Picturing the Imperceptible Eco-Documentary Filmmaking As the Staging of Media-Experiments
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Beuzekom 1 Jorn Beuzekom 10777555 Research Master Thesis Department of Media Studies University of Amsterdam 28 June 2019 Supervisor: Dr. Catherine Lord Second Reader: Dr. Alex Gekker Picturing the Imperceptible Eco-documentary filmmaking as the staging of media-experiments Beuzekom 2 Abstract With elusive, grand, slow and invisible issues such as climate change and global pollution, we might have to regard documentary film as an important source of visual information about these topics. There is, however, a discrepancy between the subjective point of view of the filmmaker in the filmmaking process (Nichols 1991; Kellner 2013) and the proximity of a cinematic image to a real, the indexical quality of film. While persuasive power might be in data visualization in film (Cubitt 2013), I want to explore how one can combine these contradicting notions to find an autonomous capacity of the cinematic image to screen the complexity of phenomena that exceed the scales of human perception. To achieve this, I turn toward the notion that media technologies play a central role in translating incomprehensible phenomena into discursive information (Ernst 2013; Hansen 2016), and examine the qualities of film and its techniques to argue that in an understanding of documentary filmmaking as the staging of experiments one might critically evaluate the choices of the filmmaker in the setup of the experiment, while also taking into account the technological processes of the camera in recording and cinematic techniques such as editing and their ability to act as devices for extra- human perception. As such, documentaries cannot be reduced to their political agenda, nor to their objective qualities, and may be seen as more effective in depicting issues such as global warming and pollution. Beuzekom 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 4 Introduction – On documentary film 5 and the imperceptible Chapter 1 – The science documentary 11 A Plastic Ocean 12 An Inconvenient Truth 19 Chapter 2 – The mechanical eye 26 Chasing Ice 27 Chasing Coral 32 Chapter 3 – The camera and reality 39 Our Planet: “Frozen Worlds” 40 Encounters at the End of the World 44 Conclusion – On documentaries and 50 urgency Cited Works 53 Beuzekom 4 Acknowledgements I would like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Catherine Lord, for leading me into the field of ecology and ecocriticism at the very beginning of the Master’s programme and for her invaluable supervision, encouragement and feedback during the writing of this thesis. I would also like to thank second reader Dr. Alex Gekker, and the professors and teachers of the Research Master who have helped me get through the programme and to some of whom I am greatly indebted. Thanks to Eelke Bo van de Weerd, for her love, humour, willpower and intelligence. Thanks to my dearest friend Laura Pannekoek, without whom I would not have had the motivation nor the knowledge to finish this thesis. Most of all, thanks to my parents Maartje and Kees, for their years of support and love and for always providing a home to come back to when I need it. Beuzekom 5 Introduction On documentary film and the imperceptible “The modern world of science was all about statistics and computer modelling, and that just wasn’t me”, James Balog explains in the documentary Chasing Ice, that follows the photographer-scientist and his project Extreme Ice Survey mapping the receding ice masses of glaciers around the world. The idea that speaks from Balog’s argument is that visual footage of processes relating to climate change can be as powerful as scientific data representing these global phenomena. Chasing Ice testifies to the importance of Balog’s project, as it accompanies the photographer in visualizing the dramatic recession of glaciers in the Arctic region, and thereby shows its audience precisely those things that have come to be, by themselves, icons for global warming. This addresses an important question about the visualization of climate change. We should think about the role documentary cinema could play in mapping and visualizing such an invisible and elusive phenomenon as global warming; the drastic changes stretched over long periods of time, the slow events of unimaginable scale. Recorded instances of, for example, collapsing ice masses are examples of real-time representations of otherwise invisible and less localized processes. A camera can capture the calving of a glacier and the ice masses crashing into the water, but it cannot capture the global rising temperature in the atmosphere that causes it. The collapsing ice is a visual representation of climate change. Thus, these visual representations seem like an important tool to convey processes like global warming and pollution, to raise awareness about their urgency. Documentary film, then, might use the techniques that its media characteristics afford it to visualize phenomena that are so massive that they elude human perception. As I shall argue, documentary cinema’s techniques and technical components allows the medium to, in some ways, alter a mode of human perception into a seeing that sees in different scales of space and time. Asking questions regarding the legitimate representations of real-life events in documentary cinema naturally raises issues concerning the position of the filmmaker in the production process. The political, subjective filmmaker might inherently obstruct the recording and representing of a natural event as it is. As Pier Paolo Pasolini has stated: “it is impossible to perceive reality as it happens if not from a single point of view, and this point of view is always that of a perceiving subject” (3). Indeed, a camera is always pointed at something by someone. One perceiving subject is the film’s spectator, who witnesses that which is recorded through the eyes of the human filmmaker. The filmmaker, who positions the camera and microphones, and subsequently produces a documentary that is a product of their vision, will always record phenomena from a human perspective. As Bill Nichols, in his work on documentary film Representing Reality, poses, “documentary realism is not the realism of Beuzekom 6 fiction” (165). While, according to Nichols, realism in fiction cinema represents an attempt to move the attention away from evidence of the construction of the screened world, documentary realism is a rhetoric, a matter of voice and argument, “how a personal point of view about the historical world manifests itself” (165). While in the establishing of fictional film worlds, the style of the filmmaker is an important device, documentary also often equips a realist style as an indication of authority. Realist style in documentary is “a mark of authenticity, testifying to the camera, and hence the filmmaker, having ‘been there’ and thus providing the warrant for our own ‘being there’” (181). Nichols refers to a well-known item in documentary criticism, namely what Douglas Kellner, in an essay on documentary and truth, calls “the normative ideal of objectivity” (59). He cites filmmaker Michael Moore, who claims that objectivity is a myth in documentary film. Kellner states that one of the sources of this ideal of objectivity is “a tradition of photography that saw the camera as a mode of reproducing reality”; photography and subsequently film have been seen as the media of reality in the sense that their technology allows a literal representation of past instances (59). It is because of this supposed impossibility of objectivity that, in an essay on data visualization in eco-cinema, Sean Cubitt argues that “pictorial realism wants to maintain a 500- year-old thesis that the world is its own cause, and that the human being alone is its witness, the observer for whom all of creation renders itself visible” (282). According to Cubitt, picturing in the classic sense, the sense of recording a phenomenon from a single point of view, is a remnant of humanism, which proposes that the human subject is the single perceiving subject. To depict climate change in a meaningful way, then, other modes of picturing would have to be thought and constructed. Sean Cubitt analyses the usage of data visualizations in film, arguing that it speaks from scientific rationalism and is, although seemingly supposed to “persuade through reason”, actually used to “mobilize at an affective level” (282). This conviction leads Cubitt to a thorough analysis of data visualization in fiction films, reaching the conclusion that its usage in film may lay bare a contradictory relationship between “the humanism of pictorial realism and the mass-management of data visualization” (294). This contradiction, Cubitt claims, is one that should be addressed by eco-cinema and eco-criticism, to reveal the fact that what is excluded from this combination is the non-human subject. While Cubitt is specifically discussing fictional narrative eco-cinema, the use of data-visualization in documentary works in a similar way in that it is employed to evoke both a sense of scientific authority and an affective response from the audience. Think of the well-known scene in Davis Guggenheim’s 2006 An Inconvenient Truth, in which Al Gore climbs to the top of his projected presentation to extend the graph of rising carbon dioxide levels beyond the borders of the presentation screen. Such a visualization of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere calls upon the authority of scientific data, while it simultaneously turns its inadequacy of representing Beuzekom 7 urgency into a gimmick by extending the CO2’s red line beyond the borders of the known data representation. The question that should be asked, then, is whether the medium of cinema could in some way escape the ostensible impossibility of objective representation, and whether it could do so by its own technical means instead of relying on other modes of visualization such as data. In the past, cinema’s functioning has sometimes been compared with the workings of scientific measurements and equipment.