when the introduction of crops for biofuels has the effect of reducing supply and raising prices. The politics of agriculture get to a point where even the reticent world of the struggling UK farmer opens up to the film-maker in Molly Dineen’s television documentary The Lie of the Land (2007) after she has witnessed a march on the city in which farmers in a display of untypical unity protested the effects of waves of culling to control disease and new government and EU legislation on the viability of their livelihoods. An inevitable part of the representation of farming communities is a focus on the farm buildings and on the land as well as the people themselves setting up a dialogue between the

Figures 6abc:  Molly Dineen explores the context for UK farmers protesting at the changing economic and political conditions for farming after a series of health scares, changes to hunting laws, and dropping commodity prices for basic foodstuffs. DVD captures from The Lie of the Land (2008). 63

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point of view of the visiting film-maker and the subject. In the following analysis of three films, one French, one Welsh and one US American, this dialogue becomes the basis for a contemplative eco-documentary that ponders the effects of modernization and change on traditional farming communities. Edward Burtynsky’s photographs and Jennifer Baichwal’s film Manufactured Landscapes explore the impact of the industrialization of China at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. As with Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s film Our Daily Bread, focussing on the latest forms of agricultural production, the contemplation of the landscape creates a sense of cognitive dissonance through the conflict set up between the benefits of modern industry and the clearly visible effects on landscapes and working practices. As such these two films fascinate both through spectacle and the need to revise beliefs about the resilience of the natural world to withstand the impacts of human civilization. The contemplation of rural landscapes: Modern Life, Sleep Furiously and Sweetgrass In the three films to be discussed the rural landscape remains intact but what is observed is the erosion of the social fabric that sustains rural life demonstrating the changing nature of the relationship between lifestyle and values. What these films offer is landscape shots of great beauty, framed to be consonant with the history of landscape painting and photography coupled with genre painting; and portraits of the people who inhabit the landscape, are part of it and suffer with and from it. Where these landscapes become dissonant is in the people themselves who emerge as the subjects of the struggle for modernization, being in themselves the social argument both for modernization and for the preservation of the past. In his study ‘Between setting and landscape in cinema’ (Lefebvre, 2006), Martin Lefebvre writes of the elusive nature of landscape in narrative film and ‘event-based documentary’. He argues that landscape and narrative are opposed because the spectator has to watch the film in the separate modes of spectacle and narrative in order to understand them. When watching in narrative mode the environment is understood as the setting for events taking

Figures 7abc:  Elegiac contemplation of hill farming in (a) France (Depardon’s La vie modern 2008, DVD capture), (b) Wales (Koppel’s Sleep Furiously, 2007, courtesy of Gideon Koppel) and (c) the US (CastaingTaylor and Barbash’s Sweetgrass, 2009, DVD capture). 64

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place. Landscapes exist in narrative films and ‘event-based documentary film’ only to the extent that the narrative is interrupted to allow contemplation: In the act of watching films, these two modes likely come into play at different moments. Thus spectators watch the film at some points in the narrative mode and at others in the spectacular mode, allowing them both to follow the story and, whenever necessary, to contemplate the filmic spectacle. It is necessary, however, to emphasize that one cannot watch the same filmic passage through both modes at the exact same time, i.e., in a way that employs both modes absolutely simultaneously. This is why it can be said that the spectacle halts the progression of narrative for the spectator. (Lefebvre, 2006, p. 29) Lefebvre’s study is useful for an understanding of the ways in which documentaries that represent rural communities coordinate their portraits of the landscape as both the setting for lives as they are lived and as landscapes that are beheld by the film-maker, subject and spectator in different ways. It also has explanatory value in that it describes the liberating effect of contemplation within a narrative framework: The interruption of the narrative by contemplation has the effect of isolating the object of the gaze, of momentarily freeing it from its narrative function. Said differently, the contemplation of filmic spectacle depends on an ‘autonomising’ gaze. It is this gaze which enables the notion of filmic landscape in narrative fiction (and event-based documentary) film; it makes possible the transition from setting to landscape. The contemplation of the setting frees it briefly from its narrative function (but perhaps, in some cases, only for the length of a thought); for one instant, the natural, outdoor setting for the action is considered in its own right, as a landscape. (Lefebvre, 2006, p. 29) At the beginning of Raymond Depardon’s film Modern Life (2008), the award-winning final of a trilogy of films, the Profils paysans beginning with L’approche/The Approach in 2001, going on to Le quotidian/The Everyday in 2005 and finally La vie moderne/Modern Life, the screen is filled with a tracking shot taken from the top of a car driving along a narrow unmarked road through grassy mountainous terrain. (see figure 7a.) After a period in which the only sound is of wind and faintly of the car, a brief extract from Fauré’s Elégie op. 24 is played by Roland Pidoux on the cello and Jean-Claude Pennetier on the piano. Raymond Depardon, speaking in voice-over, explains what the image means: First come these roads. At the end of the roads there are the farms. I’ve come back to these farms, glad to be revisiting these men, because with time, I’ve won their trust. I’m at Le Villaret, by the Pont-de-Montvert, in the Cévennes, at the Privat’s family farm. 65

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In considering what it is that causes the viewer to look on a cinematic setting as a landscape Lefebvre distinguishes between ‘intentional landscapes’ and ‘spectator’s landscapes’ (Lefebvre, 2006, pp. 30‒31). The ‘intentional’ landscape is akin to the painting in which ‘the presence of a character enraptured by the natural space offered to their gaze can lead the spectator to contemplate the same space as an autonomous landscape’ (Lefebvre, 2006, p. 33). It is useful to discuss this distinction in relation to this opening sequence in which the landscape is viewed as a moving image on screen and perceived with music and words. The landscape that is on screen at the beginning of this film before the music is heard is perhaps a ‘spectator’s landscape’ as it comes before the story explicitly begins and the viewer simply looks to see what is there. The music adds an elegiac tone to the landscape and perhaps turns it already into an ‘intentional landscape’, one seen through the eyes of the film-maker travelling through the landscape and seeing it in elegiac terms. At the same time Lefebvre’s analysis draws attention to the way in which the voice-over confirms seeing it through the presence of the narrator Raymond Depardon who knows the roads and their connection to the farms and drives in the expectation of renewing his acquaintance with his subjects, finally turning the landscape into the setting for the film. Lefebvre’s analysis of this process is influenced by the romantic representation of nature, with the ‘intentional landscape’ akin to the framed view of Caspar David Friedrich’s painting of 1818 Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer/Wanderer above the Sea of Fog in which a young man looks down onto a mountainous landscape from a rocky outcrop. In Depardon’s film, the film-maker/wanderer is represented by the sounds of the car and the movement of the frame, constantly reframing the landscape as a place through which he too is wandering. As such the film-maker and photographer is part of a long tradition of the stylization of the landscape, as Lefebvre indicates through his discussion of Christopher Wood’s seminal work on the history of landscape painting, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origin of Landscape Painting (Wood, 1993): Wood’s argument asks us to conceive of ‘early’ landscape as a pictorial practice whose work consists of making style visible, which is to say of making visible that which is by definition detached and relatively autonomous from what is figuratively depicted. As a result, its work is also to inscribe the presence of the artist within the artwork’s ‘signifying material’. (Lefebvre, 2006, p. 36) Lefebvre then goes on to consider changes in the conceptualization of land in Renaissance Europe. Here he discusses the geographer Denis Cosgrove’s thesis in his book Social formation and symbolic landscape in which he writes: ‘the social functioning of the “idea” of landscape consisted of uniting – even if unstably – two opposed conceptions of the natural world: a “natural” pre-capitalist tie to the land, and an “alienated” capitalist relationship to it’ (Cosgrove, 1998, p. 64). Cosgrove goes on: The idea of landscape holds both types of relationship in an unstable unity, forever threatening to lapse into either the unreflective subjectivism of the insider where the 66

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feeling for the land is incommunicable through the artificial language of art; or the objectification of land as property pure and simple, the outsider’s view, where alienation is complete and a statistical weighting can be placed upon the ‘landscape value’ of a piece of land which can be entered into a cost/benefit analysis against the value that the land might have as an industrial site. The origin of the landscape idea in the West and its artistic expressions have served in part to promote ideologically an acceptance of the property relationship while sustaining the image of an unalienated one, of land as use. Cosgrove’s analysis of the interplay between subjectivism and objectivism in the idea of landscape plays out as Depardon’s car progresses towards its first destination and Depardon’s account of it becomes more and more a matter of concrete naming: ‘It’s 9:30, it’s summer, it’s the month of July.’ Then as the car slows Marcel Privat is introduced as a character in the film. It is tempting to see Privat as representing the unalienated subject concerned with the land as an agricultural worker or ‘paysan’, his connection to the region emphasized by his ability to speak the local language Occitan, at least to his dog. ‘As he does every evening, Marcel Privat brings in his herd with the help of his dog Mirette, who only understands Occitan’ (La vie moderne, 2008). On the other hand for Privat the land does represent his livelihood, his goats, his business, so then perhaps Depardon’s gaze is the unalienated one, except that he, as a film-maker, is turning that view into a film, which is his livelihood. As Bruno Latour has argued in We Have Never Been Modern (1991/1993) the purity of these two poles of subject and object is artificial even though it is difficult to think in different ways about the agencies in these scenes. At this stage the car comes to a stop and in the distance Marcel Privat, the dog and the goats move down a steep grassy slope towards the road. The car approaches cautiously as Marcel shouts at the dog that has run towards the car. Marcel is introduced by the voice-over narration that has become a narrator’s voice, bringing in the characters of a novella with the perspective of the storyteller who knows how it has come to this point and how it will all end: ‘Marcel is 88. He is the eldest of the family. It is he who takes care of the ewes, lambs and sheep. He takes them out twice a day. He has spent his life following his sheep in the mountains.’ The story continues with an introduction of Alain and Cécile Rouvière whose spontaneous dialogue about their pose in front of the camera and Cécile’s high-heeled shoes interplays with the formal nature of the voice-over. Raymond is introduced as his hat blows off his head in the wind and the sense is created that we will now move from ‘once upon a time’ to the present. This introduction follows a nineteenth-century narrative style and as such fits the opening analysis of the landscape, setting and characters offered by Lefebvre. But at this stage it moves into interviews in which the subjects speak directly to camera about themselves. The documentary form begins to break down the carefully created romantic novella to become an analysis of the contemporary situation for land management in the region. Sarah Cooper has analysed Depardon’s methods for approaching his subjects both in her book Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Cooper, 2006) and in an article 67

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focussing on French documentaries made towards the end of the decade ‘Looking back, looking onwards: selflessness, ethics, and French documentary’ (Cooper, 2010). Her study reflects the reception of the film that was seen as a partial break from Depardon’s earlier style in the first two parts of the trilogy being shot in 35 mm and using inserts of classical music making it a more ‘cinematic’ film than the previous two (Méranger, 2008). It also reflects the view that the films are about Depardon’s own life, having been brought up on a farm in Burgundy where he began to take photographs, and his decision to leave to photograph the world (Mandelbaum, 2008). Cooper’s analysis is occupied with the question of distance but in this case not in relation to the land but in the relationships between the film-maker and the human subjects. La vie moderne is striking for the way in which the interview subjects are framed and edited, which causes some discomfort for some viewers. Depardon himself has sought to explain his decisions as a consequence of his own personal investment in the subject, and his attempts to gain the right distance, which will signify respect. In interview he has said that the film is ‘very literary’, that it is concerned with ‘respect’ for the subject and is a ‘melange’ of different elements (Depardon, 2008). Sarah Cooper’s study of the film picks up in particular Depardon’s experiments with camera distance. Her concern is with the study of correspondences between ethical distance as expressed in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the issue of physical distance in documentary film-making. This offers a variation on the theme of distance discussed above in which the figure looking out over the landscape hovers between belonging to and ownership of place. Here Cooper is concerned not with belonging to the landscape but with belonging to the community, with ‘distance and difference from the filmed subjects (within the diegetic space, between film-maker and subjects, and between viewer and film)’ (Cooper, 2006, p. 2). This distance is, however, as with the relationship to landscape, ‘in the name of proximity between the varied experience of self and other as anchored in their social-historical specificity in the films considered’ (Cooper, 2006, p. 2). The idea of ethical proximity is derived from Cooper’s reading of Emmanuel Levinas and becomes a means to interrogate in particular the role of the presence or absence of the filmmaker within the diegesis of the film (Cooper, 2006, p. 5). Important for her appreciation of the achievement of Depardon’s technique is the idea that his relatively formal and distanced framing of his subjects combined with his own presence in the film is an acknowledgement of ‘the radical irreducibility of alterity to the self-same’. Depardon, in effect, films his subjects as other in the same way that the landscape is other and allows them to ‘not only escape the control of the film-maker who fashions them but also the spectator’ (Cooper, 2006, p. 6). This analysis captures the seriousness of the sometimes humorous ways in which the subjects appear not to cooperate in front of the camera, and yet it also covers the ways in which they attempt to bridge the gap between themselves and the film-maker and hence between themselves and the broader community. Understood as responses to the questions of economic, social and environmental change, these acts of expression are what move the film beyond romantic alienation and towards a twenty-first-century investigation into the 68

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changing and disputed values of a rural community in a broader global context. Thus, while Cooper is concerned with the insertion of Depardon’s own autobiography into the film, interpreting it as ‘a means for him to reconnect with his past, and to gain a sense of peace and closure’ (Cooper, 2010, p. 63), it is also a film that documents the struggle of its subjects to live with the past while orientating themselves towards the future. Cooper points out that ‘Depardon was one of two sons born to farmers in Villefranchesur-Saône, and he chose a career that involved travelling the globe rather than participating in ensuring the survival of the family farm’ (Cooper, 2010, p. 63). She thus sees the ambivalence of his film-making as guilt that ‘he is attempting to lay to rest through filming the lives of others.’ Just as the photographer Burtynsky sees himself implicated in the silver mine and the hulks of wrecked and reclaimed oil tankers, so too the photographer and film-maker Depardon is implicated in the dying communities of the Massif Central. And similarly the act of photographing is a means to contemplate fully the meaning of that sense of implication. In the film then, Depardon’s abandonment of the rural hamlet for the life of the wandering photographer/film-maker is shown in reverse in the marriage between Cécile and Alain who have to work not only on the economic viability of the farm but also on the management of the elderly uncles whose work and property they are inheriting. A significant aspect of this film, which demonstrates Depardon’s living concern with the future, is the way in which it brings out the variability of the film subjects’ preference in terms of articulating themselves. Cécile eloquently verbalizes her understanding of her role in helping Alain to cope with his life and responsibilities. Her teenage daughter Camille Quenehen, who is also committed to the farm, displays the young person’s typical reluctance to articulate any thoughts or feelings particularly about ‘the uncles’ in words, but she does use her shoulders and face to express the absolute impossibility of putting her experiences into words in a way that would not upset the balance of power yet further. The uncles demonstrate a magnificent capacity to use standard French, half statements, expressions of tolerance, agreements not to disagree, strategic expressions of personal helplessness, Occitan, silence, deafness, gesture and sheer presence to communicate the gravity of a long life well lived as well as an awareness of significant changes in values and the balance of power. Cooper’s argument implies that newness, or the way in which ‘documentary may resist the reflective mechanism that would refer one back to oneself or one’s own world’ can be incorporated into the belief system of the spectator only if the documentary is understood as offering something different, something other and that the manipulation of physical distance is a means towards resisting the tendency of interpretive acts to understand in terms of what is already known or universal. Distance is not the only mechanism used. Framing and shot duration are also means that permit the spectator to contemplate the image beyond the immediate comparison with the already known. Cooper is resisting an understanding of cinema as a process of identification and finds in the work of Levinas a means to model documentary cinema in particular as a means to test and go beyond the experience and beliefs of the audience. 69

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Her emphasis on the other can also be understood in terms of a communicative model in which the spectator understands the film-maker as presenting the material for contemplation rather than for identification or for rejection; in other words the material is not to be judged but to be pondered, and the parrying techniques are not dissimilar to the strategies of the uncles in avoiding categorical conflict except where it is unavoidable. Cooper adds to the contemplative response analysis of the way in which the ethics of the relationship between film-maker and the filmed are altered by a film style that encourages an acknowledgement of an unresolved distance between film-maker and subject and between spectator and film. Towards the end of her analysis she writes that this ‘more expansive view of an ethical approach to documentary filming […] opens out to the other creatures with which we share the planet, in addition to the geography of the globe itself – its cities, its rural areas and its coastlines’ (Cooper, 2010, p. 67). Despite the benefits of such an analysis, however, the film also does what many contemporary documentaries about agricultural workers are doing in also encouraging audiences to recognize their own role not only in depopulating the countryside themselves but also in making it difficult for those who wish to commit themselves to it. Depardon’s history is probably rather close to that of many citizens worldwide who can trace family histories back to the land. It is with this thought that the film begins to become relevant as a reflection on the contemporary world and the struggle to live in ways that are sustainable. As Depardon describes it, it is a mélange, a montage of scenes that subtly bring out the issues as part of the day-to-day fabric of life. One aspect of the film relates again to the varying ways in which its cast articulate their views. The shift in musical accompaniment of the landscape from Fauré’s elegy to the pavane for orchestra and flute signals a move from a sense of a passing era to a focus on the various strategies adopted by the different families and individuals to this slow dance of life. There is a clear contrast between those who invest in words to express experiences and dreams and those who don’t, offering an analysis of the social functioning of language in the community that reflects the region and research into language change. Occitan, a language of the region descending from spoken Latin, is categorized by the online UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as ‘severely endangered’, spoken only by elderly members of the community and not passed down the generations (Moseley, 1995–2010). The uncles are the only ones in the film who use it partly to exclude the film-makers from their exchanges. Raymond’s question about whether they would have preferred to be taken to task by Cécile in Occitan rather than in French elicits the story of her misdemeanours and the unresolved issues over ownership. Religion is not a significant theme in the film, but the protestant heritage of the region is paradoxically brought out in an interview with Paul Argaud, who blocks off the entrance to his farm with barbed wire and who has refused the film-maker entry to his kitchen for nearly twenty years, but now allows him to record him watching a Roman Catholic Mass ‘pour les obsequies de l’Abbé Pierre célébrée en l’église Notre Dame de Paris’ (which dates the visit to 26 January 2008) even though, as is typical for the region and for speakers of Occitan, he is himself baptized a protestant and not a believer. 70

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The major theme that comes through this study is that of economic change and consequent social change. This is a complex theme with many facets. Talking to the couple Germaine and Marcel Challaye about their wedding and about the fact that they are both born and brought up locally, Depardon asks about the saying ‘get married where you are from’. This conversation indirectly brings in the question about the necessity with a falling population of looking outside the region for marriage partners and the marriage between Alain and Cécile takes on greater resonance along with the question of how outsiders are accepted into a tight-knit community. Although the couple have four children, some living locally, none of them wishes to continue farming. Thus the family continuity needs to be inevitably broken if farming is to continue. The couple discuss the economic viability of the farm and the development of holiday homes. Depardon contrasts this in a voice-over about the previous generation where eight children grew up on the same farm run by Germaine’s parents. The farm used to produce milk but this is no longer required. Depardon juxtaposes this conversation with an interview with the Amandine and Michel Valla, a young couple with a baby and a toddler, who are attempting to set up a goat farm but failing to find sufficient capital and land. Michel is a farmer’s son but ‘for now he has no farm’. This is compared with the situation of Marcelle Brès, the last inhabitant of a hamlet, who has lent her farm to a young couple, Jean-François Pantel and Nathalie Deleuze. With her death the couple continue to farm the land but build their own house while the old one remains shut up. Their young son wants to be a farmer like his Dad but his parents tell him in future some types of farmers will not be considered useful any more. In this way the themes mount up through a process of moving systematically between the landscape as a contemplative object beyond the car window to the land as the setting for the people whose lives are lived in it. Daniel Jean Roy speaks of his preference for his job in a local inn to the responsibility of the hard and probably lonely work on the family farm, while Amandine Valla speaks of the anguish of giving up her plans to build up a herd of goats because of a lack of capital to mend a barn. Meanwhile the aging Marcel Privat lies in the long grass in the wind as the goats’ bells tinkle all around him, and his life ‘behind his goats’ introduced at the outset of the film, seen as an aspiration for the current generation, seems almost the utopian bucolic scene but for the acknowledgement of the struggle of a gradual withdrawal from life as his hearing, sight and strength begin visibly to fail. ‘C’est la fin’, ‘it is the end’, he says spontaneously, ‘why do you say it is the end?’ insists Depardon, ‘because I cannot tend them anymore. There’s nobody any more to mind them. We are going to sell them’ (La vie moderne, 2008). In a monologue to the camera Marcel’s brother Raymond Privat argues that it is necessary to be passionate about hill farming to survive: I’ve said it often, in our job as farmers in steep areas, liking your job isn’t enough, it takes passion! All that matters is the herd, the cows, the sheep … We can’t plant vines or sow wheat. We just have our herds. And herds need a lot of fodder. If you have barns you can store it. Now we can only go where it is flatter. The rest is too overrun by scrub. (La vie moderne, 2008) 71

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Although he says he is ‘at the end of his tether’, this is followed by a communal scene in which the hay is gathered in, with Alain and Camille on the tractor. The next generation and the following generation are in effect in place, with women a significant factor as we see throughout the film. Depardon’s respect for the older generation as well as the reticence of the younger generations allows their voice space as it is disappearing, but it is also clear to the attentive that this landscape continues to have a strong attraction as the setting for a ‘passionate’ way of life. The film as a whole can thus be read as the gradual opening up of the community to outside influence, to wider debates about the role of the farmer and creative thinking about transferring farming from one generation to the next while respecting history. Its interview strategy is a mirror of a traditional respect for the elder, and yet while it rigorously maintains its appreciation for the achievements of the older generation, it does not shy away from demonstrating the need for an educated, articulate and open-minded farming community, namely a modern one. It is much commented on that as the car drives away the camera looks back on a receding landscape, a gesture that reminds me of many a holiday departure from the mountains. Here again we have the ‘intentional landscape’ of Depardon who returns to the style of the narrator of a novella telling us what we are about to see, how we should see it and assuring us that the story will be resumed: This evening is the loveliest moment of the loveliest season. It’s 6pm, in the autumn. You’ll see Raymond on the pass clinging to his passion for doing better. He knows I’ll be coming back here and that I’ll speak out my love of farmers and their land. Eased, I’ll also revisit the high-cold plateaus and the deep valleys of the mountains. Tonight I’m filming this light that is like no other, and I’m not about to forget it. (La vie moderne, 2008) The elegy returns and the film is dedicated to two members of the older generation who have died, Marcelle Brès and Luis Brès, whose sigh of contentment, as he sits on a grassy slope next to a grazing goat and looks across out of shot, somehow manages to cut across the melancholy of Fauré’s elegy. Gideon Koppel’s Sleep Furiously (2007) about the changing identity of a Welsh rural community comes close to my own consciousness of a far-off family history of farming. Given a general release in 2008 after gaining critical acclaim at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the project had begun as a black and white series of scenes following a library van on its journey from house to house in a remote part of mid-Wales in the United Kingdom. The main village portrayed in the film is Trefeurig, although it is a film that is more about the region Ceredigion, whose name itself expresses a historical struggle to maintain its identity since medieval times strangely re-enacted in the twentieth century through a series of Local Government Acts. As a child I knew it as one of the counties of the overall administrative area of Dyfed, created by the Local Government Act (1972), made up of Pembrokeshire, 72

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Carmarthernshire and Cardiganshire. While the first two counties were made up of smaller historical areas joined together, Cardiganshire was the English name for an area known in Welsh as Ceredigion, named after a fifth-century king, Ceredig ap Cunedda. In 1994 the Local Government Act (1994) removed the unpopular administrative area Dyfed (named after an overarching medieval principality, Deheubarth, which itself had created an unrelenting series of power struggles) leaving the three counties. The day after Cardiganshire was thus created it changed its name back to Ceredigion. As in Depardon’s Modern Life the film begins with a narrow winding road laid across a windswept area of open grassland cropped by grazing animals. Unlike in Depardon’s film, the frame is still and movement is created in this scene by a town crier dressed in medieval costume who walks along the road towards the camera ringing his bell accompanied by two small dogs. The screen is then filled with monochromes of red, yellow and grey-green until the image blends into a primary school art class taught in English. The children are shown singing a prayer in Welsh before they eat. The scene cuts to a sequence in which a series of ingenious farm machines roll and wrap bales of straw. The camera moves in on the black plastic as it spins until the gleaming patterns it makes fill the screen. Two women discuss their health in Welsh and carry out some tasks in the church. The screen is then filled with the lines of hay on the side of a hillside as they are scooped up by the farm machines. We return to a primary school music lesson, now taught in Welsh. The jazz piano, accompanied by the children on percussion, overlaps with further shots of the hay being gathered in. Gideon Koppel, like Depardon, is a photographer as well as a film-maker, and his cinematography emphasizes the position of the photographer’s eye, seeking to frame the scene to bring out its pattern, its symmetry and its narrative potential. Each shot is treated as a ‘money shot’, and there are no coincidental shots to bridge between scenes, so that the film becomes like an album of photographs that the viewer must link together into a portrait of the community. In Lefebvre’s terms these are intended landscapes, and as with the analysis of Depardon’s film they can be seen in terms of Koppel’s own personal history of engagement with this community, this setting and this landscape, but unlike Depardon’s study, this portrait is not of a substitute family and community but of a community into which his parents were integrated in later life as his father had established himself as an artist. Koppel himself writes in the production notes published as part of the press material that he grew up in Liverpool so the film is not so much about his childhood in this place but about childhood itself and the relationship between childhood and learning (Koppel, 2008).6 In particular it is about learning to create out of personal experience, a difficult thing to achieve but something Koppel grew up with in the form of his artist parents. Although they are not named in the film, Peter Bradshaw, along with other reviewers, refers to Gideon Koppel’s German-Jewish parentage. His grandfather, Joachim Koppel, fled Czechoslovakia with his 19-year-old son, Heinz Koppel, in 1938. His grandmother, crippled with arthritis, remained in Czechoslovakia and was murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp. While his grandfather, Joachim, did factory work in Pontypridd, his father Heinz continued to study art, and after many years producing work influenced by 73

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German Expressionism and Surrealism as well as teaching art, he joined with other Welsh artists developing a modern idiom in their representation of Welsh themes forming the 56 Group Wales. Heinz Koppel died in 1980 and his son’s film has been read as an expression of a father/ son relationship. Although he did achieve some success during his lifetime in teaching and in exhibiting his work, typically caught as a migrant artist between cultures, Heinz Koppel’s work is only recently becoming known both in Germany and in Wales. In an interview for a BBC Wales documentary series entitled ‘Framing Wales’ Pip Koppel, his widow, who, aged eight, also came to Britain as a Jewish refugee from Dresden, and, a trained artist and a potter, speaks of the difficulty the Welsh arts council had with Heinz’s European ‘seriousness’ (Framing Wales: Episode 3: Heinz Koppel, First broadcast 10 March 2011). Pip Koppel is a central figure for Sleep Furiously, appearing as the pottery teacher at the beginning of the film, she is seen as a frequent customer of the library van, hanging out her washing, deliberating over the height of a stand for a stuffed owl, taking her dog to the vet and walking through the snowy landscape with her dog. The film can also, perhaps more easily, be seen as a film about a mother and a son, centred as it is around the news that the local school is to be closed. Her words spoken to the children about working with clay, as she makes sure that the sizes of the clay pieces are not too big for their hands, set a tone for the rest of the film in their calm, encouraging, precise and yet free instructions. You can see if you can build the wall up, and if you get fed up with it going up you can flatten it and make it go down. It does quite a lot of different things so long as you keep it in the right consistency. (Sleep Furiously, 2007) It is this spirit of creativity with materials that brings this film into this study through its exploration of another form of contemplation that seeks to reveal the changing relationship between a community and its landscape through documentary. Gideon Koppel writes eloquently of the context for his search of a way to tell his story, bringing in all the elements that shape such a project, such as the need for a story to present to funding bodies, stylistic influences, the decision to use film rather than video: This relationship between people and the land reminded me of an expression that I had often heard in this part of Wales – that people don’t ‘own’ the land, they ‘belong’ to it. For me, this suggested that in sleep furiously the environment should not emerge merely as a geographic location for peoples’ lives, but should have the presence of a character in the film. To achieve that, I needed a visual medium which was sensitive to subtle details of the land: the changes in light, textures, the presence of wind and rain, and cloud patterns. I realised that I needed to shoot on film rather than video. (Koppel, 2008) 74

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In the process he writes of an awareness of the history of documentary practice as having become dominated in the United Kingdom by the conventions of television, particularly by the need for a story: Documentary has largely been subsumed into a world of television. What was once an idiom of film making is now often conflated by both broadcasters and academics with factual television programme production. That is to say, polemical themes and journalistic structures now prevail over visual observations and lyrical stories. The camera is used more as a recording device, than a kind of microscope which contains, discovers and evokes dynamics of the world that otherwise pass by unnoticed. (Koppel, 2008) The story of the making of the film is thus partly a discovery of a way to fund using the camera as this kind of ‘microscope’ that resonates with the attempts of film-makers wrestling with the problem of seeing the relationship between people and their environments. Koppel’s story here becomes one in which he discovers ‘story’ in the image itself. It is worth quoting a lengthy passage from his essay on making the film to consider how the process of filming a walk can be turned into a meditation or into an investigation into the phenomenology of the relationship between a person and an environment: Without giving the matter any further thought I went to see my mother and asked if I could film her and her dog Daisy taking their morning walk. I made two further requests – that we did this at six in the morning and that she took a slight detour and walked to my father’s grave on the other side of the valley. The following morning the light was bright, pinkish and there was an unusual strong, warm wind. The first image I shot was in her house: the wind was blowing the branches of a tree which in turn created ripples of shadow across a large painting – by my father – of my sister Sarah who drowned when she was a baby. There followed a sequence of images of my mother waking up Daisy and then walking with her through the landscape. She stops to pick up a stone which she places on my father’s grave. The final image is a wide landscape with a footpath running horizontally across the bottom of the frame. My mother and her dog appear as tiny and fragile figures as they slowly cross frame on their walk home. In television terms it could be said that nothing happens in this sequence of images and consequently it is about nothing. But for me this was ‘a story’ – a story about light, the wind, moving shadows… a sense of isolation and vulnerability – all told in simple, but carefully composed images and sounds. (Koppel, 2008) This passage in itself demonstrates the development of a technique for the film, but interestingly Koppel still writes of a need for ‘reassurance’ at this stage. Here he makes a very interesting turn to writers, moving from the W.G. Sebald to Peter Handke for a discussion about the ‘struggle for language, for words’. Handke’s direction to read Noch einmal für 75

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Thukydides/Once Again for Thucydides (Handke, 1997) (Handke, 1998) connects Koppel’s film to an Austro-Hungarian history of descriptive writing including Adalbert Stifter, Franz Kafka and Handke himself, which combines empirical observation with a rigorously impartial register that results in a paradoxically lyrical form of expression. The title of the volume Noch einmal für Thukydides refers to the Greek historian Thucydides who is known for his History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides, 431 bce). The significance of the reference is in Thucydides’ descriptive language that was more empirical and less polemical than his predecessor’s, the ‘father of history’, Herodotus. Handke’s texts can be seen as relating to Thucydides’ prose style and preoccupations in many different ways (Morley, 2012). For Koppel’s film the importance lies in the discovery of a means to create an event out of a description: ‘Each story is an evocation of a moment, place in time and gesture, and each as if, just then, time had stopped and that experience had been looked at under a microscope’ (Koppel, 2008). The effect is described in ‘Kleine Fabel der Esche von München/The Short Fable of the Ash Tree in Munich’: But on a day in late October, 1989, in the dark clear night of an autumn story, the tree stepped out of its usual role – which had in fact become a cherished one – and unexpectedly became the site of an event. The site of an event? No, the ash itself changed (from an image) into an event. (Handke, 1998, p. 70)7 Many trees become events in Sleep Furiously, but of course these are images and not words. Koppel explains how the frame around his images transforms sights into abstractions. The frame isolates a fraction of experienced vision and in doing so the world within the frame then becomes a fiction or an abstraction. That is to say objects which seemed previously unrelated, apparently develop a communion with one another: the sheep and the tree which to the eye are part of a continuum, can become related within a contained composition. Sometimes I would create the frame around an event or activity, but perhaps more often I would create a ‘landscape’ and wait to see what would happen within it. (Koppel, 2008) Koppel goes on to explain how the camera gave him a kind of patience enabling him to see what was unfolding in a way that recalls Paula Willoquet-Maricondi’s ideas about the retraining of perception through film (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010). This process, however, does not work with everyone. Peter Bradshaw gave the film its most positive review in the Guardian, which also awarded the film its prize for Best First Film (Bradshaw, 2009). Referring to his own memories of the library van of his childhood, Bradshaw sees the film as unquestionably about ‘the political dynamics of the film’ that Koppel refers to at the end of his production notes. These politics are about ‘a rural society, outwardly placid and at one with a landscape of stunning beauty, 76

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but in fact in crisis’ (Bradshaw, 2009). The village of Trefeurig, like many villages in the United Kingdom, lost its primary school in 2006 owing to a shortage of pupils (BBC News, 2006) and having already lost its local store and bus stop. The community turned its attention towards retaining the primary school building, which provided a focus for community activities, and Koppel helped to raise funds to purchase the building after the film became widely known and the council threatened to sell it for development (BBC News, 2009). The politics of these kinds of transformation are subtle where it is not a matter of a community being actively oppressed but rather affected by more general changes in demographics and land use. In the Observer, however, Philip French criticizes the film as ‘a rather familiar documentary on the inevitable decline of a small rural community, in this case in midWales’ (French, 2009). Like Bradshaw, he identifies the title as part of a sentence invented by Noam Chomsky  – ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ – to illustrate the idea of a syntactically correct but semantically incongruous sentence. Unlike Bradshaw, who argues ‘it enigmatically finds some meaning and poetry in the line’, French implies that the film exhibits the same syntactic and semantic qualities as the sentence. Chomsky’s example, and the remarkable history of its reception, is one of the many points around which discussion of the relationship between structure and meaning in language has developed since 1957. The varying ways in which it can and has been used to relate to the film are a demonstration of the point that meaning is generated by a process that is only partly determined by language itself. Even the refusal to engage with it is of significance insofar as the denial of meaning can be connected to a post-human world view in which meaning ceases to exist. In Film Comment Alex Cox is much quoted in writing, ‘The animals live to serve or feed the people. The people live to feed and raise the animals. Sleep Furiously is the least anthropocentric film I’ve ever seen’ (Cox, 2008). In writing about the film for Sight and Sound John Banville appears to argue that the film does not encourage interpretation being ‘immediate in its human moments and yet austere to the point of abstraction in what is communicated “beyond the screen”’ (Banville, 2009, p. 4). He writes of ‘inexplicable beauty’, of a ‘new kind of post-humanist but entirely humane art’, and sums the film up as ‘grave, measured, subtly comic and beautifully wrought, free of polemic and yet offering a new way of seeing that is as old as Arcady’. This way of seeing without interpretation is, however, something that Thomas Austin explores at length in a thoughtful article in The New Review of Film and Television Studies. He traces the history of unease with poetic documentary or art documentary quoting from the founders and perpetuators of the documentary debate, John Grierson, Dai Vaughan, Paul Rotha, Brian Winston, Michael Renov, John Corner, and yet a critique of the portrayal of agricultural workers in Sleep Furiously as ideological and class-based comes across as strangely dated. Such an analysis of the society being observed depends on an understanding of such ‘workers’ as feudal or exploited whereas the farmer in this community is more likely to be a businessman or businesswoman responding to the demands of a market. Austin writes that the portrayal of a worker in the rain as a beautiful object prioritizes ‘the aesthetic perspective of the leisured onlooker over the experience of the figure at work in this landscape’ when it 77

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is unlikely that such a person would be unprotected against the rain and unable to get warm and dry. Water is well known to be a tactile image so the haptic qualities of the figure are just as likely to be as vicariously pleasurable to the observer as the pattern on the screen. What is perhaps problematic about the reception of the film as an experience is, on the contrary, the idea that it is a lament about the modernization of farming rather than an ‘evocation’ of a place and time as Koppel describes it. There is frequent reference throughout the film, particularly on the part of the older members of the community, to the ‘old ways’ as well as to the larger and hence more lively community of the post-war period. The auction of old farming equipment at the end of the film seems indeed to imply that the passing of tradition is a sadness and Koppel’s writing about the introduction of Llama and quadbikes to the Welsh hills appears to be a complaint about new ideas. But the beauty of the film is not about preserving a nineteenth-century view of rural life, or even post-war austerity, but rather about noting the attractions of such an environment and its value as a place for children to grow and learn. The people – especially the elderly – who are enjoying its pleasures are determined to hold on to what they have, and the newcomers to the neighbourhood as well as the young people seem inclined to take pride in their region and to wish to stick around. (This is quite different from my memories of wanting to move away to the city as soon as I possibly could – a sentiment that Roger Ebert expressed in his review of the film: ‘There is no sign of a cinema. I daresay most of you, dear readers, will agree that this is a tranquil and bucolic district, but after a long winter, you might want to consider moving.’ (Ebert, 2011).) But then we didn’t have the Internet in those days. Koppel ends his film with an epitaph, ‘It is only when I sense the end of things that I find the courage to speak, the courage but not the words.’ The images do speak of the end of some things, as do the people, but they also speak of the continuation of a strong community tradition that has a history that goes further back than the medieval costume portrayed at the beginning of the film. The strength of the film is precisely that it does not seek to provide a social analysis but allows aspects of the social to come through the contemplative response of a family of artists to an ongoing process of change. While Sleep Furiously draws out of contemplation an appreciation for a modernized rural life in West Wales, another film, Sweetgrass (2009), is a meditation on the end of a tradition of sheep herding on common pasture land in the Absaroka-Beartooth mountains in Montana in the United States. This film contrasts the picturesque image with the subjective experiences of the herders as they are picked up through radio mikes in the course of taking the sheep up and down the mountain and attempt to protect them from wild bears and wolves. 2003 was the last year that the three-month-long trip of around one hundred and fifty miles was made. Recorded from 2001 to 2003 as part of a long-term observational project and billed as ‘the last ride of the American cowboy’ it too appears on some level to offer a lament but again the film-makers Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s and Ilisa Barbash’s reticent observational techniques, camera and mike placement, studied composition and meaningful editing draw out a twenty-first-century understanding of the environmental, social and technological process of change that has brought this tradition to an end. 78

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Castaing-Taylor and Barbash are both anthropologists working with film and now based at Harvard University. Their film-making explores the possibilities of the medium to capture life as it is lived and they explain their montage of sound and image as in some sense an imitation of ordinary cognition: ‘Everyday cognition consists rather of multi-stranded fragments of sensation, imagery, language, and memory, all jostled together messily. We sought to reflect this in the film’s aesthetic and sound–image relationship’ (Ratner, 2010, p.  25). Although Castaing-Taylor has somewhat wryly noted, ‘every ethnographic film festival has rejected it summarily’ (Kuehner, 2010, p. 11), Sweetgrass has also been analysed and defended in the journal Cultural Anthropology by Anna Grimshaw as an example of an ‘aesthetic turn’ in ethnographic film-making using the separate editing of sound and the selfconscious, deliberately aesthetic framing of the image as a form of analysis at the same time as producing a film. The directors are part of ‘a new agenda in ethnographic film-making, one in which the aesthetic possibilities of a particular medium are no longer to be denied but fully embraced’ (Grimshaw, 2011, p. 249). The ‘particular knowledge practices’ (p. 252) that this aesthetic involves are closely allied to those discussed as part of the framework of research into everyday life. Grimshaw points to this link in her statement that ‘Sweetgrass is part of a growing interest in the senses, embodied practice, and ways of knowing that have been variously described as sensuous, existential, or phenomenological anthropology’ (p. 256). She links this ‘fundamental reorientation of analytical perspective’ with a history of links between the perspective of professional anthropology and observational documentary in the films of David and Judith MacDougall, Herb Di Gioia, David Hancock and Paul Hockings. She could also link them with film-makers like Michael Pilz discussed above. The film combines aspects of observational documentary with a typical emphasis for contemporary documentary on the affective impact of wide landscapes and ambient sound. Grimshaw’s description of the effects of this aesthetic captures the patient and yet complex ways in which films of this kind explore the nature of looking at the relationships between people, non-human animals and environments: From the outset, the landscape and sheep, rather than people, are identified as crucial elements in Sweetgrass’s unfolding narrative. As characters in the film, both are beguiling. They are compelling, in the sense of being beautiful, noble, or just ‘cute’; but at the same time, the landscape and the sheep remain frustratingly out of reach. They hold our attention, while remaining mysterious and resistant to the human gaze. In the film’s early scenes, for example, a bellwether ewe chews its cud and looks into the camera. Not only does she look but also keeps on looking – looking and chewing. We stare back and wonder what kind of meaningful communication might be forged across the species divide. (Grimshaw, 2011, p. 250) This passage that is echoed in most reviews of the film expresses both the sense of involvement or envelopment in a landscape of scale and detail but also the contemplative position. What is important about the latter in the case of Sweetgrass is that it is sustained if not 79

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provoked in this film not only by a warm sense of sentimental admiration or attachment but also by ambivalence about the subject matter. In an interview with Megan Ratner the directors refer to the film as the expression of ‘both the allure and ambivalence of the pastoral – not the fantasy of the pastoral as promulgated by poets and outsiders, but as it’s experienced by those whose lot in life it is to live it’ (Ratner, 2010, p. 23). As Maria Garcia points out in her review of the film for Film Journal International (Garcia, 2010) the two shepherds or sheep herders hired to take the sheep up to the high mountains of Gallatin National Forest in Montana appear to represent starkly contrasting responses to the difficult and physically demanding task of taking the sheep up to the mountain. John Ahern, the older cousin is ‘an archetype of the gentle, weather-beaten guy of few words – he addresses the sheep as “girls”’. Pat Connolly, the younger cousin, new to the job, is ‘a repulsive, whining neophyte who in the last portion of the film punches his horse – he calls the sheep “bitches”’ (Garcia, 2010). Garcia’s characterization deliberately overstates the positive and negative in the representation of these two characters, paradoxically polarizing them through admiration for the silent and strong John Ahern who fits the stereotype of the herder more neatly than his younger cousin. The struggles of the younger cousin, however unattractive they may be, are nevertheless the most telling and do the most to prevent the film from becoming an unacceptably nostalgic exercise in the representation of a dying craft. While it is possible to see the glories of the landscape and become immersed in the gaze of the animal, in the course of a film of under two hours it is not possible to feel the hardship, the frustration, the repetition and the boredom stretched out over three months without the sudden insertions of despairing expletives or the call on a mobile phone that reveal it all. While the younger cousin has not adapted and will not adapt to the lifestyle, lamenting the fact that the work makes him hate the mountains he otherwise loves, the older cousin is the picture of a man who has been shaped by his work. The songs he sings as he takes the sheep along the forest path at the end of the film nevertheless speak to a history of adaptation to the alien environment of the mountains: I was born up in the mountains Up where snakes have legs The hoot owls speak in English And roosters lay square eggs I shaved my beard and moustache The morning I was born That night I beat up my old man And drank his rye and corn

(Sweetgrass, 2009)

The tradition shown is one that has lasted for around a hundred years. The last family to use its federal permit to use the public land happens to be Norwegian but, as Jay Kuhner draws out in interview with Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Montana is a state in which ethnicity 80

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has great importance with particular counties still recording high percentages of descent from specific Norwegian or Scottish ancestors, for example (Kuehner, 2010). The end of the tradition has come as part of a more general debate about the use of public land and of the high mountains as a place for wild animals such as bears and wolves to live unmolested by human incursions (Garcia, 2010) (Kuehner, 2010). The narrative around the film is thus as much about the separation of territories and withdrawal of humans from animals as it is about recording a lost culture of mutual dependence between herders and their herds. Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes appears to be the polar opposite to Sweetgrass but both films can be seen to be about capturing the landscapes and lived experience of communities as they are at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In different ways they, like Heaven and Earth, Our Daily Bread, Modern Life and Sleep Furiously, are the product of looking for ways to grasp and present ‘life worlds’, as Grimshaw puts it, in ways that maintain dignity but point to the complexity and ambivalence of every moment of transition. Each film develops consciousness of the reciprocal relationship between people and environments through a combination of the possibilities of layered perception and the withdrawal of overt or exclusive guidelines for interpretation and evaluation. Contemplation is the frame of mind that allows for attention to shift between these levels of perception and reflection, and that allows for an awareness of how feeling and reasoning interact. For some ecocritics this frame of mind in itself is an achievement of many – particularly experimental  – environmental films. For documentary, however, Sweetgrass and the film Leviathan (2012), also co-directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor with Véréna Pavel using innovative positioning of cameras and microphones on a North-Atlantic trawler, represent the most recent developments in 2D cinema enabled by the digital recording of sound and image, complementing developing ideas combining ethnographic research with cognitive experiment at the sensory ethnography lab at Harvard University. The separation of sound and image as well as the capacity to place microphones and cameras in ever more positions simultaneously is allowing documentary teams to capture in more detail the complexities of place and perception. The future direction for documentaries that explore the place of human consciousness in the world is likely to become an extensive worldwide experiment continuing a tradition that goes right back to the beginnings of combining recorded sound with the moving image. In the process the polarization of immersion and alienation as separate reactions is another binary that contemplation and the scrutiny of everyday life environments have challenged. This is a point that can be explored further in the next chapter on irony. Notes 1

Michael Pilz ist mit Himmel und Erde ein Filmkunstwerk klassischer Prägung gelungen – Assoziationskino im Sinn des Wortes. Für den Genuß des Films gilt, was für seine Entstehung gegolten hat: man muß warten können, einfach dabeisein; dann stellen sich Bilder ein und 81

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2 3

4

vor und bleiben einem für länger als die kurze Zeitspanne, die Aufnahme und Verarbeitung eines Filmes umfaßt. Pilz fühlt sich nicht als autoritärer Regisseur, der die Menschen mit seinen Plänen und Vorstellungen überhäuft. Er läßt sie selber sprechen und handeln und wird zum Beobachter. In 2006 Unser täglich Brot, released 21 April 2006 attracted 21,709 visits compared with 201,567 for WE FEED THE WORLD, released 30 September 2005. For comparison, Haneke’s Caché (Hidden) released on 18 November 2005 attracted 60,289 visits in 2006. Darwin’s Nightmare, another Austrian documentary with international resonance, released on 20 January 2005 attracted 44,983 visits. Source: Das oesterreichische Filminstitut, http://www.filminstitut.at/ Wir müssen wieder lernen, Verantwortung zu übernehmen, zunächst einemal für uns selbst und dann in der Folge für unser Tun und Handeln. [...]



Und, das ist die positive Nachricht, wir können es auch. Wir müssen essen, wir müssen einkaufen, und wir können daher bestimmen, was wir wollen. Dieses System ist weder natur- noch gottgegeben, es wurde von Menschen gemacht, und wir können es daher auch wieder verändern.



Und darum heiβen der Film und das Buch ‘We Feed the World’ und nicht ‘They Feed the World’. In the course of the decade several television series on the subject of food addressed the question, including a series of televised debates aired on BBC4 questioning audiences about the acceptability of farming practices such as intensive farming of chickens, or the slaughter of young animals. He does explain in a newspaper article that he went to Trefeurig on holiday from the age of 8 and moved there with his parents at the age of 12 when he attended the secondary school (BBC News, 2009). An einem Tag Ende Oktoger 1989 aber, dunkles klares Herbstlicht und Sturm, trat der Baum aus seinem üblichen, wie auch immer liebgewordenen Bild heraus und überraschte als ein Ort des Geschehens. Ort des Geschehens? Nein die Esche selbst wurde (von einem Bild) zum Geschehen (Handke, 1997, p. 93).

5

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Chapter 4 The Ironic Response

Of course it isn’t really the planet that has the problem. It is everything living on the planet that has the problem. But sometimes you’ve got to be part of the problem to be part of the solution. So in the Fall of 2004, at a moment when polls showed that global warming ranked dead last as a voting issue, we rented a biodiesel-ready but usually gas-guzzling truck and plotted out a cross country tour to see if the polls were right. (Everything’s Cool, 2007) Irony and the echoic The passage above is spoken at the beginning of the film Everything’s Cool, a ‘toxic comedy about global warming’ directed by Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand. It is spoken in a clear, jaunty voice fully aware of the ironies of driving around burning a carbon-based fossil fuel to find out about attitudes towards global warming. It rattles off the words, ‘sometimes you’ve got to be part of the problem to be part of the solution’, in an apparently empty-headed way but in fact turning the didacticism of Eldridge Cleaver’s ‘you’re either part of the problem or part of the solution’ inside out. The film is about the complexities of political and popular responses to the environmental truths already represented at the opening of the film by boxes piled high to symbolize the ‘several thousand tonnes of scientific studies on climate change’ that show us ‘we have a problem’ (Everything’s Cool, 2007). In its participatory approach it uses irony as a dominant tone to express the film-makers’ sense of involvement and implication. The ironic tone is humorous and entertaining, a good strategy to turn the dry debates about the facts of global warming into a watchable film. At the same time, however, the irony is complex and potentially confusing. It seems to be a means to both acknowledge and reject the very debate about climate change it is engaged with. It seems to express a sense of complete helplessness – ‘it is everything living on the planet that has got the problem’, and at the same time it generates an energy that makes the problem worse – and all this with the full conscious knowledge and participation of the film-makers. This chapter is about irony as a response to environmental debate and as a strategy employed by film-makers to express a state of mind that seeks to grasp and solve a problem that seems to need both an objective and a subjective eye. A central plank of the film is provided by Heidi Collen, who is employed by the Weather Channel to advise on and comment briefly on matters relating to climate change. This part of the film acts as a satire on the obsessive attention paid by media professionals to the details of appearance and expression. Collen has to engage in two incompatible sets of rules for communication. The

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television media require immediate comprehensibility and hence clear and unqualified statements. The scientific community requires precision and accuracy and hence highly unambiguous but also heavily qualified statements. When Collen wants to report that the summer ice melt in the arctic is speeding up she has the idea that the audience will be entertained by the ironic fact that the melt is reducing the number of days when exploration for oil is possible. Collen comments: I wanted to add the word ironically. Why is it ironic? I mean it’s basically an education thing. In order for you to know that it’s ironic you have to know that greenhouse gases are a by-product of fossil fuel burning. And so then I said, will it help if I say the global warming irony is that oil exploration has already been impacted. And that still wasn’t clear enough. (Everything’s Cool, 2007) Irony together with its related forms of parody and satire causes problems not only for media practitioners but also for linguists attempting to explain the relationship between words and their meanings. How do we explain saying one thing and meaning another, even its opposite? If this is permissible, how can we tell which things we say are meant as ironic? Is it not possible for everything we say to be understood in that way? Why don’t we just say what we mean? Explanations for irony derive principally from pragmatic approaches to language use. Irony cannot work without an understanding of an utterance – speech, writing or a gesture meant communicatively – as intended as an utterance. In her work on irony and metaphor the linguist Deidre Wilson (Wilson and Sperber, 2012, p. 141) has pinpointed a critical difference between the two tropes, providing the basis for understanding the cultural significance of irony. Metaphor works through substitution so that in order to explain the relevance of a metaphorical statement a connection must be made between the qualities of two different entities. Thus a comparison between the sun and a person may draw out the quality of warmth. Wilson points out that this process is in fact characteristic for most language use. To say that someone has a warm personality is also metaphorical. To say that their personality has characteristics with a high agreeability factor is an attempt to become more systematic and literal but both height and agreement have metaphorical roots. Entirely literal statements are relatively rare and often tautologies. She thus places literal and metaphorical statements at the opposite ends of a sliding scale. Irony, however, works in an entirely different way. In order to be relevant an ironic statement needs to be understood first as an abstract statement and then an attitude towards such a statement needs to be understood as the significant part of what is communicated. The structure of an ironic statement is thus the same as that for reported speech such as: ‘Tom said “Peter is very concerned about the environment.”’ This may be understood at face value as conveying Tom’s opinion that Peter is very concerned, but given the right context – such 86

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as the fact that Tom is always overly optimistic about people – it may be understood – if the emphasis is put on the word ‘Tom’ – as expressing the speaker’s opinion that Peter is not very concerned about the environment. Wilson uses the term ‘echoic’ to capture the range of utterances framed in this way including those that are not explicitly signalled in words but through paralinguistic features as tone of voice or gesture. Irony is hence a subcategory of the echoic, characterized by the expression of an antagonistic distance between the speaker and the echoed utterance or attitude indicated typically by an exaggeratedly flat tone of voice. This bringing together of reported speech and irony in Wilson’s overall analysis of the ‘echoic’ is immensely helpful in the attempt to understand the cultural effects of a whole range of communicative gestures associated with parody. One aspect of this cultural context is that of sincerity. In their essay ‘Explaining irony’ Sperber and Wilson write: In any genuinely linguistic act of communication, an utterance is used to represent a thought of the speaker’s that it resembles in content. In ordinary descriptive uses of language, this thought is about an actual or possible state of affairs. In attributive uses, it is not directly about a state of affairs, but about another thought that it resembles in content, which the speaker attributes to some source other than herself at the current time. (Wilson and Sperber, 2012, p. 128) This passage extends the contemplative frame of mind to a wider range of objects that begin in but then point beyond visible physical material in the environment. The contemplation of thoughts as thoughts, of communicative gestures as gestures, of words as words and of images as images is a fundamental condition for social discourse and is the provocation for a great deal of cultural activity. The capacity of the reflexive work to raise political consciousness became the central theme of critical modernism only to be put in question by the testing antics of postmodern scepticism. In the current scholarly context of research into environmental consciousness it has become possible to revisit reflexivity and explore how it is not just a matter of a single layer of critical reflection but a multilayered capacity to hold several interpretations and responses in mind simultaneously (Hughes, 2012). The concept of the echoic points to the huge range of possible relationships between speakers and their utterances in whatever form they appear and demonstrates also how irony and metaphor can be combined. The significance of tone for irony and the echoic more broadly is particularly important as it involves the construction of an emotional context around the attitudes represented. It is also a way to understand how complex and well-developed cultural attitudes can be established around the practice of irony. The films to be discussed in this chapter use emotionally charged irony in different ways. They are presented here as examples of the use of the echoic as the basis for identifying prevailing ‘toxic’ cultural attitudes and the creation of an oppositional or antagonistic community that seeks a different relationship with the environment. This sense of community 87

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can appear contradictory and self-defeating. The logic of ‘sometimes you’ve got to be part of the problem to be part of the solution’, is humorous in itself, but when it becomes clear that to investigate the problem of global warming the film-makers will contribute to it by driving a large lorry around the country this humour can seem a little grim. As with the contemplative films it triggers a series of questions, in particular the problems raised by the awareness itself of environmental issues. How does it help to know that driving a lorry contributes to global warming if there is no alternative to driving a lorry? Because it both says and unsays what it says, irony is a useful way to express the ambivalence of implication in environmental issues. It is also a useful way to express the contradictions that are endemic in modern societies created by the divisions between society and nature and between science and politics. In this chapter I will explore how irony is more than just a verbal form of squirming in the environmental documentary. Spotting irony is in itself a learned frame of mind and a useful way to become aware of the contradictoriness of everyday assumptions, particularly those involving assumptions about agency, cause and effect. In the discussions that follow the ironies emerge out of various situations: out of the attempt to control plant and animal species, out of a search for perfect housing, out of attempts to explain the ice ages, to distribute water to everyone and the plan to create prosperity and happiness for all. The films to be discussed can be grouped into two broad approaches. First there is the identification of the general attitude that humans and only humans have agency and are capable of controlling the environment. This cultural attitude is undermined by the documentary by replacing a human with the non-human agent at the centre of the film. Second, there is the thesis that human organizations created to promote a better, more progressive global society are themselves the source of many social and environmental problems. Capturing the nature of this phenomenon involves the tracing of agencies within and beyond the organization, mimicking the sciences developed to understand complex ecologies. The ironic agency of the non-human animal The Australian hit environmental documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1987), directed by Mark Lewis is a product of the decade of postmodern irony and parody. Like the contemplative documentaries that reflect on changing landscapes and communities, the ironic films are also situated in particular cultural contexts. Cane Toads is a film that reflects on the response of Australians to an invasive species by putting the cane toad itself at the centre of the film. Echoing genre forms dealing with human endeavour as well as fear, the figure of an animal thriving through being imported onto a new continent is both heroic and horrifying, both alien and uncannily like its human adversary. As Julien Thomas puts it in his piece for the American Historical Review, ‘Cane Toads carries off innumerable jokes and exploits to the full a distinctive palette of stylistic effects – including the scene setting 88

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devices of the gothic, alien, thriller and horror genres – without ever distracting itself from the central purpose of describing and explaining the toad phenomenon’ (Thomas, 1991). Cane Toads takes an unusual step for documentary of the period in experimenting with camera angles, genre music, fictional re-enactment and interview framing to tell an ambivalent story about the introduction to Australia of an invasive species, the cane toad, during the 1930s. With this film a highly subversive element enters the picture for environmental representation through which the larger ironies of the human capacity to modify the environment become discernible. In addition, the complex logic of Darwinian models of evolution creates a platform for an awareness of moral ambivalence in that the cane toad, like the human, turns out to have a tremendous capacity for survival in being able to reproduce swiftly, to eat anything, to colonize rapidly and to kill all its predators. It is this moral ambivalence that Mark Lewis’s film captures so well by picking up on elements of so-called Mondo films that had filtered through into mainstream reporting. Mondo cane (1962) labelled ‘the original “shockumentary”’ on the IMDb, was a highly successful venture that purported to show various strange customs around the world for Western audiences to marvel at. It was so popular that it was imitated many times creating the subgenre of the Mondo film (Kerekes and Slater, 1992). The extensive use of staged sequences presented as documentary in such films contrasts deliberately with the ethics of observational documentary and cinéma vérité of the period, but by the 1980s parodies can be seen to be attempting to gain popular appeal by acknowledging and ironizing the exploitative aspects of exoticization. Techniques for creating a knowing audience, such as using exaggerated music or soundtracks associated with fictional genres such as horror, or clearly showing scenes to be fake or fictional and using implausible or amateurish effects, pushed the popular both into the mainstream and into more intellectualized media forms. ‘Mondo cane’ means ‘a dog’s world’ and several of its sequences demonstrate considerable inhumanity towards non-human animals. Cane Toads is not this kind of exploitative film but in a very sophisticated way it inserts these perspectives to add a humorous level of reflection both on the utilitarian treatment of animals and anthropomorphizing attitudes towards them. The documentary begins with a sequence of close-ups of toads’ eyes accompanied by the kind of dramatic music that would open a low-budget horror or Mondo film. The shots of alien eyes, with their traverse pupils and the varied patterns and colours of the irises, are edited together through a sequence of blends and then the camera pans from one eye to the other across the face of a single toad as the music changes to a shimmering dawning sound of expectation. Neither the camera movement nor the music can be associated with the wildlife documentary but the film nevertheless communicates all the information that such a documentary includes. These strategies make the film both informative about the history of the cane toad in Australia and a comment on the attitudes towards the toad expressed by Australian politicians and the media. A sequence of human statements about the toads at the beginning of the film is representative of these attitudes, shown with each speaker framed looking down into a low-angled shot from the perspective of the toad. The sequence introduces the film by 89

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summarizing all the responses to the toads as a gateway to the film itself: from the admiring scientist, ‘one male and one female is more than sufficient to populate the entire top–end of the Northern Territories’, to total rejection, ‘the best thing is to get rid of them, get a big stick and hit them’, to the viewer horrified at some uses of the toads ‘the practice of going out and getting one of these things and boiling it down and eating the residue I think is absolutely repulsive’, to the fully accepting and inclusive ‘I couldn’t do without them, they’re friends’ (Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, 1987). The conventions of the horror film are used for the title as a very large toad is shown in close-up sitting in a child’s lap. The camera pulls away in a slight twisting movement from the close-up looking down on the little girl as she giggles with the music again indicating the style of the horror film as ‘Cane Toads’, and then ‘An unnatural history’ comes up on screen. After this point the film then turns to more conventional natural history methods with a text about the introduction of the toad to the continent. In their discussion of the fictional genre of the eco-disaster movie, Murray and Heumann explore how ‘the eco-disaster genre has come of age and can now be satirized through comic versions’. In their analysis they argue that the shift from the eco-disaster genre in the 1970s to the eco-comedy of the 1980s and its display of the capacity to laugh represent a shift in approach to ecological issues, which involves changing the focus from the individual to the community (Murray and Heumann, 2009, p. 110). Of the example they discuss (Eight Legged Freaks, 2002), they write that it: ‘intensifies an environmental message while minimizing didactic and pedantic proselytizing that a more serious approach might foster’ (pp. 113‒114). Murray and Heumann argue that ‘by the late 1980s, problems associated with environmental disasters seemed old hat. Gas was unleaded, catalytic converters on cars were mandatory, recycling was on the rise around the country and new EPA controls were firmly in place. Film audiences, then, didn’t need to be warned or taught about environmental problems. And they already had institutions in place that took the issue seriously. Some films highlighting environmental problems took a comic turn’ (p. 114).This statement could also refer to issues concerning pests, pest control and their environmental effects. Cane Toads is not, however, a comedy, but a documentary using a number of representational strategies to relate a documented history of how the toad came to be introduced to Australia. To dramatize the story of the cane grub is not innovative in itself, but the exaggerated gestures in the camera movement panning down a sugar cane stem towards the roots, the music continuing with a ticking sound, the loud sound effect of tearing leaves and roots as the camera appears to be about to enter the earth – all of this is new and striking. The style elicits laughter without a clear indication of what the laughter is about. The title ‘the North Queensland farmers had a problem that threatened their crops [...] the cane grub’ (Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, 1987) perhaps gives the point away. The cane grub is a small creature and not an obvious threat. To make a film about such a subject requires a little embellishment. The joke is on the act of making a film about this subject and so the film exaggerates itself by bringing in all the gestures of various genres it can find 90

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to dramatize and inject energy into the more conventional documentary interviews with farmers and scientists such as that with Tip Byrne, ‘a cane farmer from Tully’ shown as a child in the photograph and who speaks about his father’s generation and their problems with the cane grub. The style of representation then appears to be simply good humour, but as the film develops the strategy generates more meanings that reflect on the relationship between scientific and political decision making, the attitude of scientists towards their subjects, the hopelessness of politicians in dealing with such problems and more generally on the similarities between the agency of the toad and that of the human adversary, The account of the introduction of the cane toad given by Bill Kerr, ‘director of the Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations, 1933‒1943’, who is also shown in a photograph from the 1930s, is illustrated with a humorous reconstruction of a conference of ‘sugar technologists’ in Puerto Rico in 1932 beginning with an insert into the interview in which the façade of a Latin American building is shown in the evening. The loud sound of cicadas is added to the soundtrack as Bill Kerr comes up with ‘We were represented at that conference by the assistant director of the sugar experiment stations, Mr Arthur Bell’. As the shot of the building turns to night and the façade is lit up with lights, an echoing reading of a statement at the conference is audible and labelled on screen as from the speech of the entomologist Raquel Dexter, ‘on the food habits of the cane toad’. As the statement goes on, ‘I strongly advocate the effective use of this amphibian’, a toad hops into the shot and looks over at the building and a horse and carriage from the period trot by. This imaginative reconstruction with the end of the speech accompanied by applause and cheers humorously represents the moment of decision as full of hope, but the narrative goes on to demonstrate that the scientific case was in fact nonsensical, framing the error as part of the process of history in which the scheming toad will ultimately triumph. In the updated version of the film Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010) the opening frames the history in a similar way although it does not quote directly from Raquel Dexter this time and more material has been accessed to accompany an account given by the historian Nick Turvey. The parodist elements are updated to echo twenty-first-century forms of eco-fiction. The toad emerges from a South American swamp with all the requisite sound effects, and the interview subjects are framed symmetrically in environments that characterize them and their work, as has now become a common feature of documentaries involving new interview material. The re-enactments are more self-conscious with individual stories also adding new animals to the cast. A small white dog with a strong personality, named Wallace, is nearly killed by eating a cane toad but he survives an operation to come back to life as a less aggressive dog, watching several television reports on the progress of the toads across Australia. Another dog, Dobby, learns the trick of licking toads just enough to give him a high. An extensive visual sequence imagining his ‘trips’ accompanies the vet’s and owner’s explanations about the documented cases where pets have been known to keep going back for more. The story of the ‘conquest’ that involves a population growth from just over a hundred to over one-and-a-half-billion toads is told in a way that draws out the ambivalence of 91

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scientists in particular. A research group studying the cane toad as it reaches and goes beyond the group’s laboratory, not only tracks the toad’s progress across the territory, but also studies the evolution of the animal in the process. As the image shows the scientists attaching tracking devices to the animal, measuring its torso, watching the young swim across tanks, Professor Rick Shine of the Biological Department at the University of Sydney comments: There’s a remarkable phenomenon that’s gone on in the last 70 years since cane toads were released in North-Eastern Queensland. Essentially it’s become a footrace across tropical Australia for the toads. The kids that are at the front of the invasion are the fastest moving toads, the most athletic toads, so the best athletes are breeding with each other, and we call it the ‘Olympic village effect’. So it is a cumulative process and in Australia it’s produced a fundamentally different kind of a toad: these large, long-legged, incredibly active individuals that disperse huge distances whenever they can. (Cane Toads: The Conquest, 2010) The scientists in effect produce a terminology for the effects they are observing that make a direct comparison between the toads and humans, a process that is followed into the public sphere by the representation of a newspaper headline, ‘SUPER TOAD’. From this point parallels between humans and cane toads appear repeatedly, developing three themes: first the agency of the toad, then the toad as a metaphor for human folly and finally the toad as the successor to humans. For example, the continuation of the story of Melrose the Wonder Toad is told in Cane Toads: The Conquest. The star of a travelling toad show that was featured in Cane Toads: An Unnatural Story, Melrose is so pampered by his adoring owner that he becomes obese and dies of a heart attack. He is shown tanned and stuffed. Just as the toads are characterized as a military invasion, so the story of the Kimberly Toad Busters comes across as the militarization of Australian women brought out by the government’s challenge to the people, creating the idea of the frontier into western Australia. At the same time, the story is of a creature that defies human control and, almost reassuringly, rivals the human capacity for domination. It is truly remarkable that despite all of the fantastic activities that can be undertaken by the human race, the magnificent pieces of equipment that are being developed, our capacity in space, and yet we still haven’t come to find a way to control the cane toad. (Professor Mike Tyler, Environmental Biology, Adelaide University, in Cane Toads: The Conquest, 2010) All through the film, the image and score follow the cues given by the language used by the interview subjects, and this very device appears to put the cane toads into the superior position. As the environmentalist Ian Morris says towards the end of the film, ‘It’s a 92

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Figure 8:  The athletic cane toad in Mark Lewis’s Cane Toads: The Conquest (2010), following up his 1980s hit Cane Toads: an Unnatural History (1987) with some 3D irony and a thoroughly amphibian perspective. Photograph ‘Cloud Toad’ by Radio Pictures, courtesy of Mark Lewis.

remarkable story, there’s no doubt about it. This is an epic,’ the score turns to Hollywood epic style, a full strings orchestra led by a melody on brass, soon joined by a choir and then someone whistling, and a small pioneer toad is shown soldiering through the landscape. The interviewees, mainly white Europeans, appear not to notice the parallels between themselves as colonizers and the toads, but there is no doubt that the framing of a flat landscape, with mountains on the horizon, echoes the story of the European conquest of the North American continent as told through the epic Western genre. Western Australia is the frontier here as the continent is conquered from East to West by the cane toad (Taussig, 1990). By echoing various genres these two films convey a message about the hypocritical attitudes of human beings towards other species. All through the films, however, it is shown how the interview subjects have been sincerely caught up in the issues and are no more to blame than the spectators watching. In this sense the human subjects occupy the film in the same way as the toad subjects, although the parody disclaimer that no harm has been done to the toads in the making of the film is not extended to the human part of the cast. 93

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The agency of the product Blue Vinyl is also a film that focusses on an apparently banal subject – the cladding of a suburban house in Merrick Long Island, blowing it up into a low-key family drama arising out of the director’s parents’ decision in 1994 to replace the original wooden cladding of the house with blue vinyl, ‘a supposedly safe, durable material that would fit in nicely in their quiet, suburban neighbourhood’ as Angell puts it in ‘The Medium is the Maker’ (Angell, 2004). The co-director of the film, Judith Helfand, who had by this point already made a film about the toxic effects of the drugs industry on her own reproductive health (A Healthy Baby Girl, 1997), is suspicious about the safety of this material, also known as PVC, and starts up a project with Daniel B. Gold to investigate what such an apparently harmless and costeffective decision, made in households every day, means for the environment. The symbol for her project is a piece of blue vinyl that she takes around with her on her investigative journey. The vinyl thus becomes an actor at the centre of the film, around which the film is built. The film is labelled a ‘toxic comedy’ and begins with a statistic presented with a title onscreen: ‘Every three seconds another house in North America is sided with vinyl’. This is personalized with the addition, ‘My father did the math’, establishing the personal perspective of the family discussion in conjunction with the kind of information associated with expert-led institutional activities. A contemporary form of citizenship is developed in the film by setting up a self-deprecating and yet also highly critical echoic relationship between public and private, official and unofficial communication. Judith Helfand herself personifies the individual suspended between private decision-making and the public activity of investigative documentary film-making. She consistently places herself on the side of the public who wish to know, carrying her personal piece of blue vinyl around with her and asking questions from the ‘naive’ (Sarangi and Slembrouck, 1996) position that in the course of the film becomes the highly informed position of the activist citizen. Each time the register of official discourse enters into the debate it is self-consciously debunked by the personal perspective. It becomes ironic when it is clear that the official discourse clashes with the common-sense view and the film-makers distance themselves from what is represented. This happens in a scene where Judith Helfand is walking back from a presentation given by the Vinyl Institute, a lobbying organization that represents the interests of vinyl producers, at a conference on replacements for vinyl in building construction. The presentation given by the Vinyl Institute talks up the product and downplays the dangers it poses, and on the way back from the lecture two representatives talk to Helfand about why she should not be worried about her father’s blue vinyl cladding. Part of the explanation includes the point that vinyl is made from salt, or sodium chloride, a natural mineral present in everyone’s bodies. They ‘promise’ her that she does not need to be concerned. In the next scene Helfand comments in voice-over: ‘Now I was really worried. The Vinyl Institute representatives wanted me to believe that vinyl and table salt were more or less the same thing. Even I knew they weren’t’ (Blue Vinyl, 2002). 94

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As the film progresses links are built up between the personal perspective and a legal investigation into a possible international industrial conspiracy covering up the dangers of the production process to workers’ health. A variety of different perspectives are played off against each other. Consumer awareness is explored through Helfand’s concern, her mother’s concern about her concern and her father’s scepticism about her concern. These relationships play out the everyday drama of consumer awareness exploring how necessary and yet difficult it is for individuals not only to be aware of the toxic nature of the products on the market but also to act on this awareness. The efforts to create a public debate are represented, on the other hand, by the environmental experts on the chemistry behind the product, who are campaigning against the production of the toxic by-product dioxin, and by the legal investigators looking into industrial communications about the hazards posed to workers. The struggle for environmental justice for workers is linked to the community via the blue vinyl siding. The cinematography of the film as a whole seeks to put the residents of Long Island into the same space as the residents of Lake Charles in Louisiana, the North American capital of vinyl, and then North Americans into the same space as the Italian workers involved in a manslaughter case against managers at the plant originally owned by EniChem in Venice. The workers in the plants producing vinyl and the residents living around the plants are shown to be severely affected by health problems, but they have to struggle to be heard as the institutional structures are designed to demonstrate the good safety practices carried out by the industry rather than to investigate the suspicions of the local population. At a local meeting of residents in Lake Charles one of the residents is offered a tour of the plant with a talk but he responds: ‘I don’t need your talk. I’m telling you what I know’ (Blue Vinyl, 2002). This response is a key to understanding where the comedy is in this story that seems to be about very little that is funny. The joke lies in the absolute impossibility of getting the industry to acknowledge that there is any problem at all with toxins in the production of vinyl chloride even though the evidence is considerable. It also lies in the contrast between the acceptance of the general public of the risks that the industry poses and Judith Helfand’s wondering alarm. Some dialogue from a group of women workers at the Pitt Grill in Lake Charles is illustrative of the toxic comedic style that Helfand and Gold pursue. The women respond to a question about what people say about links between levels of cancer in the town and the chemicals produced by the plant: worker 1: You hear a lot of people talk about cancer. worker 2: They say that but nowadays everything gives you cancer. Look on the packet sweet-n-low – it’s got that aspartame or whatever. worker 3: They say in mother’s milk. worker 2: Bacon. worker 1: The chemicals in the plants here are really bad, you know, in the air, it’s kind of like smoking. worker 2: I have asthma really bad so I just stay in the house. Not all the time, you know, we get out. Look at her face, she’s like [makes a face]. 95

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worker 1: We’re in a hazardous town. worker 2: Any place that they have plants or any kind of chemicals, you are going to … I mean that’s just … the thing that goes– worker 1: Yeah. worker 2: –along with it. worker 1: You gotta realize the plants do make a lot of good things. worker 2: Yeah they do. worker 1: They help kids, they help people. worker 2: And any time there is something that is hazardous they take care of it right away. I mean they’re good about that. worker 1: Yeah. worker 2: If we ever get blown up … worker 1: That’s it, that’s a different story. (Blue Vinyl, 2002) The boxes of documents piled high in the office of Billy Baggett, a lawyer representing vinyl workers in Lake Charles with health-related claims are also a source of grim humour. The work involves a long-term process of gathering and linking cases to the claim that there has been an international conspiracy to hide the facts about health hazards. The encounters with the industry take on a farcical nature in the film as the evidence against the products build up through the narrative. The piece of blue vinyl accompanies Helfand to Venice. As the traditional images of Venice viewed from the gondola on the canal are shown, Helfand jokes that ‘vinyl is not exactly the first thing that leaps to mind when most people speak of Venice’. The image then pans and lifts to include the EniChem plant in the distance where the story of another legal case is ongoing. The camera work here is ingenious: having just seen a shot of St Mark’s Basilica from beneath a bridge on the canal, a shot is taken that includes the Basilica and the plant just across the water. Exploring the ‘good things’ that the industry does to help people, Helfand reports on Habitat for Humanity, a project funded by the Vinyl Institute and the Chlorine Chemistry Council to donate housing made almost entirely of vinyl for people who would otherwise not be able to afford their own homes. Helfand comments: I had a lot of questions for the Vinyl Institute, but I didn’t ask them. After all, after these five days of construction twenty-five families were going to move into their own homes. It wasn’t exactly the right time to bring up dioxin or angiosarcoma of the liver. (Blue Vinyl, 2002) The most jovial and staged humour comes from Helfand’s preparations for a formal interview with an industry representative from the Vinyl Institute. She hires two ‘paparazzi’ to take photographs of her pre-interview lunch in a café named the ‘Vynl [sic] Diner’ in New York. 96

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Figures 9abc:  Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold’s ‘toxic comedy’ Blue Vinyl (2002) explores the moral conflicts involved in the production, use, and disposal of an industrially produced building material. DVD captures.

After this she describes preparing for the actual interview as a campaign using a background soundtrack of mock military drums. We wanted a tour of a vinyl plant. They suggested a Habitat for Humanity House instead. We countered with a location in the middle of Lake Charles in front of a fountain donated by a local PVC manufacturer, but they had problems with that too. Finally we just left it up to them and they chose to hold the interview in Baton Rouge, in the heart of an area in Louisiana known as cancer alley, in a hotel at the intersection of Corporate and Trust. (Blue Vinyl, 2002) As the list of forbidden props is read out the camera pans along a line of objects prepared but now discarded: ‘no sugar packets, no salt, and there went my question about sex toys, no surprise documents or video tapes, no questions outside the expertise of their expert, and no more than thirty minutes for the whole thing. I was told to leave my blue vinyl siding at home.’ Helfand comments that the representative ‘did his job really well’ and includes a substantial section of answers to the questions about risk and alternatives that Helfand puts. Set up like a magazine interview with a camera on each participant, Helfand versus the Vinyl Institute is, however, framed as a David and Goliath encounter that David is unable to win in the face-to-face contest. The representation of the interview, however, has been framed so that the larger argument about the imbalance of powers is made clear so that the ironized competence of the representative counts against rather than for his cause. The search for an alternative material with which to clad the house is also humorously presented with another line of alternatives propped up and individually presented to a commentary on the suitability and problems of each. The decision in the end is to use some reclaimed wood that ‘cost a fortune’. At this conclusion to the film, again Helfand ironizes her own failure to find an affordable alternative, but her ironic commentary on this fact is somehow at the heart of this film and its message about the consequences of accepting risk. The implication is that to accept risk is to take ‘blood money’ that Helfand transforms in an emotionally complex move that is something of a plot twist. She explains: 97

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I paid for it out of my film budget which was partly financed by the settlement I received because DES exposure gave me cancer. I like to call it my ‘uterus money’. Of course, most middle-class Americans don’t have uterus money, but since I did, I wanted to make a point that consumers have the power to transform a market and make a hazardous product obsolete. (Blue Vinyl, 2002) In an article entitled ‘Collaborative Strategies’ published in 2002, Pat Aufderheide used Blue Vinyl as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of collaboration between film-makers and foundations and organizations. Judith Helfand’s first two documentaries both arise out of her own encounters with the effects of toxins in the environment but her own personal view is expanded through partnership with advocate organizations such as the Ford Foundation that funded her, the environmental organization Greenpeace and community groups working on health and environmental justice issues (Aufderheide, 2002). Discussing the nature of contemporary documentary Aufderheide writes: Some documentarians do seek out the benefits of collaboration from the get-go. It’s a way to deepen ties to communities in which the filmmaker will be working for some time. It’s a way to find funders whose issues are promoted by the work. And it’s a ready-made network to draw on for distribution, outreach, and action strategies when the film is released. (Aufderheide, 2002) In addition to work on the film itself, an outreach project called ‘My House Is Your House’ educated communities about the hazards created for whole neighbourhoods by housing clad with PVC panels. The campaign focussed on developing infrastructure to help individuals avoid turning to PVC as an option by developing cost-effective alternatives. The film thus became a centre piece for a much wider campaign, recalling the model advocated by Greenwald (Germano, 2002). Blue Vinyl then is clearly a serious film with a grim take on irony. It uses the echoic strategically to demonstrate the ways in which ordinary people are conscious of risk but accept it as a price to pay for a modern industrialized society. It exaggerates the naivety of the citizen on the road to enlightenment to highlight the knowing expertise of industry public relations. In the film, justice is enacted through the investigative story, the encounters with several different ongoing legal battles, opening up the questions about industry practice in relation to liability, but most of all through the depiction of a ‘journey’ to an alternative way of thinking for the film-maker Judith Helfand and her family. Gold and Helfand’s film records a journey taken by the film-makers, but also by Helfand’s parents, towards understanding not only what the image of the blue vinyl means, but also what it means to reject the blue vinyl. At each stage the thoughts and decisions made are presented in all their emotional depth and complexity and often ironized through the self-conscious 98

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process of preparation for on-film dialogue and self-representation. These are a reflection on the complex web of cause and effect that is involved in attempting to change the activities of highly capitalized industry based on large-scale scientific and engineering solutions to materials, which is organized with an awareness that unfavourable representation can become part of a sequence of effects that cause an industry to fold. The agency of the concept While Blue Vinyl is concerned with the specific environmental and health issues relating to a particular product, The Corporation is a film that explores the model that makes it possible for such large industrial projects to exist. Just as Gold and Helfand’s film represents the ways in which the manufacture and disposal of a product causes harm, the film-makers Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott focus on the agency of a concept, that of the corporation. The Corporation, based on the research for the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Bakan, 2004), is built around an exploration of the way in which a metaphor – the corporation as person – has been turned into a legal and social reality. After introducing the history of how the corporation gained the legal status of a person the film focusses on demonstrating that the personality of such a ‘person’ is pathological and along the way, the film represents environmental damage as one of the inevitable products of corporate behaviour. The Corporation uses postmodern techniques of the accumulation of repeated forms to indicate the collective nature of social attitudes. At the opening to the film a rapid sequence of corporate logos, which are each surprisingly visible despite the speed with which they come and go, is followed by another sequence of media clips in which the metaphor ‘bad apples’ to describe the many transgressions of major companies is repeated and varied. Accompanying the media clips are clips of archive footage containing apples in various scenarios. The relationship between the interview sequences, shot full-frontally with neutral backgrounds, and the images used to illustrate them is similar to that used in Cane Toads, taking the metaphors elicited from ‘CEOs, whistle-blowers, brokers, gurus and spies, insiders and outsiders’ (The Corporation, 2003) and representing the core image of the metaphor onscreen through clips of archive footage from various eras and contexts. Thus the metaphors of the corporation as a jigsaw, a sports team, a family unit, a telephone system, a soaring eagle appear as random images that are also undermined by their creators as ‘bullshit’. Out of all these techniques of image, words and sound, a reflective humour emerges that exploits what Mark Johnson has described as ‘a pervasive principle of human understanding that underlies our vast network of interrelated literal meanings’ (Johnson, 1987). Johnson argues that metaphor is constitutive of meaning, citing Black’s view ‘that some metaphors enable us to see aspects of reality that the metaphor’s production helps to constitute’ (Black, 1977). The film does not only reproduce the metaphors, however, it also creates a critical 99

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distance to them and to metaphor creation itself as one of the means through which society, particularly those involved in the creation and empowering of corporations, has promoted the corporate idea to the extent that it has become ‘the most powerful institution in the modern world’ (The Corporation, 2003). One of the most important techniques used in the film is the tone of voice established by the commentary of Mikela Jay at the beginning of the film. The relationship between this voice and the editing of the images is a primary factor in its key message to activists about the need to take control of the framing of the corporation. At first the match between the voice and the image feels very hectic because the images that visualize the metaphors appear exactly as the voice mentions them and then disappear again as soon as the voice moves on. As the viewer understands that the voice is in control of the image, able to call up whatever is needed, the archival images become more readable and more humorously appropriate. The editing as much as the argument represents the point that power involves control of the discourse. The film takes control of the framing in the terms that George Lakoff has called for in his article ‘Why it matters how we frame the environment’ (Lakoff, 2010). Lakoff explains: One of the major results in the cognitive and brain sciences is that we think in terms of typically unconscious structures called ‘frames’ (sometimes ‘schemas’). Frames include semantic roles, relations between roles, and relations to other frames. A hospital frame, for example, includes the roles: Doctor, Nurse, Patient, Visitor, Receptionist, Operating Room, Recovery Room, Scalpel, etc. Among the relations are specifications of what happens in a hospital, e.g., Doctors operate on Patients in Operating Rooms with Scalpels. These structures are physically realized in neural circuits in the brain. All of our knowledge makes use of frames, and every word is defined through the frames it neurally activates. (Lakoff, 2010, p. 71) Lakoff ’s explanation of frames helps to form an understanding of the importance of the framing of the corporation as a person in the film as well as the film’s strategy of reframing the corporate personality as psychopathic. It would be perhaps more straightforward to argue that the corporation should not be classed as a person, but as Lakoff points out: ‘negating a frame just activates the frame, as when Nixon said, ‘‘I am not a crook,’’ and everyone thought of him as crook’ (Lakoff, 2010, p. 72). Thus the film does not negate the frame but takes hold of it and scrutinizes it. In their account of verbal irony, Wilson and Sperber discuss various approaches to explaining how speakers and interpreters arrive at the understanding that what is meant is the opposite of the statement made. They point out that irony does not in fact involve a simple negation of a statement but rather the expression and detection of a negative attitude towards what has been said or is generally said, quoting Grice’s description of a ‘hostile or derogatory judgement or a feeling such as indignation or contempt’ (Wilson and Sperber, 2012, p. 127). They discuss the particular tone of voice that characterizes irony, ‘a flat or deadpan intonation, slower tempo, lower pitch level and greater intensity than are found in 100

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the corresponding literal utterances, and is generally seen as a cue to the speaker’s mocking, sneering or contemptuous attitude’ (Wilson and Sperber, 2012, p. 128). As already discussed, Wilson and Sperber’s account of irony begins with the idea of the ‘echoic’ utterance. They make a distinction between ‘descriptive’ and ‘attributive’ uses of language where the first is about a state of affairs while the second is about ‘another thought that it resembles in content, which the speaker attributes to some source other than herself at the current time’ (Wilson and Sperber, 2012, p. 128). If we translate these ideas in terms of the film The Corporation we can hear the consistently focussed yet calm voice of the commentary delivered by Mikela Jay as generally descriptive but tending towards the echoic. The echoic is not necessarily ironic, however, in that the attitude towards the attributed utterance or style of utterance is not entirely dismissive. In the end the argument is that the corporations’ strategies of self-promotion are the very ones that campaigners, social and environmental, need to learn. The brilliantly edited opening sequence of the film – the logos and the bad apples – can be seen as a postmodern process of free play with symbolic expression. Its effect on the film as a whole is considerable as it creates the possibility throughout the film that symbols may be used in this non-serious way so that the viewer needs to concentrate to identify how the statements of the different interviewees and the various film clips fit in to the scale of acceptable and unacceptable attitudes as far as the thesis of the film is concerned. Thus the film exploits a sophisticated social aptitude to recognize the use of utterances as ‘attributive’ rather than a ‘descriptive’, adding an engaging and also entertaining aspect. Nevertheless, the film also moves away from this kind of postmodern free play – sometimes labelled postmodern irony – in the way in which it is also to a large extent itself an extended analysis of the constitutive power of metaphor. The idea of the free play of signifiers causes problems for the interpretation of messages in that an attitude towards an utterance or visual gesture is suggested but it is not clear what the attitude actually is other than to point out the symbolic nature of the communication. A section in the film entitled ‘Perception management’ explores how branding and social image management can be seen as manipulative fronts, creating what Noam Chomsky has labelled ‘manufactured consent’ (Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, 1992) (Herman and Chomsky, 1988), and behind which corporations hide other more significant and less socially acceptable campaigns. What is interesting about this discussion of modern rhetorical practice is that it draws attention to the way in which all corporate communicative acts are calculated objects or ‘brands’, which both communicate and reproduce their own communicative intention simultaneously. In industrial films from the archive representing corporations this quality becomes more visible because of historical changes to the style of expression. These could be called ‘echoic’ in the sense that they generally express and reinforce a positive attitude to a positive expression. They become ironically echoic when they are reproduced by critical speakers dissociating themselves from what the brand expression and the promotional campaign stands for. The section on branding expresses a long-expressed fear first formulated by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1987) that all human interaction, including interpersonal 101

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communication, may become commercial and hence always have this doubled quality of a positively reinforced attitude. Archive footage of various scenes from advertising accompanies the question: What happens if we wake up one day and we find out that virtually all of our relationships that are mediated between us and our fellow human beings are commercial. We find out that virtually every relationship we have is a commercially arbitrated relationship with our fellow human being. Can civilisation survive on that narrow a definition of how we interact with each other? (The Corporation, 2003) Irony, as the expression of a critical attitude not only to the content of an expression but also to its form, is an obvious defence against such a possibility, and yet the tone of the commentary does not quite go so far as to become the flat and intense voice described by Wilson and Sperber. It remains throughout intimate, calm and even-tempered and expresses an overall attitude of sceptical curiosity about the progress of modern life and the role of the corporate in it. This sophisticated tone contrasts with the canon of Marxist critiques of corporate business represented in the commentaries of documentary film-makers such as Peter Nestler or John Pilger. Social actors in the film who submit to the corporate way, either affirming their commitment to it or claiming its inevitability are scrutinized as examples of a phenomenon rather than rejected as part of an evil system. Nevertheless, they are clearly part of what is on the other side, no matter how friendly the approach. And yet the film-makers follow up this sequence with a clever scenario illustrating the concept of ‘undercover marketing’ explained by a specialist, Jonathan Ressler, CEO of Big Fat Inc. The company thus marketed is called WWW.THECORPORATION.TV (if you follow the link it takes you to www.thecorporation.com.), which is seen on delivery boxes, a CD, a water bottle label and sandwich wrappers. Ressler argues that these product placements in everyday life are harmless and should be accepted, indicating the alternative attitude of mind at the same time: ‘if you want to be critical, if you want to go through your life like that, sure, be critical of every single person that walks up to you, but if they are showing you something that fits, something that works, that makes your life better in some way, well then, who cares, again, just say thanks’ (The Corporation, 2003). In this way, and many others through the film, the commentary allows the viewer to understand the pervasive quality of corporate branding and marketing that allows social and environmental harm to happen unopposed while at the same time acknowledging that The Corporation as a film and a book and a website inevitably becomes part of the system it critiques. As with the ambivalent, contemplative response this sense of implication is important for the way in which it refuses to allow the viewer simply to take sides with the current good guys and leave it at that. The critical point to be made at the end of the film nevertheless concerns how to deal with this involvement and how to acknowledge, resist and transcend it. 102

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Like many contemporary social documentaries, The Corporation ends with an extended rallying call, demonstrating to viewers that getting involved in campaigns is an effective way to protect communities. This film, like many others that follow, creates role models and stars as well as drawing on well-known public figures. Dr Vandana Shiva, for example, explains local and international resistance to the patenting of basic foodstuffs in India through campaigning and the expert use of the legal process, ‘we stopped the third world being viewed as the pirate and we showed the corporations were the pirate’ (The Corporation, 2003). The critical argument in this final section of the movie, however, is about having the better story that is not merely symbolic but a realizable vision or ‘a survival option’ as Shiva puts it. As Jeremy Rifkin puts it in the film: There are many tools for bringing back community, but the importance is not the tools. I mean there is litigation, there is legislation, there is direct action, there is education, boycotts, social investment, there’s many, many ways to address issues of corporate power, but in the final analysis what’s really important is the vision. You have to have a better story. Michael Moore is given the final word after a sequence of impressive victories, particularly over the privatization of rainwater, and it is worth discussing his views on how he feels he has used the documentary as a means to undermine capitalism. They don’t believe in anything. They put me on there because they know that there’s millions of people that want to see my film or watch the TV show and so they’re going to make money and I’ve been able to get my stuff out there because I’ve been driving my truck through this incredible flaw in capitalism, the greed flaw, the thing that says the rich man will sell you the rope to hang himself with if he thinks he can make a buck off it. Well I’m the rope. I hope I’m part of the rope. (The Corporation, 2003) Although Moore has been given the last word, the film The Corporation does not in fact function in the same way as Michael Moore’s films. His tirade against the capitalists represents a different understanding of the relationship between belief and ideology than that represented in The Corporation. The film does not attack the system that makes capitalism possible, but rather the use of it to promote business interests in profit above the value of community. It attacks the position where, ‘the corporation is legally bound to put its bottom line ahead of everything else, even the public good’ (The Corporation, 2003) so that the organization seeks to externalize its costs and does not baulk at causing harm to human health via harm to the biosphere. It is possible to believe in systems that allow for many different beliefs to co-exist. This is clearly not the belief that Michael Moore is attacking as it allows the process of collective reasoning and debate to take place. It is possible, however, to believe that such a system has been symbolically hijacked and that it is necessary to take radical symbolic action to correct its functioning. 103

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The agency of irony The Yes Men films, meaning The Yes Men (2003), The Yes Men Fix the World (2009) and a crowd-funded film in the process of production, The Yes Men are Revolting, document and represent the actions of the activist group and ‘culture jammers’ (Dery, 1993/2010) the Yes Men. The Yes Men create satirical performance interventions into public and corporate life, aimed at turning national and international broadcast media networks against themselves, against corporate interests and against non-governmental international organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank and the United Nations, which the Yes Men believe operate in the interests of global corporate capital rather than in the interests of the people. The actions of the Yes Men are those of media artists and communication scholars who have their own theories and messages about the ways in which global communication works and about how these networks can be subverted. Their promotion of ideas, like those of most anti-corporate globalization groups, is much assisted by the development of the Internet where they can advertise and develop their own networks and where they can also subvert official websites of the organizations they target. One of the Yes Men’s first actions, as narrated in their first film and on their website (The Yes Men, n.d.), was built on the transformation of GATT, the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs into the WTO in 1994. The change of name happened to take place at a more anarchic time in the history of the Internet. While the WTO was developing its new web presence, the ‘free’ domain of GATT could be used by the Yes Men to hijack the temporarily confused identity of the WTO. Andy Bichlbaum’s performance on behalf of the WTO featuring a man in ‘a gold lamé bodysuit with a threefoot gilt phallus that would make Superman blush’ (Dargis, 2004) established the Yes Men as serious actors in the realm of guerrilla media attacks. In their tactical use of media, and the Internet in particular, the Yes Men, like other contemporary activist artists working more globally, are clearly a product of the twentyfirst century but the performance art, actions or interventions that they carry out form a continuous history with conceptual art practice going back to the Italian Futurists though Russian Futurism and Constructivism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Bauhaus, Living Art and forms of video activism from the late 1960s to the present day. As Hynes, Sharpe and Fagan as well as Kenny point out, this history of art practice, with a particularly close connection to the French Situationists, is also blended with the social theories of Michel de Certeau who used the term ‘tactics’ to describe how people in their everyday lives utilize the products of consumer capitalism in ways that subvert the advertising strategies of corporate marketing campaigns (Kenny, 2009) (Hynes et al., 2007). Its politics also merges with Herman and Chomsky’s analysis of mass communication (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) in Manufacturing Consent and its demonstration of the ways in which the media and capital interests collude in their creation of a corporate-friendly public sphere. In analysing the origins of such practices one might also go back, as Kate Kenny does in her article on ‘performative surprise’ (Kenny, 2009) to the intervention into the public 104

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Figure 10:  Andy Bichlbaum demonstrates a new management suit in The Yes Men (2003) directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price. Courtesy of The Yes Men.

sphere represented by Jonathan Swift’s satirical political pamphlet A Modest Proposal (Swift, 1729) in which Swift suggests that the solution to the problem of feeding the Irish might be to turn the problem into the solution: I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust. The problem of hunger and the nature of the exploitative relationship between the wealthy and the poor nations captured in these satirical texts is exactly parallel, reflecting on the long and sustained history of colonial exploitation as well as the long history of the critique of colonial exploitation. To note in all of this radical subversive and entertaining work is the use of the political pamphlet on the one hand and the independent feature-length theatrical documentary on 105

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the other to represent and expose the brutal institutional thinking behind international exploitation and the thought that the independent documentary of today, particularly the kind that incorporates activist art, has the equivalent perceived independence and force of the political pamphlet in 1729. We might question what it is that documentary in particular might add to such creative responses to social debate. What qualities are inherent in the documentary to promote this phenomenon? Of course, by asserting such a question the documentary form itself is privileged with an agency that is separate from that of the intervention. Counterarguments to this are that The Yes Men and The Yes Men Fix the World are not documentations and perhaps not documentaries either. As Stern points out, The Yes Men Fix the World might be better termed a ‘piece of strategic communication/persuasion’ or a ‘permutation of candid-camera reality television’ (Stern, 2009, p. 311). On the other hand, in her analysis of the film The Yes Men as parody, Kenny comments that The Yes Men is limited because it is a documentary and ‘as with any medium, film offers one version of events’ (Kenny, 2009, p. 231). That they might not be documentary films is also a product of the history of conceptual art, particularly of ephemeral art and of land art with its close links to environmental art practice. In the case of such art, the documentation is not a work in itself but a substitute for the real thing, a kind of shadow of its existence. The documentary form is a critical aspect of the Yes Men activities as, like the political pamphlet, it provides a definable framework to represent and reflect on the culturejamming activities that the Yes Men engage in. Critical to this analysis is the metarepresentational function of the documentary form that exploits a fundamental aspect of human communication that allows for meta-criticism and for satire itself to exist alongside a string of other sophisticated forms of public representation that seek to force the systems to observe themselves. Sperber and Wilson’s contrast between the ‘genuinely linguistic act of communication’ cited above and attributive uses of communicative gestures puts the imitation of other people’s behaviour into the echoic as discussed above, putting the focus not only on the content but on the speaker’s ‘attitude or reaction to that thought’. All of the Yes Men’s actions, their imitation of corporate behaviour, their hoax statements by false representatives of organizations, are examples of how this simple shift can be used in multiple ways to make points about human behaviour. The historically important version, that is satire, used by the Yes Men involves what Sperber and Wilson label a ‘dissociative attitude’ that has to be signalled in some way through tone of voice or an internal contradiction or implausibility to be understood triggering a reflection on the attributed thought. Of course this kind of self-reflexivity is a highly developed characteristic for conceptual art, for artistic forms of media critique and part of the Brechtian tradition that links the concept of industrial alienation with political theatre. The concept of self-reflexivity has come to be associated with the avant-garde, just as the concept of alienation is an integral part of political modernism. These movements look at the reflexive as both a condition and a tool that ultimately assists in the process of the social emancipation of the individual from capitalism 106

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and in the enlightened turn to collective action. The postmodernists, however, demonstrated that reflexivity does not necessarily result in political awareness, but can also be an apolitical process of coming to understand human social life and social networks as inevitably metatextual and alienated. Contemporary uses of reflexive and self-reflexive strategies can thus swing both ways so that the text needs to incorporate into itself a clear line on how they are to be interpreted, paradoxically leading to a need for sincerity at some level, for the spectator to know what is the ‘genuinely linguistic act of communication’ and what is a case of attribution. This is where the documentary form comes in. The Yes Men strategy is unusual in that their acts of identity correction are often not recognized as such and their hoaxes are so well carried out that they are effective as genuine acts of communication. In The Yes Men the audience at the ‘Textiles of the Future’ conference in 2002 in Tampere, Finland appear to take their brilliantly designed ‘managerial leisure suit’ with its huge phallus-like ‘Employee Visualization Appendage’ seriously. In The Yes Men Fix the World they also manage to find a hapless businessman to enthuse about their satirical ‘survivaball’ that they presented as corporate representatives of Halliburton at a LexisNexis conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Florida to protect again the effects of global warming. In the films the preparation for these stunts act as an explanation for their design so that the documentary audience is in a position to sit back and consider the meaning of it all. The documentary provides the framework, the necessary meta-level to understand the activities of the Yes Men and to interpret them as sincere attempts to critique a systemic lack of humanity in corporate environments. As such the documentary is designed to provoke ethical questions as Reuben Stern lists them in his concise and comprehensive review of the ethical dimensions of the film. The passage below is an abridged version: 1. Is the Yes Men’s use of deception to raise awareness of larger civic issues justifiable? 2.  What about forcing the involvement of a crowd of unsuspecting onlookers? 3. The manipulation of news professionals in the film points to obvious journalistic questions. 4. On a larger scale, to what extent is a news organization serving the public good by reporting on stunts such as these? 5. Since this film was directed by the central activist characters, is it truly a documentary? Or is it a piece of strategic communication/persuasion? Or is it another permutation of candid-camera reality television? (Stern, 2009, p. 311) With all these questions the whole Yes Men enterprise can be scrutinized and evaluated and further questions can be asked about why it is that such activities as culture jamming have developed, not only in the case of the Yes Men, but also within the music industry and the experimental film and video industries. It is here that the questions raised by research into the nature of human communication, which are somewhat abstract in the face of the highly complex surfaces built by culture 107

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jammers, can perhaps lift the discussion into anthropological, comparative questions about the ecology of global media use. What does the behaviour of the Yes Men and the kind of campaigns they attempt to promote through their websites mean in the context of contemporary society and culture more generally? Some enlightenment comes from going back to those titles cited at the beginning of this section. The title of the first film, The Yes Men, echoes the story about how Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanao, using pseudonyms for the film, were once corporate workers but were let down by their firms. After they have left the corporate world, they become men who imitate yes men – colloquially, people who always agree with their perceived superiors. Although they claim they are ‘gender neutral’ on their website, the issue of male pride is resonant in the whole concept of using ‘yes men’ ironically to mean an attempt to be more positive in an ethical sense. They are now The Yes Men who now refuse to be yes men but they still say yes. This raises the question of whether this attributive act is not so much defiance as helplessness. The title of the second film The Yes Men Fix the World echoes the thought that men who ‘fix the world’ are generally chatting over a beer rather than being real superheroes. And the latest title, The Yes Men Are Revolting, is another double entendre. A perhaps strange comparison can be made here to a well-known film by the ethnographer Jean Rouch, Les maîtres fous, translatable as ‘The Mad Masters’ made in the mid-1950s about the Hauka movement (Les maîtres fous, 1955). It is still impossible to interpret fully the images that this film presents and it was so provocative as a film that it was rejected by almost all audiences (Stoller, 1992, pp. 151‒153). Steven Feld explains: Les maîtres fous is about the Hauka, a possession cult among the Songhay that reached full expression in Ghana, where migrants from Niger brought it. The film shows cult members working at menial tasks in the city during the week, then in possession trances during the weekend, then back in the city context. Hauka members become possessed by colonial and technological masters. Because the actual ritual depicted in the film is violent, and is disturbing to many viewers, Rouch was urged by friends to destroy the film; he refused on the grounds that the participants in the film had themselves requested it to be made. (Rouch, 2003, pp. 5‒6) The Hauka movement, which began in the 1920s and ended with the independence of Ghana, involved a form of collective mimicry of colonial officers and administrators in which the participants achieved trance-like states or states of possession in which they acted out something like a parody of the military rituals of the colonial powers. It became a matter of controversy to interpret whether these events were an expression of subordination or of insubordination and liberation, an attempt to gain power over through mockery or to assimilate the colonial presence, to resist it or to steal it or take it over. However it is to be interpreted, participation was only permitted if a member had become possessed and could demonstrate possession over a period of months, indicating a form of authenticity. In an interview with John Marshall and John W. Adams transcribed in Steven Feld’s edited volume 108

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of his work in Ciné-Ethnography, Rouch described the Hauka as having ‘an attitude of both mockery and respect’ (Rouch, 2003, p. 189). More generally he describes the movement as a religion: ‘These religions are a kind of inconscient collectif. The people can’t explain what they’re doing; they can only show what they’re thinking of, and it means that during these years from the twenties to independence, they were thinking of power – military, administrative, bureaucratic power – and now they are thinking of sex and death’ (Rouch, 2003, p. 194). Coming back now to the Yes Men and their activities with respect to contemporary US and global corporate society, they explain very precisely what the purpose and meaning of their activities is and so they cannot be described as an inconscient collectif. Indeed it would also be interesting to see how the Hauka might, in fact, have explained the logic of their movement. But logic cannot explain entirely why exactly the Yes Men chose to attempt to take over the powers of the corporate world through the wearing of costumes, the parodying of presentations and PowerPoint and the production and distribution of fake newspapers, rather than more straightforwardly and comprehensively campaigning against corporate activities. The act of broadcasting a lie, of putting on the clothes and speaking in the tones of the corporate representative and hoaxing the worldwide audience of the BBC World Service might be seen as a trance-like act of sheer courage induced by the media context that both takes up and undermines the power that it is concerned with. In this sense the documentaries become part of a ritual of filming and assisting, echoing the broadcast media in a process that is not fully understood but which, alongside an increasing amount of video activism, is clearly an attempt to find a way out of a systematically oppressive form of managed existence to find sincerity at a different level. The irony of consciousness This final example from Werner Herzog represents a further interesting case in which ironizing activity tips over into sincerity. As one of the directors of the New German Cinema of the 1970s and 1980s Herzog established his reputation as a daring and largerthan-life film-maker exploring the megalomaniac tendencies in humankind and the traces of human folly left on postcolonial landscapes. He seems to have strayed rather than to have marched into the realm of the environmental documentary. His film Lessons of Darkness/ Lektionen in Finsternis (1992), focussing on the aftermath of the first Iraq war and highly controversial in its blend of Wagnerian music, science fiction, fictional documentary and spectacular aerial imagery of the burning oil wells in Kuwait, has nevertheless been read as an experimental environmental film by Scott Macdonald and others (MacDonald, 2001). Grizzly Man (2005), a documentary exploring the life of Timothy Treadwell, who chose to live illegally in the Alaskan wilderness to protect, as he felt it, the grizzly bears, has been read as a wildlife film that reflects on ‘human ideals of love’ by Jennifer Ladino (Ladino, 2009). 109

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However, these films are not accounts of the need to address environmental issues but a continuation of Herzog’s explorations of one particular species, homo sapiens, looking in particular at the relationship between the species and habitat. In Herzog’s films there is a focus on the observation of the external signs of inner struggles, with the body acting as an inadequate container for the desire to conquer and shape individual and collective identity. Landscapes, particularly spectacular landscapes in whatever form, become a cipher for the expansion of human desire beyond the body, prompting Alan Singer to see his work as a form of the ‘ironic sublime’ (Singer, 1986). In his early film-making, for example in the film Signs of Life (1968), a soldier who is going mad runs through a landscape dominated by wind turbines that feature as both a cause and an expression of madness, an image that reflects on the story of Don Quixote who tilted at windmills. In his experimental travelogue across North Africa, Fata Morgana (1972), he explores the traces of these inner struggles on the landscape in a quasi-anthropological voice-over and fixes the camera on objects in the landscape, such as abandoned tanks and aeroplanes, as evidence for a long-lost paradise. In La Souffrière: Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe (1977), in which he climbs an active volcano, he demonstrates the human attraction to sublime self-destruction. Encounters at the End of the World fits into Herzog’s oeuvre as a study of a category of human beings known as ‘scientists’ as well as other supporting characters who spend some months of the year working at the South Pole. The landscape is clearly marked by their efforts and they are also clearly marked by their work. Herzog’s documentary is quite conventional in the ways it gives an account of the arrival of the film-maker and his visits to various sites of scientific fieldwork. It is at the same time unusual in its montage of a variety of kinds of footage that do and don’t quite fit into various categories commonly used to present visible evidence in the environmental debate: nature documentary footage taken by an amateur friend who is not quite happy with it; question and answer interviews where the interviewees are not quite sure why they are the object of attention; awkward observation, humorous enactment, pretend exploration, training of dubious value, adventure that falls a bit flat. The commentary provided by Herzog prevents the whole from turning into a mockumentary but points to ways in which the film can be read as a meta-environmental documentary, a cousin of Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread (Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan, 1933), a surrealist comment on eco-political uses of art and the media. This film-making enterprise is also unusual in that its institutional progress can be traced in the form of an application to the American National Science Foundation for a grant to pursue a project. Proposal number 0538072, the project summary reads as follows: Werner Herzog, world-renowned film-maker, will travel to Antarctica to create a documentary film about the Antarctic landscape. The project, Antarctica: the Inner Landscape, will be based on the artists’ perception that the continent’s volcanic activity, geological history, evolution and survival of life, represents the inner landscape of our 110

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planet. In addition, Herzog’s film will focus on the lesser-documented ‘strange forms of life’, and the scientists who study them. The artist and his cinematographer will work at Fang Camp, Mt. Erebus, and New Harbor Field Camp to interview scientists and capture footage that will result in a poetic, feature-length film documentary on Antarctica, Antarctic Science, and Scientists working there. The film will give viewers the rare opportunity to experience Antarctica and learn about the ongoing research. (National Science Foundation, 2006) The prediction that the film would gain a significant level of media coverage turned out to be correct. According to the IMDb the film had grossed $943,934 in the United States by November 2008 and was nominated for several awards including the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2009. The film itself also bears the imprint of its encounter with a different funding structure as well as with its encounters with the scientific community on the continent. As the evaluation of the project puts it, ‘the film captures the human side of Antarctic science along with the excitement of discovery and the relevance of science to society’, and it shows ‘a diverse array of people involved in science’ (National Science Foundation, 2006). At the beginning of the film on the plane to Antarctica Herzog relates in a voice-over that he was surprised to be invited as his research questions had not been conventional: I left no doubt that I would not come up with another film about penguins. My questions about nature, I let them know, were different. I told them I kept wondering why is it that human beings put on masks or feathers to conceal their identity? And why do they saddle horses and feel the urge to chase the bad guy? Hi-yo, Silver! And why is it that certain species of ants keep flocks of plant lice as slaves to milk them for droplets of sugar? I asked them why is it that a sophisticated animal like a chimp does not utilize inferior creatures? He could straddle a goat and ride off into the sunset. Despite my odd questions, I found myself landing on the ice runway at McMurdo. (Encounters at the End of the World, 2007) Beginning in this way it is clear that Herzog has opinions about representations of nature and that his tendency is towards a surreal understanding and representation of species somewhat like the development of Surrealist scientific film-making first established in the late 1920s by Jean Painlevé, who appeared as the ‘chief ant handler’ in Luis Buñuel’s Un chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) (1929) and made many films under the credo ‘Science is Fiction’ (Painlevé, 2009), including pioneering techniques for filming underwater. Herzog’s reference to ants in his introduction as well as his ‘focus on the lesser-documented “strange forms of life” and the scientists who study them’ (Encounters at the End of the World, 2007) can be read as an homage to Painlevé’s work. While Painlevé edged towards Surrealism in the ways in which the insect, plant, fish and animal life he recorded brought out human characteristics, Herzog works in Encounters at 111

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the End of the World in the other direction, studying scientists as dreamers who express their desires, fears and anxieties through their scientific projects. It is in the study of scientists as human beings that Herzog’s work is original and potentially transformative. Environmental issues come out of the film through the portrayal of McMurdo and as a by-product of the encounter with the scientists for whom global warming in particular represents a contemporary issue. At no point in the film does Herzog ask his subjects to make political statements about the environment. They speak only about their research. However, the most obvious piece of research relating to global warming is undertaken by Douglas MacAveal, a glaciologist interviewed at the beginning of the film. The style of the film here overlaps most clearly with contemporary documentaries about global warming as MacAveal demonstrates the images he has created through computer modelling to understand the movement of Glacier 51 that he is studying. MacAveal’s account of his research demonstrates how the scientific position differs from that of political discourse. First he explains how scientists have falsely understood the ice fields in the past as static and that part of what has happened in the last decade has been a greater understanding of them as dynamic. Although this represents a change in understanding rather than a change in the state of the glaciers, there is in addition the possibility that the mobility of the ice fields and movement north is a consequence of human activity. However it is seen, this movement is presented as irreversible so that: Now our comfortable thought about Antarctica is over. Now we’re seeing it as a living being that’s dynamic, that’s producing change, change that it’s broadcasting to the rest of the world, possibly in response to what the world is broadcasting down to Antarctica. Certainly on a gut level it’s going to be frightening to watch what happens to these babies once they get north. (Encounters at the End of the World, 2007) By asking scientists about their scientific activity and engaging them in performances as part of the making of the film there is a sense that a slightly different message becomes audible that has to do with the feelings and projections of science rather than the empirical and positivist processes of recording and testing. The projects in the film look at aspects of nutrition gleaned from evidence provided by lactating seals, at the variety of single-cell organisms in the Antarctic waters, at volcanic activity and social behaviour in penguins (after all). A project to catch a subatomic particle named a neutrino using a gigantic white balloon seems as fantastic as the search for the ether breathed in by the ancient Greek gods. The phrase ‘global warming’ appears only once and it is not uttered by a scientist but rather by an infrastructure worker who is attempting to create a business selling environmental homes. The most relevant aspect as far as environmental issues are concerned is the representation of McMurdo as a dump and of scientists’ activities as inherently destructive as they use explosives to blast access holes into the ice. Herzog complains that McMurdo boasts ‘climate-controlled housing facilities, its own radio station, a bowling alley and 112

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abominations such as an aerobic studio and yoga classes’ (Encounters at the End of the World, 2007). Towards the end of the film the subject of the end of the human race is discussed and, with his customary long view on the subject of human civilization, Herzog comments: ‘there is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them agree the end of human life on this earth is assured. Human life is part of an endless chain of catastrophes, the demise of the dinosaurs being just one of these events. We seem to be next’ (Encounters at the End of the World, 2007). While he retains his equanimity about the ultimate fate of human kind he becomes suddenly irate about a story told by one of the infrastructure workers, a former linguist who has abandoned a project on a dying language having been persuaded that it might harbour some form of evil. Herzog had already made a film in Australia in which the last speaker of an Australian Aboriginal language is described as ‘mute’ not because he cannot speak but because he has no one to speak to in his own tongue (Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen/ Where the Green Ants Dream, 1984). The linguist’s story prompts an outburst in Herzog: In our efforts to preserve endangered species, we seem to overlook something equally important. To me, it is a sign of a deeply disturbed civilization where tree huggers and whale huggers in their weirdness are acceptable, while no one embraces the last speakers of a language. (Encounters at the End of the World, 2007) In Encounters at the End of the World Herzog works against the deification of scientists and against the prettification of the landscape but paradoxically for a better understanding of human culture. The spirit of adventure and inquiry and the need for human beings to seek it out are acknowledged. In railing against ugliness and the loss of culture but accepting extinction as the natural outcome, Herzog’s film constitutes a revealing, contradictory experiment in alternative attitudes to environmental science and communication, and in actively thwarting expectations it points to the ironies of scientific inquiry as a fundamentally contradictory force. Herzog’s film is not using irony to show up the political manipulations of the corporate business community or of the scientific community, but to distance his voice from both of these and from the environmental movement as well. The perspective he seeks in Encounters at the End of the World is perhaps best expressed as romantic irony, a selfconscious kind of film in which the scientists agree to lie down on the ice to listen, to dress up in period costume to visit a volcano or to answer questions on why a penguin might randomly walk off into the distance. At the same time it is a film in which the characters persist in communicating about their passions and their beliefs. The forklift operator’s interpretation of the American philosopher Alan Watts expresses a modern sense of coherence about the universe rather than Herzog’s Romantic idea of its chaos: ‘he used to say that through our eyes, the universe is perceiving itself, and through our ears, the universe is listening to its cosmic harmonies, and we are the witness through which 113

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the universe becomes conscious of its glory, of its magnificence’ (Encounters at the End of the World, 2007). The variations on this consciousness of consciousness pervade the film throughout the encounters with the scientists, their co-workers and those who have ended up as part of the infrastructure. The concerted attempt not to fit the Antarctic and the scientists engaged in projects there to the models of science and scientists expected and provided by all kinds of film genres, environmental films included, is what turns it into an ironic anti-environmental-documentary and hence also perhaps the most paradoxically genuine film of all.

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Chapter 5 The Argumentative Response

My backyard wasn’t my backyard anymore, it belonged to everybody else too.

(Gasland, 2010)

Introduction: argument and intuition Between 2000 and 2010 three productions about the environment won the Academy Award for Best Documentary: Luc Jacquet’s March of the Penguins (2005) in 2006, Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) in 2007 and Louie Psihoyos’s The Cove (2009) in 2010. March of the Penguins, as a sustained observation of a natural phenomenon, has been criticized for its anthropomorphism and for its failure to make explicit the threats to the environment depicted. However, arguments can be made in its favour. As Sean Cubitt puts it in his defence of the BBC series Blue Planet, high production values and the emphasis on wonder can be understood as expressing the intrinsic value of the natural world (Cubitt, 2005). And as Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter: ‘We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism – the idea that human agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature – to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world’ (Bennett, 2010, p. xvi). An Inconvenient Truth and The Cove are both films that put across an explicit argument about an environmental issue. As such they are not engaging in entertainment but they still manage to put across their messages in a creative and popular way. In so doing they achieve a significant goal for environmental activism, gaining attention for a cause that attempts to promote political and social change. In winning such a prestigious award they use the institutional networks of film-making not just to gain attention for the film but also for the cause of climate-change activism and animal activism respectively. Although An Inconvenient Truth might be labelled a biography, The Cove has been called a ‘heist film’ and both use biographical narratives to frame their messages, they also need to be understood as films that put forward in many different forms a linked set of reasons to support a central argument. An Inconvenient Truth sets out to convince viewers that the scientific evidence for global warming is incontrovertible. The Cove seeks to persuade viewers that an annual slaughter of dolphins that takes place in Taiji on the coast of Japan should be stopped. The focus on the argument rather than the context distinguishes it from the contemplative and the ironic response and makes it the expression of an argumentative response to environmental issues. To understand the documentaries as argumentative responses is different from understanding them as arguments. The reduction of the films to their arguments of course

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leaves out most of what they are – emotionally and intellectually charged words, images and sounds that can be interpreted in different ways but that, for the film-makers, clearly add up to a central conclusion. The point of understanding the films as argumentative responses is to assert a difference between the need to contemplate a problem, the ironic sense that there is something skew with the way of thinking about a problem and the need, often urgent, to solve a problem. Activism is such a response and such environmental documentaries are generally called ‘activist’. One hypothesis might be to say that the response to environmental issues is first to think and contemplate and then to build up to an action plan. The argument here is that a contemplative response remains contemplative even if it involves reasoning and possible solutions. The ironic response also represents a consistent state of mind. Similarly an argumentative response begins right from the beginning and is an immediate response to awareness, remaining in place as a strategy even if a particular argument appears ineffective or defeated. The point of the argument is that it is an argument, an active subjective engagement that is looking for support, for collective action. This characterization draws on recent work into the relationships between argumentation, reasoning and communication. The separation between reason and emotion or between cognition and feeling has been broken down in studies that demonstrate that reasoning does not function properly without the motivational elements provided by feeling and emotion. In their article ‘An argumentative approach to reasoning’ Mercier and Sperber argue that reasoning is not a separate cognitive ability but dependent on the mechanisms that enable communication. In particular they understand argument – the explicit laying out of reasons for a conclusion – as a social ability that evolved alongside communication. They argue further that there is also a mechanism, which they label ‘epistemic vigilance’ (Sperber et al., 2010), that is activated in response. Mercier and Sperber’s mission is to demonstrate that reasoning is at the service of argument as a tool for bringing about collective activity that will assist in individual survival. An important part of their thesis is that reasons are generated not consciously but intuitively. What we become conscious of are the outputs – arguments or conclusions – of this intuitive process. What we then engage in as conscious reasoning is an attempt to retrieve the steps that have already taken place. They describe reasoning as: [a] very special form of inference at the conceptual level, where not only is a new mental representation (or conclusion) consciously produced, but the previously held representations (or premises) that warrant it are also consciously entertained. The premises are seen as providing reasons to accept the conclusion. (Mercier and Sperber, 2011, p. 57) Mercier and Sperber’s understanding of reasoning and its relationship to argument offers some insights for understanding the argumentative response in environmental documentary films. Most important about their theory is the link between intuitive inference and conscious reasoning because of the insight it gives into the personal level in which a conclusion is accepted 118

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‘because of an argument in its favour that is intuitively strong enough’ (Mercier and Sperber, 2011, p. 59). What is significant about this point is that the film is to be understood as a public action of reproducing a personal response in order to persuade others. The film in effect is an attempt to make an audio-visual version of the personal intuitive process of coming to a point of view (Mercier and Sperber, 2011, p. 59). Environmental documentaries often make this explicit by linking the argument of the documentary with the life story of a presenter or participant in the film. In An Inconvenient Truth the family home, education, near-tragedy, professional success and failure are all included in the explanation for why Al Gore began his campaign on climate change. These might be separated from the scientific arguments put forward in the slide show, but they make sense alongside the science as an additional, also legitimate, part of an intuitive process of arriving at a conclusion. They counter the possibility that there may be more cynical motivations such as business interest or a desire for glory. The same process can be seen in The Cove in which Ric O’Barry tells the story of how he became an activist on behalf of dolphins. His story of his success as a dolphin trainer but his growing personal witnessing of the suffering of the animals is the main reason behind the argument that the dolphin hunt in Taiji must stop. The film does not bring scientific experts to cite studies on the capacity of animals to suffer into the story but relies on the empathy of viewers and their general knowledge about dolphins. Again the account given of the personal journey towards the making of the film, including the controversial use of deception and trespass to get the shots needed to make the case, are in part countered by the sincerity of the commitment. The charge of racist attitudes towards the Japanese is also mitigated at least to some extent by the story leading up to the confrontation. A similar kind of argumentation can be found in other documentaries about animal activism such as Rod Stewart’s autobiographical film about sharks (Sharkwater, 2006) or Pirate for the Sea, a biography about Paul Watson, star of the TV show Whale Wars, that seeks to explain and justify his sometimes violent tactics against sea vessels engaged in whaling or other internationally proscribed fishing. A key sequence in the film is an interview with Watson about a by now famous incident in which a Russian whaling ship shot a harpoon at the Greenpeace activists. Watson does not describe the near miss with the harpoon so much as the encounter with the whale: Our idea to save the whales was to put ourselves bodily between the whales and the whalers […] They struck a female in a pod of sperm whales and suddenly the bull came full out of the water. We were told that the whale would attack us and we were waiting with a lot of anxiety for this whale to do just that when I turned because the ocean erupted behind me and the sperm whale had thrown himself out of the water straight at the harpooner on the bow of the Russian vessel. And they fired a harpoon and it exploded and the whale fell back and it was screaming and rolling in the water, blood everywhere. I looked up past these six-inch teeth into an eye the size of my fist and what I saw there was understanding, that the whale understood what we were trying to do. He could have very easily come forward and crushed us and seized us in his jaws and killed us and instead what he did was 119

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slowly slide back into the water, eye-to-eye contact all the way, and went beneath the waves and died. What I also saw in that eye was pity. Pity not for himself or for his kind but pity for us, that we would be capable of committing such an abominable act against nature. (Pirate for the Sea, 2008) Mercier and Sperber’s analysis of reasoning, as at the service of argument to gain collective support, also provides an explanation for the ways in which environmental documentaries bring together narrative commentary, the verbal evidence of experts and the visual evidence of impacts on the environment as a process of taking viewers through a simulation of a personal journey towards conviction and activism. Although films, such as The End of the Line (2009), spell out their arguments fully, using catch statistics and expert statements about the analysis of such data as well as personal testimony, to argue for the need for aquatic nature reserves, much of the reasoning is left for the viewer to complete. Image events John Delicath and Kevin DeLuca (DeLuca, 1999) (Delicath and DeLuca, 2003) have written about the transformation of the actions of radical ecological campaigners working with organizations such as Greenpeace and Earth First! into media events as ‘image events’ arguing that they are ‘a form of postmodern argumentative practice, a kind of oppositional argument that creates social controversy and which animates and widens possibilities for debate’ (Delicath and DeLuca, 2003). They argue that in a context where television represents the ‘prime real estate’ of communicative possibility, campaigning groups have developed a tactic to infiltrate a highly protected public sphere through the development of high-profile events to attract news attention. The aim in the construction of these events is the creation of visually resonant scenes that can be consumed as truncated arguments or enthymemes from which the public can go on to form opinions about environmental issues. Delicath and Deluca see the images as oppositional arguments and ‘capable of operating as claimsmaking, reason-giving, opinion-shaping communication and therefore instrumental to the practice of public argument’ (Delicath and DeLuca, 2003, p. 321). Activist documentary film-making has been profoundly influenced by the media tactics pursued by radical environmental groups. Some documentaries exist in part to extend their influence. As Delicath and DeLuca argue, part of what is conveyed by an image event, such as the struggle with the whaling ship described by DeLuca at the opening to his book Image Politics, is the legitimacy of protest and of civil disobedience. Documentary films (Sharkwater, 2006) (Just Do It: A Tale of Modern-day Outlaws, 2011) explicitly aim to demonstrate the story behind the act and to fill out some of missing premises that legitimize the argument. Nevertheless the image event itself also becomes embedded into the documentary film. Besides the sequences that represent public protest and civil disobedience, environmentally activist documentaries also create images that represent private protest on the part of the 120

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film‑makers who are engaged in research. An example from The End of the Line is a sequence showing what happens when a trawler drags its nets along the bottom of the ocean. The overall argument of the film is that there need to be undisturbed protected havens so that species have a chance to breed and to grow and there is a chance for a stable ecosystem to develop. The devastation caused by the trawler offers a powerful reason why such havens should exist as it is clear that the nets do not leave anything behind. The commentary points out that where there is no developed ecosystem there is only sludge and a verbal image is offered of an ocean of sludge. The image can be understood as a significant reason within an overall argument. In their discussion of the image event Delicath and DeLuca write that ‘image events are an argumentative form characterized by fragmentation. Image events communicate not arguments, but argumentative fragments in the form of unstated propositions, indirect and incomplete claims, visual refutation, and implied alternatives’ (Delicath and DeLuca, 2003, p. 322). The image event is seen as a resource that can be used as ‘fodder for argumentation’ and they see audiences as using them to place into their own arguments as part of an ‘inventional resource’. Such a process they see as postmodern in that its fragmentariness or incompleteness in terms of arguments fits into a view of a society in which there is no overall argument or narrative but competing possible arguments and narratives and dominant narratives. In this context an image event need not be assertive in terms of its own argument, it can also be a refutation of another, perhaps dominant argument such as the argument that technological progress – bigger, more powerful boats that catch more fish – is necessarily good. Within the economy of a documentary film, images and words in the form of interviews and commentary interact to create a coherent context for argument. However, it is clear that the material brought together in the film can be still read in various ways. Documentary film is not as inherently radical as the staged protest of the activist that brings along the broadcast media. Nevertheless the strategies of protest have themselves been derived from various practices in the arts and in film-making and in the history of civil disobedience. The relationship between words and images in documentary film, like other forms, has loosened with a considerable reduction of emphasis on words. The End of the Line in this respect goes against the trend in making connections between reasons and arguments explicit and as a result has received different responses from the scientific community and film criticism (Geddes, 2009) (Ivan, 2009). Deliberative and agonistic politics The number of arguments that may be found in environmental documentaries is multiple but as Neil Carter argues in his textbook The Politics of the Environment, exclusively environmentalist arguments can be limited to two central ones that distinguish ecological politics from other forms: ‘the need to reconceptualise the human-nature relationship and 121

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the acceptance of the idea of limits to growth’ (Carter, 2007, p. 76). Around these ideas a wide range of views exists on how the human–nature relationship is to be understood and how the conceptualization of the economy is to be changed in response to resource scarcity and the unsustainable nature of polluting practices. The topics that have provoked argumentative documentaries have combined aspects of the limits to growth and the human–nature relationship: they include the effects of the globalization of food markets on the environment (Food Inc., 2008) (Roberts, 2008) (WE FEED THE WORLD: Essen Global, 2005); the existence of anthropogenic global warming (An Inconvenient Truth, 2006) (The 11th Hour, 2007) (The Age of Stupid, 2009); species extinction, particularly the threats posed by global overfishing as discussed above; and the choice of strategy for the development of renewable energy (Die vierte Revolution: Energy Autonomy/The Fourth Revolution: Energy, 2010). Some themes, such as water – managing too much or too little water, the creation of dams, the privatization of drinking water, the rising sea level – or refuse management in the megacity, are beginning to create documentary subgenres of their own with numerous lists available online. The argument of arguments Global warming, or climate change, has been woven in to almost all environmental arguments in the first decade of the twenty-first century. ‘The mother of all problems’ as it is often referred to has produced a myriad of documentary responses to ‘sceptics’ who seek to refute the scientific evidence that the burning of fossil fuels, the intensification of agriculture and the gradual destruction of forests, particularly the rainforests of South America, is causing a rise in global temperatures and consequent climate change. As we have already seen in the discussion of Everything’s Cool some have argued that the debate has been the result of a deliberate media strategy on the part of energy corporations recognizing the possible effects of the scientific message on the oil, coal and gas industries. For these reasons, the importance for environmental documentary film-making of the success of An Inconvenient Truth cannot be overstated. While the Yes Men bring out the inanity and ineptitude of much corporate use of visual material and gimmicks in the pitching of ideas and products, Al Gore demonstrates the virtuosity of the slide show as it is used in science. Referring to the spectacular archive of images available from NASA and all kinds of material collected from his scientific colleagues and friends, he describes the long development of his material over a number of years, adding more reasons or fragments to his argument as he recognizes the gaps: ‘trying to identify all those things in people’s minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this’ (An Inconvenient Truth, 2006). His language describing his response to barriers to understanding is violent: ‘I try to take it apart, roll it away, move it, demolish it, blow it up.’ The film even invents a new kind of ‘image event’ in the construction of the graph demonstrating the relationship between the increase in carbon emissions and the increase 122

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in global temperature. Mounting a lift to demonstrate how high the levels have become Gore succeeded in creating a commentary on that event all on its own. The global impact of this film when it was released in 2006 was considerable. The scrutiny it received focussed not only on Al Gore himself as the conveyor of the message but also on each reason put forward as part of his argument. The film was attacked not only by the so-called climate change sceptics but also by deep green environmentalists who saw his argument as primarily a ‘bright green’ bid for subsidies for renewable energy projects, which Gore himself had invested in (Luke, 2008). All of these issues take on a particular urgency as they include arguments about the future of the planet and of the survival of human civilization. They also raise questions about how the politics of the environment are to be conducted. Is the situation urgent enough to permit civil disobedience? Who is responsible for the future, governments or every single individual? Is it possible for democracies as they are run today, dependent on strong economies and on constant growth, to confront the issues raised by environmental concern? Deliberative, agonistic and ecological debate While the contemplative response to environmental issues can be understood in the context of the sociology of everyday life, and the ironic response can be seen as arising out the critique of environmental communication in the public sphere, the argumentative response can be connected to a long and continuing debate, within the environmental movement and beyond it, about conscious, responsible and democratic decision making. Part of this debate includes the decision to use media forms such as documentary at all. The presence of the camera is disruptive in face-to-face communication, encouraging rhetoric and the staging of conflict rather than reasoned debate. Despite this, almost all environmental documentaries include in their arguments a position on the need for transparency and open debate. Contemporary debates about the practice of environmental politics tend to cluster around two models. The deliberative model, often seen as based on Jürgen Habermas’s work on the public sphere, attempts to engage all sections of society affected by an environmental issue in the decision making process not only in voting on alternatives but also in formulating the alternative paths available. The process of formulation and decision making is preceded by deliberation. It is frequently argued that this model has become the dominant one in the post-industrial economies of the twenty-first century. This process of arriving at consensus contrasts with an antagonistic, or more formalized agonistic, model of political change developed from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s post-Marxist work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985). Mouffe argued in an article entitled Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism published at the beginning of the new millennium that deliberative democracy fails because ‘the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions nor to relegate them to 123

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the private sphere in order to render rational consensus possible, but to mobilise those passions towards the promotion of democratic designs’ (Mouffe, 1999, pp. 755‒756). In this article addressing the problem of how to engage the general public in democratic debate in an era of extremist identity politics she reasserted antagonism as both the driver of political debate and the fuel for genuine engagement and warned against the attempt to erase it: To make room for dissent and to foster the institutions in which it can be manifested is vital for a pluralist democracy and one should abandon the very idea that there could ever be a time in which it would cease to be necessary because the society is now ‘well ordered’. An ‘agonistic’ approach acknowledges the real nature of its frontiers and the forms of exclusion that they entail, instead of trying to disguise them under the veil of rationality or morality. (Mouffe, 1999, p. 756) Documentaries that have manifested an argumentative response to environmental issues in the course of the decade can be placed on a spectrum with respect to their deliberative or antagonistic approach, with An Inconvenient Truth tending towards consensus politics and political process and Just Do It! advocating activism even where it provokes conflict and clashes with the law. In the middle of the decade, John Dryzek, responding to Chantal Mouffe, argued that ‘elements of both’ agonistic and deliberative politics can be deployed even in deeply divided societies by including ‘the engagement of discourses’ (Dryzek, 2005, p. 224). To meet the criteria of deliberative democracy, however, he argues: [t]hree tests must be applied to secure the intersubjective understanding prized by deliberative democrats. Once we move beyond ritualistic openings, communication is required to be first, capable of inducing reflection; second, noncoercive; and third, capable of linking the particular experience of an individual or group with some more general point or principle. (Dryzek, 2005, p. 224) Discussing the combination of rhetoric and argument in particular, Dryzek cites the examples of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, writing that their influence, brought about by a combination of rhetoric and argument, is what Habermas referred to as ‘communicative power’ (Dryzek, 2005, p. 235). This power is sought by documentary activists in their presentation of journalists and celebrities (The 11th Hour, 2007), articulate representatives of the research community (The End of the Line, 2009), members of the public willing to ‘step up’ (Just Do It: A Tale of Modern-day Outlaws, 2011), local experts (WE FEED THE WORLD: Essen Global, 2005) and activist stars (Pirate for the Sea, 2008). The process of making the documentary itself is capable of turning directors as citizen activists into 124

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prominent public figures, taking Josh Fox and his campaign against hydraulic fracturing as an example (Gasland, 2010). Climate change politics and the discursive communities The arguments that are put forward are enormously diverse, however, and it is not possible to come to any conclusions based on watching such documentaries. Even within individual documentaries – here The 11th Hour is a prime example – different voices appear to express contradictory responses to environmental challenges. Back in 1997 John Dryzek created a taxonomy mapping the many different environmental ‘discursive communities’ in his book The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses identifying eight different discourses besides the dominant discourse (Dryzek, 1997). Other experts in environmental communication such as Anabela Carvalho and Tarla Rai Peterson in their book Climate Change Politics have set out different taxonomies for the twenty-first century to define narrower areas, with Carvalho and Peterson making the claim, for example, that climate change can ‘breathe new life into contemporary democracies’ because of its wide impacts on different communities’ (Carvalho and Peterson, 2012, p.  1). Carvalho and Peterson argue: Climate change politics may involve more stakeholders than any other issue: governments play a key part but so do international organizations, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Moreover climate change can be effectively addressed only through sustained citizen engagement. The far-reaching transformations that are needed to respond to climate change and to move to a different model of energy production and use require the involvement of citizens at the political level: decisions have to be made in a democratic way that is simultaneously inclusive and effective in the long term. (Carvalho and Peterson, 2012, pp. 1‒2) Again this debate is reflected in the documentary texts. The films themselves, as I have been arguing, are representative of citizen responses to the issues. At the same time, argumentative responses are a deliberate call for awareness and scrutiny of the issues, a call for debate, for a process of collective thinking. This angle asks not only about the relationship between the public sphere and the state but about the capacity of the discursive film text to influence individual minds and behaviour, bearing in mind that politicians and managers are also human beings. The debate about documentary film-making is thus part of the bigger, more fundamental debate about democracy addressing the relationship between the science of climate change and the transformation of civic politics. Again as Carvalho and Peterson put it: ‘Just as political action may affect climate change, climate change may affect the political’ (Carvalho and Peterson, 2012, pp. 1–2). 125

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The energy debate Towards the end of the decade and beyond it, the debate has turned away from arguing the case for climate change to scrutiny of the causes and proposed solutions. The argument that the apocalyptic tone of some of the documentaries on global warming was counterproductive briefly fed into the production of more positive films about the future such as Robert Fechner’s Die vierte Revolution/The Fourth Revolution: Energy (2010) arguing for the viability of renewable power even in the most energy-dense economies. This strand, however, with its tendency to advertise industry, has moved away from argument to the immersive and spectacular display of engineering. The subject of oil production has produced the highest number of documentaries in this area, ranging from studies that demonstrate the polluting effects on local, often indigenous communities, to films linking energy production to conspiracy theories or to patriotism, to debates about the concept of ‘peak oil’. The Alberta Tar Sands in particular have provoked a number of independent and television documentaries (Takach, 2014 in press). At the end of the decade the film Gasland (2010), telling the story of how Josh Fox, a young New York theatre and short-film director became a ‘natural gas drilling detective’ and documentary film-maker, started up a new cycle of films focussing on a drilling technique called ‘hydraulic fracturing’. His film is about the environmental damage caused by the natural gas drilling boom to rural areas across the United States and about the particular threat posed to drinking water by the proposal to drill in the Delaware River Basin, the watershed for drinking water in New York and Pennsylvania. As even Greg Staple, the CEO of the pro-drilling organization the American Clean Skies Foundation, put it in a postscreening discussion, the film ‘delivers a big emotional wallop’ (American Clean Skies Foundation, 2010‒2012). It is a concerted attempt to stop the practice of hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania, and its global dissemination has made it part of an international effort on the part of environmental activists to prevent it worldwide. Fox’s film, began spontaneously, like so many independent environmental film projects, out of a ‘need to find out what was going on’. As it developed and gained momentum it was funded by individual donations, the Sundance Documentary Film Programme Reach Fund, Cinereach and the Fledgling Fund. It is a good example to focus on as a case study because the issues raised in and by the film are central to the general question about the contribution made by activist environmental documentaries. Visible evidence The process of making documentaries is often treated as transparent by environmental communicators, but for documentary studies, non-fiction film-making has been the site of a particular set of battles because of the ways in which it makes claims about the relationship between representation, communication and the real. The issues that emerge 126

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from the documentary debate are closely linked to those that confront environmental communications professionals, themselves confronted with the question of how the public is to be informed or persuaded by the traditional media most effectively. In various works such as We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1993), first published in English in 1993; Politics of Nature (Latour, 2004), first published in English in 2003; and Reassembling the Social (Latour, 2005), Bruno Latour has pinpointed some of the ways in which the modern world is designed to make it difficult, if not impossible, for scientific insights to be shared with the public at large in a way that will effectively influence political debate and decision making. Latour addresses in particular the problem of representation, arguing that a separation of politics from science, or from nature, has made it impossible for any such thing to occur in our modern world, ‘a world in which the representation of things through the intermediary of the laboratory is forever dissociated from the representation of citizens through the intermediary of the social contract’ (Latour, 1993). Latour has written about the efforts to bring science and politics back together in the sociology of science and about the strong resistance to the claim that scientific facts, like political ones, are constructed by the community. The claim that science has direct and infallible access to nature and that scientific facts are ‘real’ and not constructed has given it a powerful claim on the truth but its separation from politics has meant that the activities of the scientific and technological community have been brought into politics only when its products have forced a political debate. Latour calls these products – giving the discovery of the hazards of asbestos as an example – ‘hybrid objects’, hybrid because they have a social and political dimension as well as a scientific one. Hybrid objects are non-human objects created by and for human society so that they have social and natural characteristics. Latour proposes that hybrid objects are the norm and that science and politics, or the non-human and the human, by necessity have been reconnected case by case while the modern ‘constitution’ has kept them separate (Latour, 1993). What has been proposed by his analysis over the past two decades is a change of direction that had already been signalled in various fields besides social theory. Latour himself refers to the practice of anthropologists who, he writes, are ‘pretty good at tackling everything at once.’ The work of ethnographic film-makers who have influenced enormously the directions taken by contemporary documentary might be included in that statement (Grimshaw, 2011). Latour’s interpretation of the relationships between politics, science and the history of ideas is helpful in clarifying the debates in contemporary documentary about the postmodern approach to scientific facts. This debate has been of great significance for environmental and activist documentarists who, as I wrote in an article about the much-disputed film Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), are interested in conveying truth about their subjects and in persuading audiences to change their beliefs and behaviours on the basis of their films (Hughes, 2012). Latour makes the obvious point that to say that people see things from their own perspective and that people assign values differently. However, to say that truth is relative is not to say that truth does not exist. Even more importantly, Latour emphasizes the importance of going after the complex, relative truth by making the myriad of connections between the 127

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agents that play a role in ‘matters of concern’. And even more importantly than that, in order to build a collective hierarchy of values, the connections must be understood by all. This describes to some extent what many environmental documentary film-makers attempt to do in making their films, adding the agency of documentary film itself. It is a difficult task and some films are better than others but the controversy that some of the films raise demonstrates the effectiveness of the technique. This is because documentary film-making has for some time now been battling with that denial of the possibility for the representation of the real with positions ranging from the claim that documentary is entirely constructed and fiction-like, to an emphasis on the photographic image in particular as ‘visible evidence’ to more differentiated claims focussing on the steps between these two (Renov, 1993) (Winston, 1995) (Rothman, 1997) (Grant and Sloniowski, 1998) (MacDougall, 1998) (Bruzzi, 2000). The capacity of documentary to witness, represent and recreate the real is one that is described most eloquently by Michael Renov in his groundbreaking article on documentary aesthetics. Nevertheless, other documentary theorists have not been so sure of the nature of this link and have instead been caught up in the idea that it is impossible for signs to connect with reality. A position supported by Stella Bruzzi in between these two is represented by the documentary film-maker Errol Morris in his essay ‘The Anti-postmodern Postmodernist’ in which he argues that ‘the truth is knowable, but often that we have a vested interest in not knowing, not seeing it, disregarding it, avoiding it’ (Morris, n.d.). Morris gives an example from his film Vernon Florida (1981) in which a couple called the Martins make the claim that sand can grow. Morris assumes that they are deluded but when he showed the clip to a class as an example of people deluding themselves one of the students came up with an alternative explanation. The sand was gypsum, a material sensitive to humidity. The sand could well have been ‘growing’ having been moved to a more humid climate than the desert. Morris comments: ‘Who is the one truly self-deceived? This is a question, I think, very difficult to answer. But at least you should always entertain the possibility that it is yourself ’ (Morris, n.d.). Latour’s comments on the paralysis of ecological politics brought about by this disjuncture and debate about representation and the real, capture how documentary is a form that is situated precisely in between the practice of science and the practice of politics. Gasland, as an example, is a film full of information about fracking and about the political history of the regulation of the energy industries. It thus brings together science and politics and does the work of tracing how the two have affected one another. Attacks on the film have, however, questioned its status as a documentary because of the ways in which these issues are represented in the film. As the film developed and gained momentum, it was funded by individual donations, the Sundance Documentary Film Programme Reach Fund, Cinereach and the Fledgling Fund. Its great strength is the balance it achieves between the narration of the film-maker’s own journey as a citizen and the exposure of a torrent of stories about industrial abuses committed in the course of the rapidly developing ‘natural gas rush’ unmonitored by 128

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Figures 11abc:  Two DVD captures from Josh Fox’s Gasland (2010) about the debate over fracking in the Marcellus shale (a), including the one that went viral (b). Mike Markham demonstrates what happens if he puts a flame to the water that runs from his tap on his property in Weld County, Colorado. A screen capture (c) shows a scene from Truthland (2010) a web documentary in which Fox’s film is refuted by Shelley DePue, a school teacher and ‘Mom’ who has been disturbed by the film and wants to find out the truth.

regulators such as the Environment Agency owing to exemptions to federal environmental laws. Fox’s approach to the people who participate in the making of the film brings out particularly sharply the value of the citizen’s perspective in appreciating the environment as a place to live rather than as a place from which to extract resources. Hydraulic fracturing raises many concerns not only with respect to the drilling process, the injection of chemicals into the bedrock and the effects of blasting and cracking on the geophysics of the areas concerned, but also with respect to the competence of the energy companies and their capacity to carry out the procedures as safely as possible and the need for sufficient scrutiny to ensure that they are not taking shortcuts and circumventing regulation. The arguments about the safety of the technique and its potential threat to clean water supplies have a degree of complexity compounded by the tendency of the industry to keep details of the process secret. The main achievement of the campaign has been to force the industry to publish the evidence. However, Gasland is most famous for its images of flammable water pouring from the faucets of US citizens affected by the development of fracking. When the film first appeared the image quickly found its way online and it has acted as an iconic focus for the whole argument ever since. The image of the flaming water is a striking example of the agency of ‘image events’ (Delicath and DeLuca, 2003), which, as already discussed, have the capacity to gain attention, ignite debate (excuse the pun) and fierce refutations from organizations representing the scientific and engineering community. Although Fox’s film addresses far more extensively the problems arising out of the legislation about energy extraction, this particular image is the one that public relations organizations have decided to focus on partly to weaken its power to convince audiences that the practice of fracking is hazardous and partly because it has offered clear possibilities for refuting the meaning of the image and for labelling Fox as ignorant of the science he is reporting on. As Gasland began to make its impact at film festivals, and after being screened on HBO in June 2010 and winning several awards including the Primetime Emmy award for Outstanding Direction for Nonfiction Programming, newspaper and broadcast reporting on the film became relatively high and the film was having a clear effect on the debate about hydraulic 129

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fracturing in the Marcellus Shale. Then, when it also won the nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2012, it provoked another familiar response from industry experts – they questioned the film’s status as a documentary. Of course this in itself gained more attention for Gasland and increased its status as an independent film, but it also gained some public attention for views opposed to its own on hydraulic fracturing. The letter written by Lee O. Fuller of Energy in Depth opens as follows: As found on the Academy’s official website, on a page entitled ‘Special Rules for the Documentary Awards,’ a feature-length documentary film can only be considered eligible for Oscar consideration if, among many other things, it is a ‘theatrically released nonfiction motion picture dealing creatively with cultural, artistic, historical, social, scientific, economic or other subjects.’ Importantly, the description also indicates that the film must maintain an ‘emphasis […] on fact and not on fiction.’ As we demonstrate below and in the attached, the film Gasland, which was nominated for an award in this category late last month, falls short of this description in a number of significant ways. (Fuller, 2011) The letter went on to give a detailed refutation of the points put forward in the film, dealing in particular with the image of flaming water so that a lot of well-organized information about the nature of fracking was released into the public creating the possibility for a high level of understanding of the process and its risks. When it comes to disputes over the veracity of documentary films and their status as expressions of objective truth, it is tempting to defend them as ‘creative’ or as postmodern, an expression of the subjectivity or relativity of truth (Hughes, 2012) (Ruby Rich, 2006). In the case of Gasland Josh Fox’s response has been to defend his representation of the facts and to make another film, Gasland Part II, about the ways in which the industry representatives distort the facts and ‘contaminate our democracy’. The website to the film exhorts viewers to sign up and ‘make sure decisions are made by the people and not the fossil fuel industries’ (International WOW Company, 2013). This development is an interesting one as it expresses a certain confidence in the capacity for the documentary to represent things as they are and to reveal the strategies of the opposing side, and it begins to look as though there is a possibility to turn the documentary form from a one-to-many medium into a more dialogic or interactive form for open debate via online websites and interactive documentary. Groupthink Although one might think that accessible information is a good thing to have in the public sphere, Salas and de Mar Salazar point out that the use of it can be significantly affected by the phenomenon of ‘groupthink’ (Janis, 1982). In the 2011 Conference on Climate Change Communication Salas and de Mar Salazar delivered a paper discussing Gasland together with 130

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an online video refutation, The Truth about Gasland, as examples of ‘groupthink’ in which communities fail to engage with each other’s representation of the issues, preferring instead to affirm their own existing prejudices (Salas and del Mar Salazar, 2012). Since then more refutations have appeared online and on DVD including the short online video Truthland (2010), Gas Odyssey (2010), Shale Gas and America’s Future (2010), a biopic about the natural gas champion Robert A. Hafner III The Grand Energy Transition (2012) and a crowd-funded film FrackNation (2013). A website called Shalecountry has also been created, sponsored by the American Clean Skies Foundation, to counter the effects of campaigning against fracking (American Clean Skies Foundation, 2010‒2012). In response Fox has produced a second film Gasland Part II (2013). Although these films exhibit the mentality of separate communities, it is possible that the externalization of all these mindsets online, bringing about a collective exposure in public space, may nevertheless constitute a collective audio-visual debate even if a mock ‘trailer’ to ‘Gasland II’ put online by Energy for America, which calls the film a ‘fearumentary’, and indeed the official trailer that declares that ‘the war about who is going to tell this story is on’ indicates that the debate in this medium does indeed tend towards the rhetorical rather than the deliberative. It remains to be seen whether it can transcend the model of propaganda and counter-propaganda to become a meaningful means for deliberation. The impact of a campaigning documentary can be measured in various ways (Clark and Abrash, 2011). As Christensen has argued, box office figures are a limited piece of information owing to the restricted nature of commercial distribution (Christensen, 2009). Impact can also Table 3:  Based on information gathered from Nexis UK Date

Event

May 2008

Letter from a natural gas company to Josh Fox offering to lease his family’s land in Milanville, Pennsylvania for $100,000 to drill for gas. Sundance Documentary Film Grant for film Gasland. Sundance Institute Cinereach development grant for Gasland. Gasland awarded US Documentary Special Jury Prize. Legislation on fracturing. Two pieces of legislation introduced by Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton, D-Ithaca, are passed in the Assembly’s Environmental Conservation Committee. A natural gas blowout is reported in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania. Obama suggests that natural gas is an alternative for oil. Gasland premiered on HBO. It is reported that the Environmental Protection Agency is to review hydraulic fracturing. Neighbour disputes over drilling rights are reported. A lengthy refutation of Gasland is published in the Oil and Gas Journal. General release of Gasland.

June 2009 December 2009 30 January 2010 9 June 2010 10 June 2010 15 June 2010 21 June 2010 3 July 2010 4 July 2010 12 July 2010 15 September 2010

(Continued) 131

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4 October 2010 4 November 2010 9 November 2010 18 November 2010 19 January 2011 25 January 2011 26 January 2011 1 February 2011 14 March 2011 14 May 2011 14 July 2011 22 November 2011 10 December 2011 1 February 2012 2 February 2012 7 February 2012 13 February 2012 15 February 2012 17 April 2012 20 April 2012 13 June 2012 21 June 2012

A pro-drilling documentary called Gas Odyssey directed by Aeron Price is shown in the Capitol Media Center. Shale Gas and America’s Future, a 30-minute, TV-film released by the American Clean Skies Foundation (ACSF). Gasland is debated on ABC in Australia. Gasland included in a list of 15 documentaries shortlisted for Academy Award nominations. Manchester University Tyndale Centre report on dangers of fracturing funded by the Co-operative. Gasland nominated for Oscar. Lee Fuller, Executive Director of Energy In Depth, makes a statement against Gasland after nomination. Letter from Lee Fuller to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences regarding the eligibility of Gasland for the documentary nomination. The chief oil and gas geologist for Pennsylvania’s Department of Conservation and Natural Resources compares Josh Fox with Nazi propagandists. UK discussion reported in the Independent about green government policy and gas drilling. Gasland awarded the Emmy for Best Photography and Outstanding Directing for Nonfiction Programming. Sundance Institute Documentary Film Programme Audience engagement grant for Gasland. The US Environmental Protection Agency reports that tainted groundwater can be linked to gas drilling in Wyoming. Josh Fox arrested attempting to film a hearing about suspected pollution in Wyoming caused by hydraulic fracturing. Josh Fox starts project on Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People. Film-makers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer announce a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for a new documentary, FrackNation. They complain about online censorship. Gasland screening in France. Court hearing and charges of unlawful filming dropped against Josh Fox. Report on ‘finishing touches’ being made to Gasland Part II and a new fictional movie, The Promised Land, starring Matt Damon about how drilling affects a small town. New documentary based on the book The Grand Energy Transition: The Rise of Energy Gases, Sustainable Life and Growth, and the Next Great Economic Expansion (2009). Release of Truthland, a short documentary sponsored by Energy In Depth and the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Josh Fox releases an 18-minute short extract of Gasland Part II entitled The Sky is Pink on Vimeo. 132

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be measured empirically through newspaper column inches and by the amount of broadcast airtime given to discussion of the issues it raises. By the end of the first decade of the new millennium this space and time also translates into online digital space in forms that mimic the older media but also adding blogs, diary videos and new documentary films. This last development has the outcome of the increasing capacity of online platforms between 2000 and the present to deliver high-quality digital video so that opposing voices to a documentary can respond in kind. This significant development is bringing documentaries into a closer relationship of dialogue with each other in which response and counter-response combine aesthetics with rhetoric. Word versus word, image versus image. Collective wisdom The existence of debate in the public sphere is already an indication of the success of a film. However, success for the campaign is more about public opinion on energy policy. Bill Nichols, who has over several decades examined the modes of documentary film-making and directly addressing the problem of documentary evidence, argues against the possibility that a documentary film can provide objective and conclusive evidence for a position. He nevertheless argues that documentary has something to offer: ‘Rhetoric, in other words, may sometimes be deceptive but it is also the only means we have as social actors, or citizens, for conveying our beliefs, perspectives, and convictions persuasively’ (Nichols, 2008, p. 34). Research into argumentation offers some support for the view that public debate leads to insights of value despite the possibility that it may lead decision making in the wrong direction. In defence of their position on the function of reasoning as argumentative, which some critics saw as unlikely in the context of species survival, Mercier and Sperber emphasize the point that the theory asserts reasoning as a collective process. While reasons are accessed, driven by argumentation, scrutiny is driven by ‘epistemic vigilance’, a similarly intuitive process in which the source of information and the coherence of the reasoning is checked. This process is where logic and existing beliefs are brought into play as means to challenge argumentation leading to access to potentially better reasons. It is the improvement of the quality of reasoning that is of benefit to the individual. Critical to the model as a theory about the function of reasoning is hence an understanding of the development of a culture of scrutiny in which both argumentation and scrutiny take place. Mercier and Sperber’s emphasis on motivated reasoning as the only kind that really works and on the critical role of scrutiny supports Dryzek’s acceptance of rhetoric within a mixed model of deliberative democracy. In a further essay, ‘Reasoning as Social Competence’, for a collection on ‘collective wisdom’ (Sperber and Mercier, 2012), Sperber and Mercier address the problem of ‘groupthink’ or the polarization of ideas within particular interest groups: Consider, for instance, different scientific groups (labs or schools of thought) each following with utter conviction a different idea. Each group is likely to suffer from a form 133

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of polarization. When, however, there is a process of selection going on at a higher level – when for instance the ideas coming from these different groups are evaluated and tested by a larger community – then the polarization may have allowed for a much broader exploration of the space of ideas. Many will have been wrong, but hopefully some may have been even ‘more right than they thought’, and polarization will have allowed them to dig into new and otherwise unreachable territory. (Sperber and Mercier, 2012, p. 382) The developing context of the argumentative documentary in social hubs and online, with the intention to increase environmental consciousness and the consequent debates about human long-term survival, will no doubt continue to provide some resonant examples with which to further explore these ideas in the area of documentary studies and research into ‘visible evidence’ more generally.

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Chapter 6 The Material Response

‘Making a film like this is a way of living. It’s not just a product.’ Agnes Varda on The Gleaners and I. (Anderson, 2001, p. 26) Introduction: conclusion In this volume environmental documentary film-making in the twenty-first century has been discussed as a communicative response to environmental consciousness. This is a perspective that might appear excessively individualized and abstracted so it was important at the outset to situate the idea of this responsiveness within the institutional contexts of debate about environmental issues as well as in the developing contexts of audio-visual media production. In the end, however, neither history nor global citizenship has been seen as integral to the response of documentary film-makers, as cultural workers, to the visible evidence of environmental concern. The energy is seen as coming from psychological states – contemplation, irony, argumentativeness, an awareness of complexity and above all the sense of an implication of self in the scene. This perspective can be compared to the idea of the ‘environmental imagination of the global’ explored in Ursula Heise’s study (Heise, 2008) and developed in Pietari Käpää and Tommy Gustafsson’s collection (Käpää and Gustafsson, 2013). In Sense of Place and Sense of Planet, Heise perceives a transnational capacity for environmental concern, a cosmopolitan consciousness developing alongside globalization, that transcends the national obsession with place, perceiving the ecological problem as one that, as Ulrich Beck (1992) argues, ignores borders and boundaries and compels a sense of global citizenship. Instead of pursuing the aspiration to find a more constructive cosmopolitan consciousness to replace the more conflicted environmental consciousness, however, this study has focussed on exploring the kind of responses which have found expression in documentary films. Focussing on a single decade, it has been about the wide variety of reasons for which there has been a surge of environmental documentaries at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The study has put forward the idea that they are, despite their apparent collective appearance, contingent objects, but linked through networks directly and indirectly promoted by institutions such as the UN and UNESCO that gather and disseminate knowledge about the human environment, or by alliances such as the IPCC developed to enable international cooperation in the measurement of atmospheric change or by more local institutions such as national and local government departments, film festivals, Internet hubs and campaigning

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groups. As objects the documentary films are part of the story of the response to the idea of potentially catastrophic change in the environment. They are the result of experiments in documentary production, connecting individual responses to the larger themes. This study began with the ambivalent identification of documentary film as itself a hybrid object, a material product of technology that emerges out of relationships between human and non-human subjects for the period of production, that is then in circulation for a short period as an intervention in the alternative political sphere, and that ends partly in an archive and partly in the rubbish dump. The focus has been on that period of energy and optimism in production and circulation, on the process of connecting places, people and objects that make up a ‘matter of concern’. The focus on the three states of mind – contemplation, irony and argument – as organizing principles has connected the films to different critical discourses on everyday life, rhetoric and mass communication and theories of political deliberation and argumentation. These discourses are ongoing and it is to be hoped that further research in environmental communication, particularly in audio-visual argumentation, will improve the capacity of documentary to be a meaningful form of participation in the debate. In this last chapter, by way of a conclusion, a final connection is to be made between documentary responses to environmental concern and recycling. The connection is partly made in the spirit of the eco-doc as a final rallying call in which ambivalence/ contemplation, irony and argumentativeness are transcended by an optimistic and material sense of resolution. This call does connect in an unsophisticated way to some recent papers that connect film criticism to the philosophical joys of the new materialism (Kendall, 2012) (Hawkins, 2006) and find some answers to the effects of the modern industrialized world in a shift of focus away from the problem towards an appreciation of the natural and the social world as it exists, as Bill McKibben would say, ‘in all its glory’ (Everything’s Cool, 2007). Greening the media In their book Greening the Media Maxwell and Miller survey the impact of print and screen media on the environment pointing out that the media industries have a high polluting effect and a considerable carbon footprint (Maxwell and Miller, 2012). A central question for their enquiry is ‘how much media technology is socially necessary?’ Similarly an alternative material response to environmental concern on the part of the documentary film-maker might be to ask how many documentaries are socially necessary. In terms of the waste recycling management scheme, ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ reduction might be a response. Of course, the paradox here – if it is decided not to make a film – is that a project that might galvanize people into their own material actions might be prevented. Added to the ethics of documentary activity is thus the question of environmental impact versus the other social goods the film might supply. 138

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Many green documentaries have been made that utilize the idea of the documentary project as a means to generate environmentally beneficial activity. Jean Rouch’s film Madame l’eau has already been described in Chapter 2 as a documentary film that reframes and carries out an international development project to bring water to a farming community suffering from drought. Another example can be found in Waste Land (2010), a film about the Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, directed by Lucy Walker, Karen Harley and João Jardim. Vik Muniz goes back to his roots and starts up a project with a group of garbage pickers who make a living sorting out valuable refuse to sell in Jardim Gramacho, a gigantic landfill site outside Rio de Janeiro. The group, vulnerable to criminal assault and projection rackets, wishes to be recognized as a recycling unit and needs finance. Muniz works with them on an art project, creating mosaic portraits of their bodies out of the recycled materials. The work is exhibited in Sao Paolo and sold at auction in London, financing the company. The film documents the emotional responses of the artist and the individuals chosen to be portraits, respecting their stories and decisions about participation. It also captures the creation of the work that is subtle and expressive of the world that it reflects on. Recycling art is an old phenomenon and closely connected with material responses to environmental issues. Agnes Varda documents the work of several artists working with recycled materials in her film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000). The Gleaners and I, as it was translated in English, is a film about gleaning. In her portrayal of her investigations into the history of the practice and into activities that can be seen as forms of gleaning today, Varda both discovers and expresses an ancient propensity in modern human beings that plays a significant role in sustaining connections between people and environments. Much has been written on this film that is described by Ernest Callenbach as ‘a film of playful, magical delight’ (Callenbach, 2002/2003, p. 46). As Callenbach goes on to say, the first audiences sometimes responded to the film with applause, hence some critical activity has been expended in attempting to explain why the film elicits such positive emotions from viewers. Harlan Jacobson, like Callenbach, sees the audience as appreciating the unexpectedly positive approach to representing people who are poor. He writes, ‘Far from constructing just another bleeding heart’s cryfest, Varda takes Gleaners beyond the existential demands of scavenging to make the case for it as fun.’ The review then goes on to locate a central human characteristic that the film celebrates and that allows it to offer insights into the potential for film to express human environmental concerns. He writes: ‘The world of the gleaner is a completely personified world, where every object is the lost expression of some mother’s intention and so must be rescued. Varda’s gleaners divide between agri-utilitarians and those who, like aging Médecins sans Frontières, are caught up in a more personal passion to rescue, to use, to regenerate something to love out of the DNA of the whatnot calling your name from the dumpster’ (Jacobson, 2001, p. 76). Beginning with the gesture, the desire to forage for food and to collect and reuse objects comes across in Varda’s film as a tendency that expresses something so fundamental to human existence that it continues to manifest itself even when a culture is so wealthy that 139

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every physical need is supplied. Nevertheless the gesture of bending down to pick something up, which Varda describes as ‘humble’, symbolic for the relationship between the person and the object grasped, is normally hidden by all kinds of mechanisms, such as the division of activities into work and leisure, the division of society into labourers and managers, by the use of machines that replace the human bodily gesture for gestures of their own. The film’s foregrounding of this gesture is, however, not to emphasize humility but rather humanity. Detached from the social context, the gesture, repeated again and again with the utmost concentration, expresses both need and desire. Combining objects differently Chapter 23 in the DVD edition of The Gleaners and I, entitled ‘Un “Biffin” VR 99’, is a visit to Hervé, alias VR99, who is a ‘biffin’ – a word sometimes translated as a ‘rag and bone man’ meaning someone who collects other people’s junk. Hervé is an artist who works with the material he finds and his function in the film is to explain how the system used for householders to leave large discarded items for collection out on the street can also be used for free distribution to those willing to travel, sort through and take away. While he is explaining ‘faire la biffe’ he and Varda have an edgy conversation. He shows her a map of his local area, which, he explains, shows the streets, districts and days people can go to pick up items. Varda interrupts him and says, ‘I think the map shows where to dump things rather.’ He agrees but says he reads the map in his own way as it is how he collects his raw material. At the back of his house Hervé has a shed where Varda conducts her interview. The space is full of all kinds of collected items. The edginess of the conversation continues as Varda and Hervé engage in a battle over how the space and the activity it is used for is to be defined. Varda appears to see the space as pathological while Hervé sees it as creative. Varda calls the space a ‘cavern’ while Hervé explains that it is the place where he ‘combines objects differently’. Varda persists and asks if it is also a protective space, to which he responds by

Figures 12abc:  Hervé, alias VR99, explains how he finds the materials (a) for making his works (b) by retrieving and ‘combining objects differently’ in Agnes Varda’s film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (2000). Varda discusses with him the psychology of his impulse to collect so many discarded objects. DVD capture. 140

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asking what it should be protecting him from. ‘From emptiness’, replies Varda, ‘du rien’, ‘because it’s full here, over full’, ‘parce-que c’est du plein, là, c’est du surplein’. Hervé replies that he is moving towards emptiness ‘or rather to lessness’ to which Varda says, ‘Y a du boulot!’ ‘There is work to do!’ The nature of the collector has recently become a figure of interest, representing a tendency that is both sustaining and potentially pathological. Throughout the film Varda is continuously expressing through every means at the disposal of the camera and microphone the gravitational pull of things. She observes her own desire to view, sort and select establishing at the outset the connection she makes between the process of gleaning images and her subjects’ collecting activities. The very first image is a slow moving closeup over the embossed red leather covers of an encyclopaedia in which she finds an entry on glâner [to glean]. Her cat ensures a tactile response to this opening by rubbing its soft furry chin up against the corners of the slightly worn volume. Both the cat and the set of leather-bound volumes have clearly called to Varda’s senses through their colour, their texture and their shape, and the neatly arranged entries inside the books are an attraction too. The image of the cat and the book also demonstrate their existence with each other quite separate from the human desire to handle and to stroke, provoking an even stronger urge to reach out to them. The Gleaners and I has not generally been interpreted as an environmental film, perhaps because of the palpable love it expresses for the junk produced by modern industry or perhaps because in 2000 the eco-doc had not yet entered consciousness as such. It is not a film that emerged out of the recent urgent debates about climate change, but it does have a link to a strong debate that was going on in France at the time about food and wine, regional identity, terroir, global markets and the quality of life. Considering Varda’s long career as a photographer and film-maker the film also comes out of a much more protracted process of thinking about the role of the arts in the everyday social world and the possibilities for artistic practice to become a catalyst for collective and individual reflection and social change. A significant aspect of this film is the demonstration of how the focus on a concept functions not only structurally but also as a generator of material in the process of making. Not just any concept will do. It is important to this film that the concept of gleaning, ancient as it is, is one that has fallen into the background, requires investigation and inspires experimentation, and in the process reveals historical continuities between behaviours that otherwise appear quite separate. The bringing together of different activities under the umbrella concept of gleaning creates a large community within the film out of overt isolation and fragmentation. Alongside this utopian quality of the generation of material, the sheer quantity of material to be sorted and collected provides a counterweight, an indication of how it is that these objects that appear to bring salvation are also the original source of division. Gleaning is about the right to take the leftovers after the harvest has been collected, and as such it is an expression of social division between those who benefit from the harvest and those who do not. The concept has historically been pushed away precisely because society, in the 141

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process of democratization, has attempted to erase this difference, to claim that everyone is included in the first harvest, to eliminate both the leftovers and the need for people to rely on them. But the practice, as Varda’s film reveals, persists, partly because not everyone is included in the cycle of production and consumption and partly because leftovers, far from being eliminated, have increased exponentially as the capacity for production and consumption has increased. Observing these phenomena through the historical prism of the word and concept ‘gleaning’ reasserts the realities of social division but also suggests that the acknowledgement of the first and second harvest in the contemporary world has also become politicized not only through its concretization of extreme wealth and extreme poverty but also through the effects of the attempt to produce a continuous stream of brand new goods and ultra-fresh food for mass populations. It is here that Varda’s film creates a context in which the artist’s desire for less and Varda’s puzzlement over his tendency to collect more can be explained. Leftover goods are not goods, and in this sense to have them rather than new goods is to have less, but at the same time the collecting and hoarding of the goods is to reinvest in them rather than destroy them and so to make them yet more. But why does the artist want less? Why is less more? Why are objects a burden? Why is it easier to discard them than to reuse them? It clearly takes energy to find, sort and collect, an energy that comes out of the hunger for food, the desire for production that creates value out of human investment but it struggles with the categorization of the objects as non-objects so that salvaging them is not only a physical act but also a mental act of reframing. To glean then – and for Varda that is also to film – is to rescue and in the process to make one more step towards retrieving all those discarded items that harbour so much energy. It is also to assess and to evaluate as well as to reframe and to value the objects that already exist in the world. As such this film works through the contemplation of the environmental concerns raised by the modern industrial state, stays on the humorous side of irony, allows the argumentative some space and picks up on a material response that demonstrates that it is possible for premodern values to persist beyond modern times into a non-modern sustainable society.

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Nichols, B., 2001. Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nichols, B., 2008. The Question of Evidence, the Power of Rhetoric and Documentary Film. In: T. Austin & W. de Jong, eds. Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices. Maidenhead, New York: McGraw-Hill Open University Press, pp. 29–50. No Impact Man. 2009. [Film] Directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein. US: Eden Wurmfeld Films, Shadowbox Films. Nordhaus, T. & Shellenberger, M., 2007. Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. O’Hehir, A., 2009. Let a Thousand Eco-Documentaries Bloom! [Online] Available at: http://www. salon.com/2009/09/17/ECODOCS/ [Accessed 27 November 2012]. One River Two Nations. 1996. [Film] Directed by Magnus Isacsson. Canada: Cineflix. Ong, W. J., 2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. 2004. [Film] Directed by Robert Greenwald. US: MoveOn.org; Brave New Films. Painlevé, J., 2009. Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, New York: Criterion. Petty, R. E., Brinol, P. & De Marree, K. G., 2007. The Meta-Cognitive Model (MCM) of attitudes: Implications for attitude measurement, change, and strength. Social Cognition, 25(5), pp. 657–686. Pirate for the Sea. 2008. [Film] Directed by Ron Colby. US: Artists Confederacy. Planet in Focus, 2011. GreenScreen. [Online] Available at: http://www.greenscreentoronto.com/ news/45/ [Accessed 25 March 2011]. Porter, E., 1962. In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World. San Francisco: Sierra Club. Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation. 1988. [Film] Directed by Godfrey Reggio. US: Golan-Globus Productions, NorthSouth, Santa Fe Institute for Regional Education . Prelinger, R., 2010. We have Always Recycled. [Online] Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/newsopinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/rick-prelinger-we-have-always-recycled [Accessed 13 September 2013]. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2010. Sensory Ethnography Lab. [Online] Available at: http://sel.fas.harvard.edu/ [Accessed 5 September 2013]. Pripyat. 1999. [Film] Directed by Nikolaus Geyrhalter. Austria: Nikolaus Geyrhalter Filmproduktion, firstchoicefilms. Rancière, J., 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London; New York: Continuum. Ratner, M., 2010. Once Grazing, Now Gone: Sweetgrass. Film Quarterly, 63(3), pp. 23–27. Renov, M., 1993. Toward a Poetics of Documentary. In: M. Renov, ed. Theorizing Documentary. New York; London: Routledge, pp. 12–36. Renov, M., 2004. The Subject in Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Riverglass: A Ballet in Four Seasons. 1997. [Film] Directed by Zdravic Andrej. Slovenia: SCCALjubljana. Roberts, P., 2008. The End of Food. London, Berlin, New York: Bloomsbury. Rothman, W., 1997. Documentary Film Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rouch, J., 2003. Ciné-Ethnography. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. 152

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Ruby Rich, B., 2006. Documentary Disciplines: An Introduction. Cinema Journal, 46(1, Fall), pp. 108–115. Rust, S., Monani, S. & Cubitt, S. eds., 2013. Ecocinema: Theory and Practice. New York; Abingdon: Routledge. Salas, A. & del Mar Salazar, M., 2012. Hydraulic fracturing and environmental effects: Understanding media communication strategies through groupthink theory. In: S.  K.  Sowards, ed. Across Borders and Environments: Communication and Environmental Justice in International Contexts. Cincinnati: International Environmental Communication Association, pp. 295–304. Sarangi, S. & Slembrouck, S., 1996. Language, Bureaucracy and Social Control. London: Longman. Sargent’s Court Reporting Service, Inc., 2011. Before the Delaware River Basin Commission in re: Draft Natural Gas Regulations. [Online] Available at: http://www.nj.gov/drbc/library/documents/ naturalgas-draftregs-hearingtranscript022211Liberty-eve.pdf [Accessed 27 February 2014]. Shale Gas and America’s Future. 2010. [Film] Directed by Jennifer Gruber. US: Hillmann & Carr Inc for the American Clean Skies Foundation. ShaleCountry.com LLC, 2012. Shale Country Home. [Online] Available at: http://www. shalecountry.com [Accessed 8 July 2012]. Sharkwater. 2006. [Film] Directed by Rob Stewart. Canada: Sharkwater Productions. ShepstoneTom, 2012. Truthland, The Gasland Antidote, Arrives! [Online] Available at: http://eidmarcellus.org/marcellus-shale/truthland-the-gasland-antidote-arrives/9834/. [Accessed 26 June 2012]. Shipbreakers. 2004. [Film] Directed by Michael Kot. Canada: National Film Board of Canada; Storyline Entertainment. Singer, A., 1986. Comprehending Appearances: Werner Herzog’s Ironic Sublime. In: T. Corrigan, ed. The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History. New York: Methuen, pp. 168–194. Sleep Furiously. 2007. [Film] Directed by Gideon Koppel. UK: Bard Entertainments, Van Film. Soja, E. W., 2010. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sontag, S., 1977. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Sperber, D. et al., 2010. Epistemic Vigilence. Mind & Language, September, 25(4), pp. 359–393. Sperber, D. & Mercier, H., 2012. Reasoning as Social Competence. In: H. Landemore & J. Elster, eds. Collective Wisdom: Principles and Mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 368–392. Steffen, A., ed., 2006. Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century. New York: Abrams. Stern, R., 2009. The Yes Men Fix the World. Written, produced and directed by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Exploring Questions of Media Morality, 24(4), pp. 310–311. Stoller, P., 1992. The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. Sundance Institute, 2000–2012. Archives: Gasland. [Online] Available at: http://history.sundance. org/films/6177 [Accessed 26 June 2012]. Sweetgrass. 2009. [Film] Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor. France, UK, US: Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. 153

Green Documentary

Swift, J., 1729. A Modest Proposal For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland, from Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. [Online] Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm [Accessed 6 September 2012]. Takach, G., 2014, in press. Visualizing Alberta: Duelling Documentaries and Bituminous Sands. In: R. Boschman & M. Trono, eds. Found in Alberta: Environmental Themes for the Anthropocene. Waterloo: WLU Press. Taussig, M., 1990. Review of Cane Toads. An Unnatural History. American Anthropologist, 92(4), pp. 1110–1111. The 11th Hour. 2007. [Film] Directed by Leila Conners Petersen, Nadia Conners. US: Appian Way, Greenhour, Tree Media Group. The Age of Stupid. 2009. [Film] Directed by Franny Armstrong. UK: Spanner Films. The Animals Film. 1981. [Film] Directed by Victor Schonfield, Myriam Alaux. UK: Beyond the Frame, Slick Pix. The Corporation. 2003. [Film] Directed by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott. Canada: Big Picture Media Corporation. The Cove. 2009. [Film] Directed by Psihoyos. US: Oceanic Preservation Society; Jim Clark; Diamond Dogs; Skyfish Films. The Day After Tomorrow. 2004. [Film] Directed by Roland Emmerich. US: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, Centropolis Entertainment, Lions Gate Films . The End of the Line. 2009. [Film] Directed by Rupert Murray. UK: Arcane Pictures, Calm Productions, Dartmouth Films. The Environmental Media Association, n.d. [Online] Available at: http://www.ema-online.org/ [Accessed 2 March 2012]. The Grand Energy Transition. 2012. [Film] Directed by Greg Mellott. US: Gray Hour. The Land. 1942. [Film] Directed by Robert Flaherty. US: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Adjustment Administration, United States Film Service . The Lie of the Land. 2007. [Film] Directed by Molly Dineen. UK: Channel 4. The Plow that Broke the Plains. 1936. [Film] Directed by Pare Lorenz. US: Resettlement Administration. The River. 1938. [Film] Directed by Pare Lorenz. US: Farm Security Administration. The Shadow of Progress. 1970. [Film] Directed by Derek Williams. UK: Greenpark Productions, Film Producers Guild, British Petroleum (BP). The Uprising of ’34. 1995. [Film] Directed by George Stoney, Judith Helfand, Susanne Rostock. US: Independent Television Service (ITVS). The Yes Men. 2003. [Film] Directed by Chris Smith, Dan Ollman, Sarah Price. US: Yes Men Films LLC. The Yes Men Fix the World. 2009. [Film] Directed by Andy Bichlbaum, Mike Bonanno, Kurt Engfehr. US, UK, France: Renegade Pictures UK; Britdoc; Arte France; Article Z; Charny Bachrach. The Yes Men, n.d. The Yes Men. [Online] Available at: http://theyesmen.org/hijinks [Accessed 5 September 2013]. Thomas, J., 1991. Review of Cane Toads: An Unnatural History. American Historical Review, 96(4), pp. 1118–1119. 154

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Willoquet-Maricondi, P., 2010. Shifting Paradigms: From Environmentalist Films to Ecocinema. In: P. Willoquet-Maricondi, ed. Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film. Charlottesville; London: University of Virginia Press, pp. 43–61. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D., 2012a. Explaining irony. In: D. Wilson & D. Sperber, eds. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 123–145. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D., 2012b. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Winston, B., 1995. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited. London: British Film Institute. Wittgenstein, L., 1953/2009. Philosophical Investigations (4th ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Wo die grünen Ameisen träumen (Where the Green Ants Dream). 1984. [Film] Directed by Werner Herzog. Federal Republic of Germany, Australia: Pro-ject Film Production; Werner Herzog Filmproduktion; Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF). Wolters, J., 2013. Waste Management World. [Online] Available at: http://www.wastemanagement-world.com/articles/print/volume-14/issue-3/features/recycling-film-a-hit-inbelgium.html [Accessed 13 September 2013]. Wood, C. S., 1993. Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. London: Reaktion Books. Working Films, 2002. About this DVD and Working Films: Toxic Comedy Meets Grassroots Organizing. New York: Docurama. Workingman’s Death. 2005. [Film] Directed by Michael Glawogger. Austria; Germany: Arte; Lotus Film; Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg; Quinte Film; Vienna Film Financing Fund; Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF); Österreichisches Filminstitut.

156

Index The 11th Hour (Petersen and Connors) 122, 124, 125 28 Weeks Later (Fresnadillo) 7 56 Group Wales 74 A Abbott, Jennifer and Mark Achbar, The Corporation 99–103 Academy Awards 111, 117, 130, 132 see also awards Achbar, Mark and Jennifer Abbott, The Corporation 99–103 Achbar, Mark and Peter Wintonick, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media 32, 101, 104 activism 35, 37, 104, 109, 117–20, 124–5 see also campaigning; civil disobedience; Greenpeace; environmental movement; Yes Men activist documentaries 31–3, 52, 118 see also documentaries activist film-making 4, 120–1, 124, 126, 127 see also film-making Actor Network Theory 19 Adams, Ansel 47 Adams, John W. 108–9 advertising 58, 60, 101–2, 104 aerial photography 35, 46, 48–9, 51, 109 see also photography The Age of Stupid (Armstrong) 11–12, 122

agency 5, 20, 129 of concept 99–103 of irony 88–93, 104–9 of product 94–99 agonistic politics 121–4 see also politics Der Agrar-Rebell: Permakultur in der Salzberger Alpen/The Agrarian Rebel: Permaculture in the Salzberg Alps (Verhaag) 62 agribusiness 57–62 see also agriculture; farming agricultural workers 67, 70, 77–8 agriculture, development of 46, 78, 122 see also agribusiness; farming Agyeman, J and A. Kollmus, ‘Mind the Gap’ 5, 12–13 Ahern, John 80 Alaska 109 Alaux, Myriam and Victor Schonfield, The Animals Film 58 Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origin of Landscape Painting (Wood) 66 Altman, Rick, Film/Genre 8–9 ambiguity 9, 14, 44, 51–2, 62 ambivalence of film-making 69, 80, 81, 89, 138 in framing 14, 89 as response 5, 88, 102 of scientists 91–2 to technology 45 American Clean Skies Foundation 126, 131, 132

Green Documentary

At the Edge of the World (Stone and Gambuti) 34 aubergines 59 Aufderheide, Pat, ‘Collaborative Strategies’ 98 Austin, Thomas in New Approaches 56 in The New Review of Film and Television Studies 77 Watching the World 6 Australia 63, 88–93, 113 see also Cane Toads Austria 14, 17, 53–5, 57, 59, 62 avant-garde 6, 47–8, 106–7 awards, Academy 111, 117, 130, 132 Emmy 129–30 Green Seal 11 Grierson 6

American Conservation Film Festival 29 American Historical Review 88–9 American National Science Foundation 110–11 An Andalusian Dog/Un chien Andalou (Buñuel) 111 Anderson, theory of imagined community 9 Andrej, Zdravic, Riverglass: A Ballet in Four Seasons 47 animal activism 119–20 see also activism animals The Animals Film 58, 60 The Cove 119 and ironic agency 88–93 Sleep Furiously 77 Sweetgrass 79, 80–1 Whale Wars 119 The Animals Film (Schonfield and Alaux) 58 Antarctica 110–14 see also Encounters at the End of the World anthropomorphism 60, 89, 117 ants 111 Aotearoa Environmental Film Festival 29 archives 138 audio-visual 30, 37 film 4, 15, 99, 101, 102 Argaud, Paul 70 argumentation 133–4, 138 and reasoning 120, 121, 123, 133 see also debate argumentative response 5, 16–17, 117–20, 123, 124, 125, 134, 142 and image events 120–1 topics for 122, 124–5 argumentative theory of reasoning 16 Armstrong, Franny, The Age of Stupid 11–12, 122 art conceptual 9, 104, 106 recycling 17, 139 art photography 45–52 see also photography Artivist Film Festival 29

B Baggett, Billy 96 Baichwal, Jennifer, Manufactured Landscapes 10–11, 14, 43–52, 64, 81 Bakan, J., The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power 99 Banville, John 77 Barbash, Ilsa and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Sweetgrass 14, 78–81 Barbieri, Olivo 48 Barthes, Roland 10 BBC 117 BBC4 6, 82 BBC Wales 74 Blue Planet 117 Storyville 6 World Service 109 Beck, Ulrich 137 behaviour research 12–13, 34–5, 87 see also data gathering; research Bell, Arthur 91 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter 117 ‘Between setting and landscape in cinema’ (Lefebvre) 64–6, 93 158

Index

C Callenbach, Ernest 139 campaigning, online 33, 130–1, 134 pamphlets 105–6 see also activism campaigning documentaries 4, 30–1, 33, 47, 131, 133 see also Blue Vinyl; The Corporation; documentaries; fracking; Yes Men campaigning groups 8, 9, 16, 32, 37, 101, 120 see also Greenpeace; public information campaigns; Sierra Group Can Cinema Ever Be Truly Green (discussion) 11–12 cane grubs 90–1 Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (Lewis) 15, 88–93, 99 Cane Toads: The Conquest (Lewis) 91–3 Canetti, Elias, Crowds and Power 57, 58 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring 25 Carter, Neil, The Politics of the Environment 121–2 Carvalho, Anabela and Tarla Rai Peterson, Climate Change Politics 125 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien 79 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien and Ilsa Barbash, Sweetgrass 14, 78–81 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien and Véréna Pavel, Leviathan 81 categorization 4–5, 142 see also genres and subgenres; taxonomies Ceredigion 72–3 CFCs 61 Challaye, Germaine and Marcel 71 Chernobyl 14 Un chien Andalou/An Andalusian Dog (Buñuel) 111 China 7, 51, 64 Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge (Lu and Mi) 7 Chlorine Chemistry Council 96

Bichlbaum, Andy 104, 105, 108 Big Fat Inc 102 Black, M. 99 Blewitt, John, Media, Ecology and Conservation: Using the Media to Protect the World’s Wildlife and Ecosystems 7, 36 Blod i mobilen/Blood in the Mobile (Poulsen) 11 Blue Planet 117 Blue Vinyl (Helfand and Gold) 15, 94–9 Blurring Boundaries (Nichols) 38 Bonanao, Mike 108 Bordwell, D. and K. Thompson, Film Art 48–9 Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice 55 Bousé, Derek, Wildlife Films 7 Bozak, Nadia 45, 51–2 BP British Petroleum, The Shadow of Progress 44 Brabeck, Peter 61 Bradshaw, Peter 73, 76–7 branding 101–2 see also advertising Brave New Films 32–3, 37 Brave New Theatres 32–3 Brereton, Pat, Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in American Cinema 6, 34 Brès, Luis 72 Brès, Marcelle 71, 72 bright green documentary 8–9 bright green environmentalism 35, 36–8, 40, 123 Bruzzi, Stella 128 Buñuel, Luis, Un chien Andalou/An Andalusian Dog 111 Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan/Land without Bread 110 Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations 91 Burtynsky, Edward 51, 69 Manufactured Landscapes 10, 11, 43–6, 48, 51, 64 159

Green Documentary

Chomsky, Noam 77 and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent 32, 101, 104 Christensen, Christian 32–3, 37, 131, 133 Chronique d’un été (Rouch and Morin) 38, 54–5 Cine Eco – Environmental International Film and Video Festival 28 Ciné Ethnography (Rouch) 108–9 cinema, and distribution 7, 9, 31, 33, 38, 47 and documentaries 69 ecocinema 6, 7, 8, 47 and eco-docs 33–8 CinemAmbiente 28 cinematography 35, 49, 73, 95 see also film-making Cinereach 126, 128, 131 citizenship 94, 137 civil disobedience 120–1, 123 see also activism cladding see Blue Vinyl climate change 17, 30, 122–3, 125, 126 Conference on (2011) 130–1 invisibility of 24 World Environment Day theme 27, 31 see also Everything’s Cool; global warming; An Inconvenient Truth Climate Change Politics (Carvalho and Peterson) 125 coalition film-making 33, 37 see also film-making coffee table books 47 cognitive dissonance 51, 64 Colby, Ron, Pirate for the Sea 119–20, 124 collaboration, Blue Vinyl 98 ‘Collaboration Strategies’ (Aufderheide) 98 collecting 141, 142 see also Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse collective wisdom 133–4 Collen, Heidi 85–6 colonial exploitation 105, 108 comedy 90 see also toxic comedies

commentary 120, 121 Blue Vinyl 97 The Corporation 100, 101, 102 Encounters at the End of the World 110 The End of the Line 121 WE FEED THE WORLD 57 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 61 communication 3–4, 5–6, 13, 24, 107–8, 118 corporate 101–2 and eco-docs 8–9, 10, 126–7 and film 70 and image events 120, 121 and irony 85–7 subversion 104, 106–7 visual 24 see also environmental communication communication theory 7–8 community 8–9, 87–8, 102–3, 125, 131, 141–2 The Corporation 15, 103 discursive 125 farming 63–4, 139 and film-making 33 Himmel und Erde 55, 56 Into Eternity 19–20 and identity 9 and language 70 Manufactured Landscapes 81 and politics 76–7, 125 rural 65 Sleep Furiously 72–4, 77–8 Sweetgrass 81 La vie moderne 52, 54, 67–72 computers 11, 35–6, 112 concept, and agency 99–103 conceptual art 9, 104, 106 see also art Conference on Climate Change Communication (2011) 130–1 Conners, Nadia and Leila Conners Petersen, The 11th Hour 122, 124, 125 Connolly, Pat 80 consciousness, and irony 109–11 160

Index

D Damon, Matt 132 Darwin’s Nightmare (Sauper) 82, 127 data gathering 26, 31, 35–6, 48 see also research de Certeau, Michel 104 The Practice of Everyday Life 52, 55–6 de Mar Salazar, M. 130–1 Dead Harvest: The Battle for the Seed/Tote Ernte: Der Krief um’s Saatgut (Krüger and Verhaag) 62 debate 5, 7–8, 10, 126 deliberative 123–4, 131 see also argumentation Debord, Guy Comments on The Society of the Spectacle 61 The Society of the Spectacle 62, 101–2 Deleuze, Nathalie 71 deliberative democracy 123–4, 131, 133 see also democracy ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’ (Mouffe) 123–4 deliberative debate 123–4, 131 see also debate deliberative politics 121–2 see also politics Delicath, John 120–1, 129 DeLuca, Kevin 120–1, 129 democracy 125 deliberative 123–4, 131, 133 Depardon, Raymond 68, 69 La vie moderne/Modern Life 14, 52, 64, 65–73, 81 depopulation 63, 70–1, 76–8 De Vries, David, Life After People 18 Dexter, Raquel 91 Di Gioia, Herb 79 digital cameras 35, 43, 48, 63, 133 see also cameras Dineen, Molly, The Lie of the Land 63 disaster movies 6, 24, 35, 90 see also films discursive communities 125 see also community

contemplation 13–15, 17, 20, 44, 52, 81, 87–8, 138 of environmental issues 117–18, 123 Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse 142 Himmel und Erde 14, 53, 54 Into Eternity 4 and landscape 64–6 Manufactured Landscapes 14, 51, 67 and reasoning 81, 118 Sleep Furiously 64–5, 74, 78 Sweetgrass 64–5, 79–80 Unser täglich Brot 14, 44–5 La vie moderne 64–5, 69–71 contemplative response 5, 118, 123 contradiction 6, 52, 88, 113, 125 Cooper, Sarah, Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary 67–70 Corner, John 16, 77 corporate behaviour 11, 15–16, 63, 101–2 see also The Corporation; The Shadow of Progress; Yes Men films The Corporation (Achbar and Abbott) 99–103 The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power (Bakan) 99 Cosgrove, Denis, Social formation and the symbolic landscape 66–7 Cosgrove, D.E. and W.L. Fox, Photography and Flight 48, 49, 51 The Cove (Psihoyo) 17, 34, 117, 119 Cox, Alex 77 crowd-funding 104, 131, 132 see also funding Crowds and Power (Canetti) 57, 58 Cubitt, Sean EcoMedia 6, 34, 117 Stephen Rust and Salma Monani, Ecocinema: Theory and Practice 7–8, 29 Cultural Anthropology 79 culture jamming 104, 106, 107–8 161

Green Documentary

The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses 125 Dunaway, Finnis, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform 7, 45–6, 47

dissociative attitude 106 distance, of camera shots 47–9 in La vie moderne 68–70 distribution of films 8, 11, 32–3, 36, 98, 131 alternative means 12, 32–3 and the cinema 7, 9, 31, 33, 38, 47 online 17, 34, 36, 37, 129, 131, 133 documentaries 46 activist 31–3, 52, 118 bright green 8–9 and the cinema 69 effectiveness 128 future of 35–6, 81, 134 language of 18, 55–6, 77 modes 5, 9, 38 music 14, 89, 107 optimistic 38–40 revival 6–8 and rhetoric 56, 101, 123, 124, 131, 133–4 and television 33, 35, 36, 75 see also campaigning documentaries; eco-docs; film; film-making; genres and subgenres ‘Documentary as Critical and Social Research’ (Wayne) 17 documentary theorists 16, 54–5, 128 Documenting the Documentary (Grant and Sloniowski) 128 dogs, and cane toads 89, 91–2 in Sleep Furiously 73, 74, 75 in La vie moderne 67 dolphins 117, 119 Doyle, Julie ‘Picturing the Clima(c)tic’ 10 ‘Seeing the Climate’ 10, 24 dreams Encounters at the end of the World 111–12 and language 70 Madame l’eau 39–40 Dryzek, John ‘Deliberative Democracy’ 124, 133

E e-waste 12, 51 Earth Day 23, 30 Earth Day Network 30 Earth Days (Stone) 23, 34 Earth First! 30, 120 Earth Vision Environmental Film Festival 29 Earth Vision the Tokyo Global Environmental Film Festival 28 Earth Watch 26, 35 EarthDance (festival) 29 Eastman Kodak 43 Ebert, Roger 78 echoic 15, 94 Blue Vinyl 98 and irony 85–8, 101, 106 Eco Vision Festival 28 eco-comedy 90 eco-disaster movies 24, 90 see also disaster movies eco-docs 5, 8–9, 23–5, 141 and the cinema 33–8 and communication 8–9, 10, 126–7 iconography 44 toxic materiality of 10–12, 17–18 see also documentaries Ecocentrism (Garrard) 35 ecocinema 6, 7, 8, 47 see also cineman Ecocinema: Theory and Practice (Rust, Monani and Cubitt) 7–8, 29 Ecocinema - Zakynthos 29 ecocriticism 7, 24, 25, 35 Ecofilms Rhodes 29 ecological sublime 47–8 see also sublime Ecology and Popular Film (Murray and Heumann) 7, 34, 90 EcoMedia (Cubitt) 6, 34, 119 162

Index

ecosee 7 education and environmental communication 12, 26, 30, 56 EFFY The Environmental Film Festival at Yale 29 Eight Legged Freaks (Elkayem) 90 EKOFILM 28 Elkayem, Ellory, Eight Legged Freaks 90 Emmy Awards 129–30 see also awards emotion 44, 46, 117–18 Blue Vinyl 97–9 Gasland 126 Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse 139 and irony 87, 98–9 Manufactured Landscapes 51 Waste Land 139 Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog) 16, 110–14 The End of the Line (Murray) 34, 120, 121, 124 Energy for America 131 energy debate 17, 126 see also global warming Energy in Depth 130, 132 EniChem 95, 96 ENVIROFILM 28 Environment Agency, USA 129 environmental awareness 10, 11, 12–13, 17, 23, 26–7 see also environmental consciousness Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 7 environmental consciousness 5, 13, 15, 51, 81, 134, 140 Into Eternity 19, 20 see also environmental awareness environmental communication 5, 6, 8–9, 123–4, 125, 137–8 and cultural events 30 and education 12, 26, 30, 56 and environmental justice 7–8 see also communication

environmental damage 11, 12, 24, 25, 37, 44, 99, 126 Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital (USA) 28 environmental justice 7–8, 32, 52, 95, 98 see also justice Environmental Media Association 11 environmental movement 19, 23–5, 30–2, 37, 123 see also activism environmental protection, professionalisation of 24–5 Environmental Protection Agency, USA 131, 132 epistemic vigilance 118, 133 ethnographic film 26, 52, 54, 62, 79, 81, 127 see also film European Union 32 Evans, Terry 48 Everything’s Cool (Gold and Helfand) 15, 85–8, 122, 138 experimental film 6–7, 34, 47, 81, 107, 109, 110 see also film F farming 14, 58, 62–4, 71–2 and community 63–4, 139 and identity 56, 72 modernization 57, 64, 78 representation of 55, 63–4 and water 59, 60, 61, 139 see also agribusiness; agriculture; The Animals Film; Cane Toads; Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse; Himmel und Erde; The Lie of the Land; Madame l’eau; Sleep Furiously; Unser täglich Brot; La vie moderne; WE FEED THE WORLD Fata Morgana (Herzog) 110 Fechner, Robert, Die vierte Revolution: Energy Autonomy/The Fourth Revolution: Energy 122, 126 Feld, Steven 108–9 Festinger, Leon 51 163

Green Documentary

FICMA International Environmental Film Festival 28 film, as archive 4, 15, 99, 101, 102 and communication 70 disaster movies 6, 24, 35, 90 ethnographic 26, 52, 54, 62, 79, 81, 127 experimental 6–7, 34, 47, 81, 107, 109, 110 film vert 6 and NGOs 31 and space 43–4, 48, 52, 66, 68 wildlife 7, 9, 89, 109 see also documentaries; film-making; genres and subgenres Film Art (Bordwell and Thompson) 48–9 Film Comment 77 film festivals 28–30 Film Journal International 80 Film Quarterly 45 film vert 6 see also film film-making 5, 11, 63, 81, 126–30 activist 4, 120–1, 124, 126, 127 ambivalence of 69, 80, 81, 89, 138 coalition 33, 37 and collaboration 98 and community 33 materiality 6, 14 participatory/performative mode 9, 38, 85 social activist 32, 33 and technology 35–6, 37, 45–6 see also cinematography; documentaries; funding Film/Genre (Altman) 8–9 Fingerlakes Environmental Film Festival 28 fishing 59, 119, 122 Flaherty, Robert, The Land 7, 46 Fledgling Fund 126, 128 food, genetically modified 59, 61, 62 globalization 57, 58, 60–1, 122 and politics 57, 58, 61, 63 Food Inc (Kenner) 34, 122

Ford Foundation 98 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things 55 The Fourth Revolution: Energy/Die vierte Revolution: Energy Autonomy (Fechner) 122, 126 Fox, Josh 125, 132 see also Gasland Fox, W.L. and D.E. Cosgrove, Photography and Flight 48, 49, 51 Fox News Channel 32 fracking (hydraulic fracturing) 125, 126, 129–30 see also Gasland FrackNation (McElhinney and McAleer) 131, 132 framing 66, 79 and ambivalence 14, 89 Cane Toads 89, 93 The Corporation 100 Sleep Furiously 73, 75, 76 Unser täglich Brot 57, 61 La vie moderne 66, 68, 69 ‘Framing Wales’ (BBC) 74 Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film (WilloquetMaricondi) 6, 7, 34, 47–8, 76 France 17, 63, 141 see also Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse; La vie moderne Fraser, Nick, 6 French, Philip 77 Fresndillo, Juan Carlos, 28 Weeks Later 7 Friedrich, Caspar David, Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer/Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 66 Fuller, Lee O. 130, 132 funding 9, 98, 126, 128 Blue Vinyl 96, 98 crowd-funding 104, 131, 132 Encounters at the End of the World 110–14 Gasland 126, 128, 132 FrackNation 131 and the Internet 32–3 Sleep Furiously 74, 75 Yes Men films 104 164

Index

G G8 (Group of Eight) 32 Gabbert, Laura and Justin Schein, No Impact Man 34 Gambuti Jr, Patrick and Dan Stone, At the Edge of the World 34 Garcia, Maria 80–1 The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (MacDonald) 6–7, 34, 47 Garrard, Greg, Ecocriticism 35 Gas Odyssey (Price) 131, 132 Gasland (Fox) 17, 44, 117, 125, 126, 128–32 Gasland Part II (Fox) 130, 132 GATT (General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs) 104 genetically modified food 59, 61, 62 genres and subgenres 4–5, 8–9, 23, 122 and Herzog 110, 114 mixing of 34–5, 89–91, 93 see also mode Geyrhalter, Nikolaus, Pripyat 14 Unser täglich Brot/Our Daily Bread 15, 44–5, 57–62, 64 Ghana 108–9 Ginsberg, Faye 39 Giuggioli, Nicola 12 glaciers 112 Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I (Varda) 17, 63, 137, 139–42 global warming 10, 16, 31, 88, 122–3 see also climate change; Encounters at the End of the World; energy debate; Everything’s Cool; An Inconvenient Truth; Yes Men globalization 4, 15, 32, 37 of food 57, 58, 60–1, 122 Gold, Daniel B. and Judith Helfand Blue Vinyl 15, 94–9 Everything’s Cool 15, 85–8, 122, 138 Gore, Al 16, 34, 119, 122–3

Gowin, Emmet 48 The Grand Energy Transition (Mellott) 131 The Grand Energy Transition: The Rise of Energy Gases, Sustainable Life and Growth, and the Next Great Economic Expansion (Hefner) 132 Grant, B.K. and J. Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary 128 Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (Ingram) 6, 34 Green Screen, Toronto 11 Green Seal Awards 11 see also awards Green Vision (festival) 28 Greening the Media (Maxwell and Miller) 11, 43, 46, 138 Greenpeace 10, 24, 30, 98, 119–20 see also activism Greenwald, Robert 32–3, 37, 98 Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism 32 Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price 33 Grierson Awards 6 see also awards Grierson, John 16, 77 Grimshaw, Anna 79, 81, 127 Grizzly Man (Herzog) 109 Group of Eight (G8) 32 groupthink 130–1, 133–4 Gruber, Jennifer, Shale and Gas in America’s Future 131, 132 The Guardian 76–7 Guggenheim, Davis, An Inconvenient Truth 16–17, 34, 117, 119, 122–3, 124 Gustafsson, Tommy and Pietari Käpää, Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation 7, 137 H Habermas, Jürgen 9, 123, 124 Habitat for Humanity 96 Hafner, Robert A. III 131 Hancock, David 79 165

Green Documentary

Handke, Peter, Kleine Fabel des Esche von München/The Short Fable of the Ash Tree in Munich 76 Noch einmal für Thukydides/Once Again for Thucydides 75–6 Hansen, David 48 Harley, Karen, Lucy Walker and João Jardim, Waste Land 139 Hauka movement 108–9 Hayes, Denis 23 Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Network 29 A Healthy Baby Girl (Helfand) 94 Heaven and Earth/Himmel und Erde (Pilz) 14, 53–6 Hefner, R.A., The Grand Energy Transition 132 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe) 32, 123–4 Heise, Ursula, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet 18–19, 34, 137 Heisler, Stuart, Tulsa 25 Helfand, Judith 15, 94, 98 A Healthy Baby Girl 94 Helfand, Judith and Daniel B. Gold, Blue Vinyl 15, 94–9 Everything’s Cool 15, 85–8, 122, 138 Heller, Chaia 62 Herman, Edward and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent 32, 101, 104 Herzog, Werner 111, 113 Encounters at the End of the World 16 Fata Morgana 110 and genre 110, 114 Grizzly Man 109 Lektionen in Finsternis/Lessons of Darkness 109–10 Heumann, Joseph and Robin Murray Ecology and Popular Film 7, 34, 90 ‘The First Eco-Disaster Film?’ 24, 25 Himmel und Erde/Heaven and Earth (Pilz) 14, 53–6 Hockings, Paul 79

Hollywood 6, 8 Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in American Cinema (Brereton) 6, 34 house cladding see Blue Vinyl humans 6, 12–13, 30, 43–4, 121–2 impact of 4, 5–6, 24–5, 35 and landscape 110 post-human 9, 77 see also Cane Toads; Encounters at the End of the World; Into Eternity; Yes Men Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan/Land without Bread (Buñuel) 110 hybrid object 127, 138 hydraulic fracturing (fracking) 125, 126, 129–30 see also Gasland I identity community 9 environmental 19 European 56 and farming 56, 72 in Herzog films 110, 111 regional 72, 141 and Yes Men 15, 104, 107 ILO, International Labour Organization 32 image events 120–1, 122–3, 129 Image Politics (DeLuca) 120 In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World (Porter) 47 An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim) 16–17, 34, 117, 119, 122–3, 124 Independent Petroleum Association of America 132 see also Truthland India 103 Indigenous Earth Film Festival 29 Indigenous and Tribal People’s Convention 32 information campaigns see public information campaigns Ingram, David, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema 6, 34 166

Index

Just Do It: A Tale of Modern-Day Outlaws (James) 120, 124–5 justice, environmental 7–8, 32, 52, 95, 98 spatial 8, 32, 52

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 31, 51, 137–8 International Labour Organization (ILO) 32 International Mother Earth Day 30 International Puchalski Nature Film Festival 28 Internet 32–3, 37, 104 Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (Madsen) 3–4, 5–6, 18–20 Introduction to Documentary Film (Nichols) 9, 38 invasive species see Cane Toads IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 31, 51, 137–8 Iraq 109 irony 5, 15–16, 100–1, 123, 137, 138–42 and agency 88–93, 104–9 Blue Vinyl 97–9 and communication 85–7 and consciousness 109–11 The Corporation 101–2 The Cove 117–18 and the echoic 85–8, 101, 106 and emotion 87, 98–9 Encounters at the End of the World 113–14 and language 86 and metaphor 86–7 as response 85, 118, 123 Yes Men films 108 Italy 63, 95, 96

K Kafka, Franz 76 Käpää, Pietari and Tommy Gustafsson, Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation 7, 137 Kenner, Robert, Food Inc 34, 122 Kenny, Kate 104–5, 106 Kerr, Bill 91 Kimberley Toad Busters 92 King, Martin Luther 124 Kleine Fabel des Esche von München/The Short Fable of the Ash Tree in Munich (Handke) 76 Kobenter, Samo 54 Koepp, Volker, Leben auf dem Lande: Uckermark/Living on the Land: Uckermark 62–3 Kollmus, A. and J. Agyeman, Mind the Gap 5, 12–13 Koppel, Gideon 7, 73–5 Sleep Furiously 14, 72–8, 81 Koppel, Heinz 73–4 Koppel, Joachim 73–4 Koppel, Pip 74, 75 Koyaaniqatsi: Life Out of Balance (Reggio) 46 Krüger, Kai and Bertram Verhaag, Tote Ernte: Der Krief um’s Saatgut/Dead Harvest: the Battle for the Seed 62 Kuhner, Jay 80–1 Kuwait 109

J Jacobsen, Harlan 139 Jacquet, Luc, March of the Penguins 17, 117 James, Emily, Just Do It, 120, 124–5 Jardim, João, Karen Harley and Lucy Walker, Waste Land 139 Jay, Mikela 100, 101 Johnson, Mark 99 Journal of Environmental Education Research 7

L Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 32, 123–4 Ladino, Jennifer 109 167

Green Documentary

Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Pavel) 81 Levinas, Emmanuel 68, 69 Lewis, Mark, Cane Toads: An Unnatural History 15, 88–93 Cane Toads: The Conquest 91–3 The Lie of the Land (Dineen) 63 Life After People (De Vries) 18 lifestyle 14, 37, 64, 80 Lifton, Barbara 131 Light, Michael 48 Living on the Land: Uckermark/Leben auf dem Lande: Uckermark (Koepp) 62–3 The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu) 55 London Film Festival (2009) 11 Long Island, USA 94, 95 Lorenz, Pare 7 The Plow that Broke the Plains 46 The River 46 Lu, Sheldon and Jiayan Mi, Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge 7 Lumière Brothers: First Films (Lumière Brothers) 24 Lumière Brothers, Oil Wells of Baku: Close View 7, 24

Lake Charles, USA 95–6, 97 Lakoff, George, ‘Why it matters how we frame the environment’ 100 The Land (Flaherty) 7, 46 Land without Bread/Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Buñuel) 110 landscape 64–8 Herzog films 110, 113 rural 14 see also Cane Toads; Into Eternity; Manufactured Landscapes; Sleep Furiously; Sweetgrass; La vie moderne language 67 Cane Toads 92–3 and community 70 The Corporation 101 of documentaries 18, 55–6, 77 and dreams 70 dying 113 An Inconvenient Truth 122–3 Into Eternity 18 and irony 86 Occitan 67, 70 ordinary 55–6, 87 social functioning 70 structure and meaning 77 Sweetgrass 79 La vie moderne 67, 70 Welsh 14, 73 Lao Tse 53 Latour, Bruno, The Politics of Nature 127 Reassembling the Social 127 We Have Never Been Modern 19, 67, 127–8 Leben auf dem Lande: Uckermark/Living on the Land: Uckermark (Koepp) 62–3 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space 43–4, 46, 48, 52 Lefebvre, Martin, ‘Between setting and landscape in cinema’ 64–6, 73 Lektionen in Finsternis/Lessons of Darkness (Herzog) 109–10

M MacAveal, Douglas 112 Macdonald, Angus and Patricia 48 MacDonald, Scott, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place 6–7, 34, 47, 109 MacDougal, David and Judith 79, 128 MacLean, Alex 48 Madame l’eau (Rouch) 38–9, 139 Madsen, Michael, Into Eternity: A Film for the Future 3–4, 5–6, 18–20 Maier-Aichen, Florian 48 Maisel, David 48 Les maîtres fous (Rouch) 108 managerial leisure suit 105, 107 168

Index

Mandela, Nelson 124 Manufactured Landscapes (Baichwal) 10–11, 14, 43–52, 64, 81 Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (Achbar and Wintonick) 32, 101, 104 Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (Herman and Chomsky) 32, 101, 104 March of the Penguins (Jacquet) 17, 117 marketing 101–2, 104 see also advertising Marshall, John 108–9 materiality, of eco-docs 10–12, 17–18 of film-making 6, 14 of photography 43 Maxwell, R. and T. Miller, Greening the Media 11, 43, 46, 138 McAleer, Phelim and Ann McElhinney, FrackNation 131, 132 McKibben, Bill 138 McMurdo, Antarctica 112–13 media, impact on environment 11, 12, 138 see also documentaries Media, Ecology and Conservation: Using the Media to Protect the World’s Wildlife and Ecosystems (Blewitt) 7, 36 Media That Matters Film Festival 29 Mellott, Grey, The Grand Energy Transition 131 Melrose the Wonder Toad 92 Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber 120 ‘Why do humans reason?’ 16, 118–19 ‘Reasoning as social competence’ 133–4 metaphor 86–7, 99–100, 101 Mi, Jiayan and Sheldon Lu, Chinese Ecocinema: In the Age of Environmental Challenge 7 Miller, T. and R. Maxwell, Greening the Media 11, 43, 46, 138 Mind the Gap (Kollmus and Agyeman) 5, 12–13

Misrach, Richard 48 mobile phones 11 Modern Life/La vie moderne (Depardon) 14, 52, 64, 65–73, 81 modernization, farming 57, 64, 78 modes, of documentary 5, 9, 38, 85 see also genre and subgenres A Modest Proposal (Swift) 105 Monani, Salma, Stephen Rust and Sean Cubitt, Ecocinema: Theory and Practice 7–8, 29 Mondo cane (Cavara, Prosperi and Jacopetti) 89 Mondovino (Nossiter) 63 Montana 14, 78–81 Moore, Michael 37, 103 Morin, Edgar and Jean Rouch, Chronique d’un été 38, 54–5 Morris, Errol ‘The Anti-postmodern Postmodernist’ 128 Vernon Florida 128 Morris, Ian 92–3 Morton, Timothy 15 Mouffe, Chantal, ‘Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism’ 123–4 Mouffe, Chantal and Ernesto Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 32, 123–4 Muniz, Vik 139 Murdoch, Rupert 32 Murray, Robin and Joseph Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film 7, 34, 90 ‘The First Eco-Disaster Film?’ 24, 25 Murray, Rupert, The End of the Line 34, 120, 121, 124 music, in Blue Vinyl 97 in Cane Toads 89, 90 in documentaries 14, 89, 107 in La vie moderne 65, 66, 68, 70, 73 see also soundtracks My House is Your House project 98 169

Green Documentary

N Naqoyqatsi: Life as War (Reggio) 46 narrative 64–5, 67, 121 Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Dunaway) 7, 45–6, 47 nature, representation of 7, 111 see also landscape Nelson, Senator Gaylord 23 Nestlé 61 Nestler, Peter 102 New Approaches (Austin) 56, 133 New Deal 7, 46 New German Cinema 109 The New Review of Film and Television Studies 77 NGOs, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 12, 30, 31, 125 Nichols, Bill, Blurring Boundaries 38 Introduction to Documentary Film 9, 38 New Approaches 56, 133 No Impact Man (Gabbert and Schein) 34 Noch einmal für Thukydides/Once Again for Thucydides (Handke) 75–6 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) 12, 30, 31, 125 Nossiter, Jonathan, Mondovino 63 nuclear power/waste 3, 4, 5, 18–20

optimistic documentaries 38–40 see also documentaries The Order of Things (Foucault) 55 ordinary language 55–6, 87 see also language Our Daily Bread/Unser täglich Brot (Geyrhalter) 15, 57–62, 64, 81 Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism (Greenwald) 32 P Painlevé, Jean 111 Pantel, Jean-François 71 parody 86, 87, 89 Cane Toads 88, 91, 93 Madame l’eau 39 Les maîtres fous 108 Yes Men films106, 109 participatory mode 9, 38, 85 see also modes Paulson 11 Pavel, Véréna and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Leviathan 81 penguins 111, 112 see also March of the Penguins Pennsylvania 126, 131, 132 performative mode 38 see also modes performative surprise 104–5 Petersen, Leila Connors and Nadia Conners, The 11th Hour 122, 124, 125 Peterson, Tarla Rai and Anabela Carvalho, Climate Change Politics 125 photography 10, 24, 37, 47 aerial 35, 46, 48–9, 51, 109 art 45–52 Gasland 132 and landscapes 64, 66, 68, 69 Manufactured Landscapes 10–11, 43–6, 51, 64, 69 materiality of 43 Sleep Furiously 73 La vie moderne 68, 69 Photography and Flight (Cosgrove and Fox) 48, 49, 51 Pilger, John 102

O O’Barry, Ric 119 The Observer 77 Occitan 67, 70 see also languages O’Hehir, A. 34 oil exploration and production 7, 24–5, 86, 109, 122, 126 Oil Wells of Baku: Close View (Lumière Brothers) 7, 24 Ollman, Dan, Chris Smith and Sarah Price, The Yes Men 104–9 Once Again for Thucydides/Noch einmal für Thukydides (Handke) 75–6 170

Index

The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau) 52, 55–6 Price, Aeron, Gas Odyssey 131, 132 Price, Sarah, Dan Ollman and Chris Smith, The Yes Men 104–9 Pripyat (Geyrhalter) 14 Privat, Marcel 67, 71 Privat, Raymond 67, 70, 71–2 privatization 101–3, 122 product and agency 94–9 placement 102 The Production of Space (Lefebvre) 43–4, 46, 48, 52 professionalisation, of environmental protection 24–5 Profil paysans films see La vie moderne/ Modern Life The Promised Land 132 Psihoyo, Louie, The Cove 17, 34, 117, 119 public information campaigns 13, 24, 26–7 see also campaigning

Pilz, Michael 62, 79 Himmel und Erde/Heaven and Earth 14, 53–6 Pinewood Studios 11 Pioneer 59 Pirate for the Sea (Colby) 119–20, 124 place 18–19, 81, 137 and belonging 68 Himmel und Erde 55–6 Into Eternity 18 and loss 45–6, 55–6 and politics 18 Sleep Furiously 78 La vie moderne 68 Planet in Focus (festival) 28 The Plow that Broke the Plains (Lorenz) 46 political documentaries 32, 37, 54–5 see also documentaries political pamphlets 105–6 see also campaigning politics 121–5 agonistic 121–4 and community 76–7, 125 deliberative 121–2 and food production 57, 58, 61, 63 and place 18 and science 88, 91, 127, 128 The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses (Dryzek) 125 The Politics of the Environment (Carter) 121–2 Politics of Nature (Latour) 127 Porter, Eliot, In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World 47 postmodernism 15, 88, 99, 101, 106–7, 120–1, 127–8, 130 Poulsen, Frank Piasecki, Blod i mobilen/ Blood in the Mobile 11 poultry 59–61 Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation (Reggio) 46 Power: One River Two Nations 47

Q Quenehen, Camille 69, 72 R Rancière, J. 24 Ratner, Megan 79, 80 reality, representation and truth 7, 39, 52, 128 reasoning 16, 118–20 and argumentation 120, 121, 123, 133 and contemplation 81, 118 ‘Reasoning as social competence’ (Sperber and Mercier) 133–4 Reassembling the Social (Latour) 127 recycling art 17, 139 see also art Reduction Festival of Environmental & Green Short Films 29 Reel Earth Environmental Film Festival 29 reflexivity 87, 106–7 171

Green Documentary

S Salas, A. 130–1 Salon 34 Sauper, Hubert, Darwin’s Nightmare 82, 127 Schein, Justin and Laura Gibbert, No Impact Man 34 Schonfield, Victor and Myriam Alaux, The Animals Film 58 science 119 and politics 88, 125, 127, 128 see also Encounters at the End of the World scientific privilege 56 scientists 8, 35–6, 91–2 see also Cane Toads; Encounters at the End of the World scrutiny, culture of 133 self-reflexivity 106–7 see also reflexivity Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Cooper) 67–70 Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Heise) 18–19, 34, 137 Serf, Kamil 24 The Shadow of Progress (Williams for BP) 44 Shale Gas and America’s Future (Gruber) 131, 132 Shalecountry website 131 shared anthropology 38 Sharkwater (Stewart) 119, 120 sheep see Sleep Furiously; La vie moderne; Sweetgrass Shine, Rick 92 Shiva, Vandana 103 The Short Fable of the Ash Tree in Munich/ Kleine Fabel des Esche von München (Handke) 76 Sierra Club 47 Sight and Sound 77 Signs of Life (Herzog) 110 Silent Spring (Carson) 25 sincerity 87, 107, 109 Singer, Alan 110 The Sky is Pink (Fox) 132 Sleep Furiously (Koppel) 14, 72–8, 81

Reggio, G., qatsi trilogy 46 relative truths 127–8, 130 see also truths religion 46, 56, 61, 70, 109 Renov, Michael 77, 128 representation 7, 45, 47–8, 89, 106, 126–8 Cane Toads 90–1 environmental debate 10, 35 farming 55, 63–4 landscape 66 of nature 7, 111 reality 7, 39, 52, 128 research 122 behavioural 12–13, 34–5, 87 see also data gathering; Encounters at the End of the World Resettlement Administration 46 Ressler, Jonathan 102 rhetoric, and documentary 56, 101, 123, 124, 131, 133–4 Rifkin, Jeremy 103 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 139 The River (Lorenz) 46 Riverglass: A Ballet in Four Seasons (Andrej) 47 Rotha, Paul 77 Rouch, Jean, Ciné-Ethnography 108–9 Madame l’eau 38–9, 139 Les maîtres fous 108 Rouch, Jean and Edgar Morin, Chronique d’un été 38, 54–5 Rouvière, Alain and Cécile 67, 69, 71, 72 Roy, Daniel Jean 71 rural communities 65 see also community; La vie moderne; Sleep Furiously rural landscapes 14 see also landscape; Sleep Furiously; Sweetgrass; La vie moderne rural space 62–4 Ruscha, Ed 48 Rust, Stephen, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt, Ecocinema: Theory and Practice 7–8, 29 172

Index

Sloniowski, J. and B.K. Grant, Documenting the Documentary 128 Smith, Chris, Dan Ollman and Sarah Price, The Yes Men 104–9 social division 140, 141–2 Social formation and the symbolic landscape (Cosgrove) 66–7 social-activist film-making 32, 33 see also film-making The Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 62, 101–2 Soja, Edward 32, 52 Sondrio International Documentary Film Festival on Parks 28 Sontag, Susan 10 La Souffrière: Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe (Herzog) 110 soundtracks 89 Blue Vinyl 97 Cane Toads 91 Madame l’eau 39 see also music space, and film 43–4, 48, 52, 66, 68 rural 62–4 spatial justice 8, 32, 52 see also justice Sperber, Dan and Hugo Mercier, ‘Reasoning as social competence’ 133–4 ‘Why do humans reason?’ 16, 118–19, 120 Sperber, Dan and D. Wilson, Meaning and Relevance 15, 86–7, 100–1, 102, 106 Staple, Greg 126 Steffen, Alex, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century 36–8 Stern, Reuben 106, 107 Stewart, Rod, Sharkwater 119, 120 Stifter, Adalbert 76 Stockholm Conference (UN Conference on the Human Environment) 13, 25–6 Stone, Dan and Patrick Gambuti Jr, At the Edge of the World 34 Stone, Robert, Earth Days 23, 34

Storyville (BBC) 6 subject/object 55–6, 66–7 sublime 43, 46, 47, 48, 110 ecological 47–8 technological 43, 46, 47–8 subversion 32, 89, 104–5, 106–7 Sundance Documentary Film Programme Reach Fund 126, 128 Surrealism 61, 74, 104, 110, 111 Sweetgrass (Castaing-Taylor and Barbash) 14, 78–81 Swift, Jonathan 105 T tactics (le Certeau)104 Taiji, Japan 117, 119 Tales from Planet Earth (festival) 29 Tavernier, Bertrand 24 taxonomies 125 technological sublime 43, 46, 47–8 see also sublime technology, ambivalence to 45 and film-making 35–6, 37, 45–6 old/new 37–8 television 33, 75, 85–6, 120 and documentaries 33, 35, 36, 75 This is the American Earth (Adams and Newhall) 47 Thomas, Julien 88–9 Thompson, K. and D. Bordwell, Film Art 48–9 Thucydides 75–6 tomatoes 59, 61 Tote Ernte: Der Krief um’s Saatgut/Dead Harvest: the Battle for the Seed (Krüger and Verhaag) 62 toxic comedies 15, 87–8 see also Blue Vinyl; Everything’s Cool toxicity, of eco-doc 10–12, 17 Transnational Ecocinema: Film Culture in an Era of Ecological Transformation (Käpää and Gustafsson) 7, 137 173

Green Documentary

Verhaag, Bertram and Kai Krüger, Tote Ernte: Der Krief um’s Saatgut/Dead Harvest: the Battle for the Seed 62 Vernon Florida (Morris) 128 Vibrant Matter (Bennett) 117 La vie moderne/Modern Life (Depardon) 14, 52, 64, 65–73, 81 Die vierte Revolution: Energy Autonomy/The Fourth Revolution: Energy (Fechner) 122, 126 Vinyl Institute 94, 96–7 see also Blue Vinyl

Treadwell, Timothy 109 Trefeurig 72–3, 76–7 truth, relative 127–8, 130 representation and reality 7, 39, 52, 128 The Truth about Gasland 131 Truthland (IPAA) 129, 131, 132 Tulsa (Heisler) 25 Turvey, Nick 91 Tyler, Mike 92 U UK Film Council 11 UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food 57 UNEP, United Nations Environment Programme 25, 26, 30, 31, 33 UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 25, 30, 39, 70, 137 United Nations 25–6, 30–1, 32, 104 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Conference) 13, 25–6 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 25, 30, 39, 70, 137 United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) 25, 26, 30, 31 Unser täglich Brot/Our Daily Bread (Geyrhalter) 15, 44–5, 57–62, 64

W Wagenhofer, Erwin, WE FEED THE WORLD 57–62, 122, 124 Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (Greenwald) 33 Wales 14, 64, 72–8 see also Sleep Furiously Walker, Lucy, Karen Harley and João Jardim, Waste Land 139 Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer/Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Friedrich) 66 Waste Land (Walker, Harley and Jardim) 139 Watching the World (Austin) 6 water 78, 122 and farming 59, 60, 61, 139 Gasland 126, 129, 130 Madame l’eau 39 Watson, Paul 119–20 Watts, Alan 113–14 Wayne, M., ‘Documentary as Critical and Creative Research’ 17 WE FEED THE WORLD: Essen Global (Wagenhofer) 57–62, 122, 124 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour) 19, 67, 127–8 Weather Channel 85–6 Welsh language 14, 73 see also language Whale Wars 119 whales 119 ‘Why do humans reason?’ (Mercier and Sperber) 16, 118–19, 120

V Valla, Amandine and Michel 71 Varda, Agnes, Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I 17, 63, 137, 139–42 Vaughan, Dai 77 Venice 95, 96 Verhaag, Bertram, Der Agrar-Rebell: Permakultur in der Salzberger Alpen/ The Agrarian Rebel: Permaculture in the Salzberg Alps 62 174

Index

Wood, Christopher, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origin of Landscape Painting 66 World Bank 32, 104 World Environment Day 26, 27, 30–1 World Meteorological Society (WMS) 31 World Trade Organization (WTO) 16, 32, 104 Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century (Steffen) 36–8 WTO, World Trade Organization 16, 32, 104 WWW.THECORPORATION.TV 102

‘Why it matters how we frame the environment’ (Lakoff) 100 wildlife films 7, 9, 89, 109 see also films Wildlife Films (Bousé) 7 Williams, Derek (for BP), The Shadow of Progress 44 Willoquet-Maricondi, Paula, Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film 6, 7, 34, 47–8, 76 Wilson, Deirdre and D. Sperber, Meaning and Relevance 15, 86–7, 102, 106 wine industry 63, 141 Winston, Brian 77, 128 Wintonick, Peter and Mark Achbar, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media 32, 101, 104 Wittgenstein, L. 55, 56 WMS, World Meteorological Society 31

Y Yes Men 104–9, 122 Yes Men films (Smith, Ollman and Price) 15–16, 104–9 Z Ziegler, Jean 57

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During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a stunning array of documentary films focusing on environmental issues has been met with critical and popular acclaim. Green Documentary is the first booklength study of this phenomenon. It explores how the films offer a variety of responses to the questions raised by environmental change: about the future of the countryside, the relationship between health and industrial pollution, the role of corporations, and the politics of energy and climate. Offering a coherent analysis of imaginative, controversial and high-profile documentary films such as Into Eternity,The Yes Men Fix the World and An Inconvenient Truth, the book divides the responses into contemplation, irony and passionate argument, and the recruitment of the filmmaking process itself into the campaign to bring about better change. Along with analysis that includes the wider context of environmental documentary filmmaking, about local rural communities in Britain and Europe, Green Documentary underlines the important role of documentary film in the on-going public debate about the environment. Helen Hughes is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Surrey.

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