Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays

225 Pages·2016·2.562 MB·English

by  Rayson K. Alex, S. Susan Deborah (eds.)

e c o d o c u m e n t a r i e s
critical essays
rayson k. alex
&
s. susan deborah
Ecodocumentaries
Rayson K. Alex • S. Susan Deborah
Editors
Ecodocumentaries
Critical Essays
Editors
Rayson K. Alex S. Susan Deborah
Birla Institute of Technology and M. E. S. College of Arts & Commerce,
Sciences, Pilani, Goa, India Goa, India
ISBN 978-1-137-56223-4 ISBN 978-1-137-56224-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56224-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957775
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To
All the ecodocumentary filmmakers who support tiNai Ecofilm Festival
F : P c
oreword ackaging oncerns
“They didn’t fear their demise, they repackaged it—it can be enjoyed as
video games, as TV shows, books, movies. The entire world wholeheart-
edly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted toward it with gleeful aban-
don.” Thus spoke Governor David Nix in the film Tomorrowland.
We are they, and we are having a heyday with all things eco. Ecocinema,
ecomedia, ecodocumentaries, ecoperformances, ecocriticism: it is the best
of times, and it is the worst of times to be the natural environment. There
is intense interest—popular and academic—in all things eco. There is
hope, and there is despair. There are utopic visions of sustainable “futuris-
tic” futures (clean, glossy, digital, silicon), and there are dystopic views of
imagined horrors to continue (dirt, WALL-E, and the gray of The Road).
There is entertainment, and there is fact (the difference between the two
increasingly not so great). Clever scriptwriters give words to gifted actors,
who then serenade us with speeches about the state of things, undoubt-
edly with more charisma and passion than most academics or activists can
ever hope to achieve, not to mention an infinitely broader reach. There
are, to be sure, really good results from all of this. “Clean technologies”
are developing very quickly indeed. So too, however, are the subsequent
new problems that often attend these new technologies. Novel things that
look truly great on the surface sometimes turn out to be truly horrendous.
Take the digital revolution, for instance. Cloud storage and the Internet
are wonderful and indispensable in my line of work, but there is a sober-
ing reality about sustainability here that most of us perhaps would wish
just weren’t true: one of these is that by 2009, “the server farms that allow
the internet to operate and that provide cloud-based digital computing
vii
viii FOREWORD: PACKAGING CONCERNS
had surpassed the airline industry in terms of the amount of carbon diox-
ide released into the earth’s atmosphere” (Rust, Monani, and Cubitt
“Introduction,” 3). Who would have thought? And who ever thinks about
the actual physical waste of the actual physical equipment? One of the
documentaries covered in this collection (deftly and thoroughly by Başak
Ağın Dönmez and tangentially by Chia-ju Chang) is about the mega-
electronics dump in Accra, Ghana. These two things alone (the carbon
dioxide usage and the burial grounds of electronics) go beyond simply
shocking; they are virtually paralyzing. Real eye-openers. And opening
eyes is what this collection is all about.
It is clear that “one of the central ways we shape our relationship to
other animals, our place on Earth, and the social structures that arise
from these understandings is through media and culture,” as John
Parham has eloquently explained in Green Media and Popular Culture:
An Introduction (1).1 Indeed, it is the centrality of media in industrialized
nations to understandings of self and the world that has resulted in so
many books recently addressing and exposing both humanity’s spectacu-
larly visible ecocaust and the slower aspects of this violence toward nature.
These books attest to the growing importance of scholarship that urges
sustained ecocritical and other eco-inflected analyses of what has come to
be termed ecomedia.2
Two books—each fresh and wide-ranging—by Stephen Rust, Salma
Molani, and Stephen Cubitt have been and continue to be vital in this
new area of study: Ecocinema Theory and Practice (2013) is arguably the
first collection of essays about eco-inflected cinema; Ecomedia: Key Issues
(2016) is another first, massive in scope, giving more attention than ever
before to the topic and ranging in discussion from thematic issues to
matters of production, from divergences to convergences, from frames
to flows. Another foundational text, without which Ecodocumentaries:
Critical Essays simply would not have been possible, is Sean Cubitt’s 2005
EcoMedia, a book that boldly states upfront that “we have no better place
to look than the popular media for representations of popular knowledge”
(1). Infused with biophilic and ecophobic ethics, knowledge about our
natural environment is both represented in and produced by popular
media.
Pat Brereton’s Environmental Ethics and Film (2016) builds on
Cubitt’s important work and analyzes the medium of film and how it has
been, is being, and can be used to reimagine ethical values. Also influenced
by Cubitt’s work, Culture and Media: Ecocritical Explorations (2014)—by
FOREWORD: PACKAGING CONCERNS ix
Rayson K. Alex, S. Susan Deborah (the editors of the current volume),
and Sachindev P.S.—expands the discussions and puts India center stage
in a study of a richly diverse and provocative body of ecomedia. Using
Nirmal Selvamony’s “tinai criticism,” Alex identifies ecocriticism in India
as “a local and global concept…an indigenous way of looking at the land
and its people from natural, cultural, and supernatural perspectives” (3)
and seeks “a holistic understanding of place, people, and culture” in this
book, “a major portion of [which]…is devoted to essays on cinema” (4).
In light of the tremendous energy and work appearing on eco-inflected
media, then, Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays is a timely collection. It
does what good scholarship in the environmental humanities should do.
It digs deeply, it unearths, it questions, and—perhaps most importantly—
it motivates. It joins and extends a conversation about media and environ-
ment, and about the role documentaries play in educating and inspiring. It
brings together some of the best thinkers in this new field of scholarship—
a field that is deeply challenging and filled with ambivalences.
One of the more prominent challenges of the field, as Rob Nixon
has famously observed in his remarkable Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, “is representational: how to devise arresting
stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence
of delayed effects” (2). A key insight of John Parham, too, is that often
“green messages sit uncomfortably alongside dominant (non-green) ide-
ologies and/or anthropocentric thinking” (xx). Indeed, the challenges for
media are strong, and the urge to include things that are known to sell
well seems irresistible—hence, the jarring presence of sexist configurations
and images in so many mainstream eco-inflected movies.
It has long been a research interest of mine to know what happens
when, as John Parham so nicely words it, media “adapt[s] itself to and
speak[s] in the modes and language of the dominant culture” (xvii). These
modes and this language are imbued not only with the patriarchal val-
ues of sexism and heterosexism (both profitable for patriarchies) but also
with the values of ecophobia (also profitable for patriarchies). Ecophobia
prominently colludes with sexism any time we hear some unseemly com-
ment about “Mother Nature” (sometimes even described as a cunning
“bitch”).3
One of the main things that many of the films covered in
Ecodocumentaries: Critical Essays address is ecophobia, and although the
word does not appear much in the following pages, many of the contribu-
tors to this volume address the concept in varying ways. Pat Brereton hints
x FOREWORD: PACKAGING CONCERNS
at it without actually naming it in his discussion about the E.O. Wilson’s
“controversial theory of ‘biophilia.’” Chia-ju Chang more directly raises
the matter of ecophobia, again without actually naming it but rather by
describing it—in contrast to biophilia (which she does mention)—as “the
dark and ‘inconvenient’ side of the earth’s story.”
The packaging of ecophobia (and sexism, heterosexism, racism, among
other things) uncomfortably alongside green issues, however, is not the
only danger ecodocumentaries face, not the only thing that threatens the
effectiveness of ecodocumentaries, and not the only challenge ecodocu-
mentaries must confront. I have noted elsewhere (see Estok, “Ecomedia
and Ecophobia”) that there are several reasons why so much of ecomedia
has had limited effects on pushing people to change their behaviors, a
crippled capacity to halt or slow the warming of our atmosphere, and
these challenges must be addressed: (1) ecomedia not only sometimes
perpetuate the ecophobic ethics that are so central to the problem in the
first place; ecomedia are embedded in a period in which our continu-
ous partial attention runs hand in hand with our compassion fatigue; (2)
ecomedia dilutes the material to such a degree that important abstract
concepts are blurred, thus preventing thinking people from seeing key
connections; and (3) ecomedia has become entertainment, and the blur-
ring of virtual and actual worlds makes a lot of the actual news simply
another form of entertainment. Speaking “in the modes and language of
the dominant culture” indeed does bring the issues to a wide audience,
does make knowledge more accessible, does theoretically make a differ-
ence; yet, the tensions and contradictions of ecomedia, delivering, as it
does, comments about nature being a bitch and daring people to dance4
are manifold.
Tensions and difficult balances fill the pages of this book. The very
topic implies, as Pietari Kääpä in this collection observes, a “difficulty of
balancing human stories with environmental rhetoric.” In the films Kääpä
discusses, “even as they evoke environmentalist arguments, they also con-
ceptualise nature as property.” There is no question, as Pat Brereton also
argues in this volume, that we “need much more ecodocumentaries…
that speak[…] to and hopefully help[…] in the process of gently chang-
ing behaviour patterns with regards to food production alongside other
related environmental concerns, before it is too late.” Yet, while it certainly
seems counterintuitive to argue against such an idea (and I don’t want to
do so here), we must also ask, first, if pummeling ourselves with data is
going to do the trick and, second, whether we should address questions
FOREWORD: PACKAGING CONCERNS xi
about information overload and numbness, about how, as Naomi Klein
has recently put it, “each massive disaster seems to inspire less horror,
fewer telethons” (53). Compassion fatigue increases with every news
report, every additional documentary, and every fresh environmental
horror story. To be clear, some of this stuff, if I may quote from Divya
Anand’s chapter, “is at times over-awing for the viewer.” This is one of the
challenges for ecodocumentaries: to provide numbing material without
numbing the viewer.
Documentaries that move people and are in some ways jarring perhaps
still remain the best bet. In her discussion of In God’s Land, Salma Monani
describes a kind of jarring affect, a “visual and aural affect” of an animated
film that she describes as “discombobulating,” the film itself being not
easy to watch. It is about Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in India and
the conflicts surrounding them. While the film is not anti-SEZ, it does,
nevertheless, capture the sense of “the simmering conflict that surrounds
the SEZ” and of how it seems to offer instant solutions of “development”
for long-term problems of poverty and disenfranchisement, solutions that
themselves will have “long-term ecological aftermaths.”
All of the contributors to this volume are, of course, in principle con-
cerned about the “long-term ecological aftermaths” of human activities as
they are represented in diverse documentaries, but many of the chapters
also share a vital concern with how documentaries package the seemingly
opposing topics of the local and the global, the individual and the commu-
nity, the self and the other. In his discussion of the documentary The Queen
of the Trees, for instance, Nirmal Selvamony examines the ontology of the
fig tree and stresses that although the individual is important and undeni-
able, community membership and belonging are also ontological realities.
We ignore these at our own risk. Selvamony argues about the impossibility
of isolating the individual (and of the foolishness in trying to do so) and
about the importance of recognizing that the individual is always a part
of a larger living body. John Duvall maintains that the sense of connect-
edness is of global importance, and this matter takes center stage in his
discussion of the documentary entitled Elemental. The film documents
the work of three activists in three very different parts of the world: an
Indian government official taking personal action to clean up the Ganges
River, a First Nations Canadian mother campaigning against the Alberta
Tar Sands project, and an Australian entrepreneur/inventor trying to get
investors to put money into biomimicry research and development. Duvall
sees the importance of linking the local and the global, and notes that