A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film

Alexandra Juhasz, Alisa Lebow

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780470671641
• eBook ISBN: 9781118884508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

A Companion to Contemporary Documentary Film presents a collection of original essays that explore major issues surrounding the state of current documentary films and their capacity to inspire and effect change.

• Presents a comprehensive collection of essays relating to all aspects of contemporary documentary films
• Includes nearly 30 original essays by top documentary film scholars and makers, with each thematic grouping of essays sub-edited by major figures in the field
• Explores a variety of themes central to contemporary documentary filmmakers and the study of documentary film – the planet, migration, work, sex, virus, religion, war, torture, and surveillance
• Considers a wide diversity of documentary films that fall outside typical canons, including international and avant-garde documentaries presented in a variety of media

Part I
Planet

Introduction
Planet

Juan Francisco Salazar

Earth Day took place for the first time on April 22, 1970. It came to materialize an emerging planetary consciousness, fueled by the vitality of anti-war and civil rights movements, where environmental concerns took center stage for the first time. Since then, the date has become a symbol and a worldwide celebration of global environmentalisms. Some of the first images to illustrate this new awareness of a global environment, which later became exhausted by overuse by the environmentalist movement in the global north during the 1970s and 1980s, were the famous images taken by the Apollo missions. First, the 1968 image of the Earth rising on the Moon’s horizon taken by the Apollo 8, but most notoriously, the famous image of the “blue marble” taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972. In 1988 the same image was used on the cover of Time magazine to illustrate that year’s Man of the Year (now Person of the Year): “The Endangered Planet Earth.” Environment and global are in fact two notions that have developed forcefully in tandem since the appearance of environmental studies in the 1940s and the development to planetary sciences stemming out of the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year.

In 1969, reflecting on the initial Apollo images and the first humans to walk on the Moon, Allen Ginsberg (1972) wrote: “No Science Fiction expected this Globe-Eye Consciousness.” In fact, these images opened up for the first time a path for a new kind of planetary imagination, a new form of planetary consciousness which took on a new dimension once the planet was able to be “seen” from afar; from outer space; a planetary disposition that computer imaging – also since the 1970s – has been able to powerfully convey through modeling and visualization of a global ecology. As environmental cultural studies scholar Ursula K. Heise points out, these images provide “an apt metaphor for a cultural moment in which an entire planet becomes graspable as one’s local backyard” (Heise, 2008: 4). This new planetary global ecology emerging since the 1970s and fired up by new theories such as James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis quickly became “a new arena of political conflict” (Sachs, 1993) and has recently “become a core concern of social and cultural theory” (Heise, 2008: 4).

Hence, when setting out to interpret the theme of Planet for this volume on contemporary documentary cinema, a starting point was to interrogate how do we make sense of the idea of planet at a time when globalism and globality have become the currency of choice in contemporary social and cultural theory. The etymology of the English word planet, as in many other Indo-European derived languages, originates in the Greek word planētēs, meaning “wanderer, drifter.” Astēr planētēs or wandering star thus was a word used to refer to celestial bodies that wander/drift through the heavens (as opposed to the “fixed stars” of the constellations). I am captivated by how this notion of wandering captures humanity’s present moment: a permanent state of movement, of itinerant circumstances, of nomadic and transient acts, of a politics of drifting, of a civilizational wanderlust. Like never before, as Dyer-Witheford so eloquently puts it, today the whole planet has been opened up “as a field for manoeuvre” (Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 133).

In putting together this section I was interested in conveying a critical perspective on planetarity through a series of commissioned essays that could reflect critically on what Ursula K. Heise (2008) calls a “sense of planet” and what Edgar Morin (1999) has called “Earth identity.” In other words, essays which could develop a critical sensibility on the frictions arising between an “awareness of the planetary whole and the sharpened perception of differences” (Heise, 2008), which mark the form in which the global is presented and represented in contemporary documentary film. As such, when the future of the human species is now situated on a planetary scale and is immanent to the future of the non-human world, we were most interested in bringing together a series of preoccupations around two main vectors to interpret the notion of planetarity in documentary film: the environment and the future.

In doing so I have tried to put together a compelling case that documentary cinema is a vital and formidable cultural strategy and device through which to theorize not only how the planet has become perceivable and experienceable as a complex set of ecosystems, but most importantly how planetary futures are being played out, mobilized, and put into practice through differing knowledge practices. Here wandering also attaches its meaning to the notion of wondering. Wondering in this context concerns speculation and conjecture about our relationship with nature and our attachment to an array of possible futures. In relation to the power of cinema in general, not just documentary film, Sean Cubitt has persuasively articulated the view that certain types of cinemas have the capacity to produce films that are “more ethically, emotionally, and intellectually satisfying than much of what passes for eco-politics” (Cubitt, 2005: 1).

It may be fair to say that a planetary politics in documentary film is not necessarily a post-1990s phenomenon, fueled by new understandings of the scale of climate change, mass biological extinctions, irremediable loss of biodiversity and the new geopolitics of scarcity. A whole wave of advocacy documentary films, looking at nuclear hazard, the effects of radiation from nuclear power plants, and the imminence of nuclear war surged strongly in the 1970s and 1980s. These in some way also addressed a sense of planet and of planetary annihilation by nuclear war.

But in this section the focus is rather on how in the past two decades or so there has been a rush of documentary films that convey a “sense of planet” through a “global-eye consciousness” preoccupied with the possibility of developing an eco-critical perspective in documentary film. One such film is Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Home (2009), a $12 million feature-length environmental documentary that became the first film to premiere on YouTube at the same time as in cinemas and on TV. By mid 2012, the film had received more than 32 million views on YouTube. Home, like many other “contemplative” films of this kind, find their role in educating and contributing to “an awareness of our Earth-Homeland” (Morin, 1999). However, films like these do take a rather deterministic and hegemonic planet-wide perspective, in that they fail to signal and address the tensions, frictions, and destabilizing forces of locally embedded planetarity. Ursula K. Heise sees this as “a field of tension between the embrace of and the resistance to global connectedness, and between the commitment to a planetary vision and the utopian reinvestment in the local” (Heise, 2008: 21). This tension in contemporary environmental documentaries connects to broader attempts irrupting in recent years, and more or less coalescing in a wide array of related fields of knowledge and practice: eco-media, eco-cinema, environmental history, environmental humanities, environmental communication, and environmental cultural studies.

In selecting the essays for this section, we wanted to invite authors whose work would highlight a planet-wide perspective but which could incorporate a strong critique of bottom-up eco-politics. In searching within a vast sea of possibilities – given the rise to prominence of environmental documentaries in recent times – we looked for essays that could connect to current works in eco-criticism and eco-film criticism and that could develop a critical cosmopolitan perspective without leaving the concern for local eco-politics behind. As Sean Cubitt puts it: “an environmentalism that ignores class, poverty, inequality pestilence, war and injustice is not a political platform anyone would care to follow” (Cubitt, 2013: 279).

Broadly speaking, all three essays in this section ponder in one way or another on the environmental crises that are casting a profound anxiety about the future of human and non-human life on this planet. Each essay connects with contemporary critical eco-criticism in order to discuss not one form of planetarity and futurity but “a variety of ecological imaginations of the global” (Heise, 2008: 62). Whether focusing on the scalar aesthetics of oil, the datafication of sea level rise, or the assembling and putting into practice of divergent potential futures, the three essays in this section invite a deep reflection about the profound transformations in the complex dynamics of coupled socio-ecological systems at a planetary scale. As Kathryn Yusoff so clearly sets it: the catastrophe of climate change is excessive and will inscribe all earthly space. It is earth writing writ large (Yusoff, 2009; see also Walker, this volume). These profound transformations, which have paved the way for us to conceive of an epoch, the anthropocene, where human intervention has geophysical force, speak of a moment in human history characterized by an agonizing wondering about the future of the planet, our own existence as human beings, and our relationship with “our environment” that is irreversibly changing at an unprecedented scale. The anthropocene lives with a tension that is amplified by the recognition that the planet may be more like “a moving whirlwind with no organizing centre” (Morin, 1999) than a global system.

The essays in this section signal a sort of zeitgeist in the emerging and burgeoning field of eco-cinema studies, as they investigate the politics and poetics of documentary cinema’s interventions in contemporary renderings of global change as the “new spectre haunting the ‘globe’” (Szerszynski and Urry, 2010: 1). All three authors are concerned with what documentary cinema, in both theory and practice, has to offer by reflecting upon a consciousness of planetary crisis and the inevitable thought of a tipping point – or irreversible change – to human life on this planet. As the world as we know it is disappearing in front of our very own eyes, can documentary film become something more than commentary and critique; moving beyond textual representation and deconstruction to contribute to an ethos of hope by instigating action on global change? What other ways are possible to visualize and narrativize...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Planet
• Part II: Migration
• Part III: Work
• Part IV: Sex
• Part V: Virus
• Part VI: Religion
• Part VII: War
• Part VIII: Torture
• Part IX: Surveillance
• Index
• End User License Agreement