Picturing the Imperceptible Eco-documentary filmmaking as the staging of media-experiments

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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. Siegfried Kracauer, for example, argues that that “in its preoccupation with the small the cinema is comparable to science”, because “like science, it breaks down material phenomena into tiny particles, thereby sensitizing us to the tremendous energies accumulated in the microscopic configurations of matter” (50). The screened reality of film, Kracauer claims, is one that is presented by a different mode of perception than human sensorial experience: in its use of field of depth, focus and framing, it is more sensitive to the small that human perception. Also its focus on the massive, on the internal and the strange, for Kracauer, means that cinema is able to “reveal things normally unseen; phenomena overwhelming consciousness; and certain aspects of the outer world which may be called ‘special modes of reality’” (46). Also Stanley Cavell, in his The World Viewed, refers to the perceptive qualities of the mechanical camera. He points out that “photographs are not hand-made; they are manufactured” (20). This manufacturing, or as Cavell calls it, “mechanism or automatism”, testifies to the material properties of the recording device, the mirrors and the celluloid. However, “reproducing the world is the only thing film does automatically”, Cavell argues, and therefore he separates the physical properties of the medium from those things that make cinema an art, such as form, genre, type and technique (103). A moving picture can use its mechanical properties to show successive frames, to panning and zooming, and therefore, according to Cavellian film philosophy, “the fixed screen frame results in a phenomenological frame that is indefinitely extendible and contractible” (25). Crucially, for Cavell, the spectator exists because of the film world, but the film world also exists by virtue of the fact that it is seen by the spectator. In screening ‘reality’, as recorded, or manufactured, the film screen “holds reality from us, it holds reality before us, i.e., withholds reality before us”. In this philosophy, the ‘automatism’ of the recording and screening mechanism allows the medium to screen an image that is a screened reality, with the fact that “the projected world does not exist (now)”, as “its only difference from reality” (24).

There is another objection to the fact that cinema could represent a reality however, especially a reality of complex issues such as climate change. Timothy Morton, in his book Hyperobjects, claims that it is not at all possible to represent the object, or rather, hyperobject, that is climate change, neither within human cognitive faculties, nor with scientific machinery or recording equipment. Hyperobjects, according to Morton, are those things viscous, nonlocal, untouchable, transcending human spatiotemporal scales. The hyperobject “is not a

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function of our knowledge”; it is relative to humans (2). From Morton’s investment in object-oriented ontology, he draws the characteristic of hyperobjects that they are withdrawn from direct access, and that we can only sense these hyperobjects in their interobjective manifestations, in which the “aesthetic properties of an object” interrelate (1). Neither human perception nor the film camera, thus, can ever capture a phenomenon, because it only reveals itself in parts: objects can only show their aesthetic dimensions, not their objective essence.

In this thesis, however, I will argue that eco-documentaries are able to screen certain events in a meaningful way due to the mechanical properties of the camera and filmmaking techniques, with the filmmaker(s) subjectively present in the framing of the automated recording. While I have thus far mostly discussed the work of film and documentary theorists, such as Siegfried Kracauer, Stanley Cavell and Bill Nichols, my thesis argument hinges on certain parts of the German media theory that seem to originate in Friedrich Kittler’s media studies of the 1980’s, which aimed to depart from the anthropocentrism of the humanities and explore a media studies which focuses on technologies that are not, as Marshall McLuhan claimed, “extensions of man”, of “our senses and our nerves” (3-4), but are independent materialities that exist outside the cultural domain. Central to my thesis are certain texts of Wolfgang Ernst and Mark Boris Nikola Hansen, whose works are in their own way continuations of Kittler’s media theory. In this project, I will try to synthesize this theoretical context of the autonomy of media with the various thoughts on documentary film, reality and objectivity that I have discussed above, and thereby make a case to regard eco-documentary filmmaking as the staging of media-experiments. Such an approach is worthwhile, I argue, because in it, the product of the filmmaking process cannot be reduced to its automated, mechanic functions, nor to the subjective, political position of the filmmaker.

This thesis is divided into three chapters. In each chapter, I analyse two films that are connected by the theme of that chapter. In the first of the three, I will examine the scientific discourse that is often employed in environmental documentaries and consider the role of the filmmaker or author in conveying the message of the film. In doing this, I will look at A Plastic Ocean (Craig Leeson, 2016), which makes an attempt to show how plastic waste is polluting oceans and has entered the marine food chain from the smallest level, and the well-known An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006), in which ex-presidential candidate and climate activist Al Gore presents a slideshow lecture about the climate crisis. I will analyse these two films in terms of their usage of data visualizations and employment of a certain scientific discourse and establish how these two strategies that are often found in eco-documentaries might not be sufficient to convey the urgency of the climate crisis. In the second chapter I analyse two films by Jeff Orlowski, Chasing Ice (2012) and the more recent Chasing Coral (2017). Both of these films depict the usage of camera equipment as measuring media, and I will thus analyse these two films to illustrate my argument explicitly and examine how certain

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camera setups might work as media technologies, as well as describe some of the implications of a non-human mode of imaging. In the third chapter, I will look at what my argument means for the ontology of the moving image, for the relation between the camera and reality. By analysing the second episode of the recent Netflix series Our Planet, “Frozen Worlds” (2019), and Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007), I will show how questions of objectivity and reality of the documentary film medium fall into my argument and examine how these two documentary texts construct their own realities.

To support these approaches, I turn to Mark B.N. Hansen’s essay “Medium-Oriented Ontology”, which, in an attempt to counter Timothy Morton’s argument for the “infinitely withdrawn hyperobject” and to create a different ethical conception of the phenomenal, invents the term ‘medium-oriented ontology’, naming the conviction that the phenomenal can be accurately represented through media technologies (402). Contrary to the notion of hyperobjects of Timothy Morton, Hansen claims that there is no objective essence of phenomena, and that phenomena only consist of their appearances. This philosophy, in the context of climate change, is a practical perspective in the sense that it is “crucial for any ethical engagement with global warming”, in order to actually engage with the “concrete operationality” of the phenomenon (403). Hansen argues that phenomena such as climate change are visible through their appearances in measuring technologies, a notion which is based in the media-archeological accounts of Wolfgang Ernst (discussed below). It presents its reader a fundamental notion in thinking about representing invisible objects and processes: those objects that are too slow, immense or complex to regard and comprehend, can be represented through media technology interfaces. However, Hansen’s argument is more radical than that: he claims that, therefore, media technologies are ontological technologies. The data is the phenomenon; there is no object behind these representations that is fundamentally different from the data output the measuring instruments produce. Hansen’s medium-oriented ontology reveals to us a conception of regarding climate change that is essentially non-human, in that it assumes the autonomy of data and media technologies in measuring invisible phenomena.

Wolfgang Ernst, one of the main influences for Hansen’s essay, claims that in producing visualizations of invisible phenomena such as quantum behaviour, media technologies produce images that are artifacts of something universal. While the setup of measuring technologies “clearly belong to what we call and describe as cultural history”, Ernst argues, there is also “something at work [...] that is indifferent to the historical” (185). According to Ernst, “the media-experimental event cannot be reduced to discursive effects”, because “there is always the imminent ‘veto’ that comes from physics” (185). There are micro-temporal processes at work in the mechanical parts of measuring media, that give the equipment some

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kind of authority over what it measures. They perform the translation between the invisible, physical, and the human scales of cultural experience.

Eco-documentary filmmaking as the staging of an experiment, then, would incorporate the filmmaker as the discursive figure setting up the experiment, while also acknowledging the irreducible role of the physical recording that happens inside the camera. If James Balog, in Chasing Ice, sets up his camera at a certain point to record a receding glacier over the course of months, his experimental setup is a product of cultural experience and hypotheses, but the camera records the glaciers by its own means. To produce this time-lapse, and to render the recordings into a legible event in a comprehensible time-scale, the footage needs to be edited. In Encounters at the End of the World, to name another example, Werner Herzog creates his own poetic atmosphere over footage of a sympagic environment; we might say that this is an exercise of the culturally situated filmmaker to translate the physical unknown into a legible account. Important here is the role that editing and other cinematic techniques play in documentary film acting as this hinge between the physical and the discursive. This is something that media scholar Jussi Parikka alludes to in his A Geology of Media, by coining the term “medianatures”. By this term, he proposes to define the “double bind” of media: technical media are needed to render natural phenomena and earth’s materials knowable, and simultaneously, “it is the earth that provides for media and enables it” (13). Using as an example, for the former part of the double bind, slowed down audio recordings of earthquakes, Parikka establishes that this representation of natural phenomena “means the portability and repeatability of the Real: the geophysical that becomes registered through the ordering of media reality” (13). Film has the affordances to speed up, slow down, pan, zoom and arrange footage in order to create patterns, figures and, in a sense, like the audible earthquakes, extra-human perception. Through this “portability and repeatability”, the moldability of media, invisible, inaudible or incomprehensible phenomena are rendered legible, earthquake trembles are made audible, plastic waste in the ocean is made visible, global warming is rendered, in a sense, knowable.

Thus, in this project, I will explore the possibilities of the medium to depict issues such as global warming and pollution, how the camera might be used to produce footage that exceeds human perception, and how this notion reflects on the relation between cinema and reality. To consider the production of environmental documentaries as the staging of media-experiments, the filmmaking mechanism as media technology, requires, as I have suggested above, an appreciation of documentary cinema’s own devices. Sean Cubitt emphasizes the role of data visualization in fiction film, which I will use to describe two documentaries in the first chapter. My argument, however, will emphasize cinema’s own devices of framing, editing and image manipulation as important mechanisms to depict the issues that exceed the scales of human perception.

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Chapter 1 The science documentary

A Plastic Ocean and An Inconvenient Truth

In this project of establishing a concept of documentary filmmaking as the staging of experiments, I will first discuss two films that engage in a similar language by relying, visually and discursively, on scientific research and its authority, but that also prominently feature the personal life and background of the central characters and the affective dimensions of the films’ subject matter. This chapter explores these characteristics in light of the bigger project of this thesis in the documentary film A Plastic Ocean (2016), an examination of the global problem of plastic waste and pollution in oceans, landfills and organisms that is directed by Craig Leeson, and the much discussed film by Davis Guggenheim An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which follows former presidential candidate and climate activist Al Gore and is an account of his efforts to raise awareness about global warming.

I will examine questions regarding the role of scientific data that is often a prominent feature of environmental documentaries, and the accompanied cinematic strategies of data visualization and the affective mobilization of the spectator. As an often employed discourse in documentaries on climate change and similar issues, it is important to address the scientific authority of data visualization not only to understand its effects, but also to understand how it exists alongside cinema’s more traditional devices and how it overlaps with the techniques that are able to screen extra-human perception, that I will address in this thesis. This chapter will examine the two cases mostly in terms of Sean Cubitt’s essay, which I have cited in the introduction, to get a grasp on “the data-fication of the photographic image”, the construction of filmic images as scientific evidence (282). In the first part, I will look at A Plastic Ocean to not only review the filmmakers’ prominent role in the documentary, but also to look at how the moving image is used to depict plastic’s invasion into microscopic life, and thus how it depicts extra-human perception in a way that makes cinematic use of a technology otherwise used for scientific measurements. In the second part, on An Inconvenient Truth, I will discuss the obvious pathos that is used by Al Gore, but also the way in which Gore uses research data and photographic techniques to depict the complex phenomenon that is global warming. The translation of slow, massive changes in the environment into manageable, legible and comprehensible bits is a key feature of An Inconvenient Truth, but it mostly does so in simplified graphs and pictures of climate change icons, such as melting glaciers.

In this chapter I will argue that the devices used in both A Plastic Ocean and An Inconvenient Truth heavily rely on the interpretation of the filmmakers, instead of on visual evidence. I want to show that the employed scientific authority and the affective experience of the filmmakers in both these films might not always be sufficient to depict the complexity of

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the issues they address. To depict a phenomenon that is inconceivably large, incomprehensibly ubiquitous, cinema needs another mode of picturing that neither relies on abstract representations such as graphs and satellite imagery, nor on personal interpretation of the filmmakers; a mode of picturing that is based in recordings but that alters anthropocentric modes of perception. I will show examples of these kinds of images in both these films, but also question the way they are used. Another aspect I will explore is how the personal life of the central cinematic figure, undeniably present in these films in the forms of Craig Leeson in A Plastic Ocean and Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, contributes to some kind of understanding of the film’s subject matter. In both A Plastic Ocean and An Inconvenient Truth, the central male figures serve as mediators between the complex issues of which they want to raise awareness and the spectator’s cultural experience. This presence of authorship is another cinematic device, in the sense that it uses voice-over and close-ups of the figures, to approximate a kind of sense of the subject matter of the films, to form a visual language to depict the issues of global warming and pollution. By referring to Bill Nichols’ modes of documentary film and reviewing the role of the filmmaker in these, I will analyse some instances of authorship and personal authority in A Plastic Ocean and An Inconvenient Truth.

A Plastic Ocean

One present issue that is increasingly often regarded in terms of ubiquity, globality and elusiveness is plastic pollution. “How”, Amanda Boetzkes asks in a short essay on plastic and oil culture aesthetics, “do we grapple with the ubiquity of plastics, and the fact that they are not a localized, but rather a global waste belonging to everyone and no one?” (52). Indeed, the polymers that are present in products ranging from food packaging to car frames are globally distributed and its distribution has become an environmental issue as polymers and plastic products have found their way into the oceans in large numbers, are breaking up into microplastics and are influencing ecosystems and food chains. As Boetzkes states, such a phenomenon in its entirety, which is present worldwide but still mostly invisible, is hard to think about, and equally hard to depict.

Craig Leeson’s 2016 documentary A Plastic Ocean makes an attempt to tackle the global issue of plastic pollution in the oceans and its implications for animal and human health. Together with free diver Tanya Streeter, director Leeson travels to a wide range of different locations to depict the ubiquity of polymers and the ramifications for organisms and ecosystems that come into contact with the substance. Thinking in terms of Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary, the practice of documentary filmmaking that Leeson engages in mostly resembles the participatory mode in the scheme of documentary modes that Bill

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Nichols proposes. The participatory mode involves the filmmaker, in a similar way as the anthropologist researcher, undertaking field work, being “among others and speak about or represent what they experience” (Nichols 116). This type of filmmaking is characterized by the fact that the audience is not presented with merely a sense of what it is to be in the situation that is depicted, as it is in documentaries that fall into the observational mode that Nichols proposes, but is represented with “a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result” (116). For Nichols, the degree of the latter feature defines the differences between films that belongs to this mode.

In A Plastic Ocean, although the way Leeson and Streeter alter situations they find themselves in is far from explicit, they actively position themselves as mediators for the information that is provided by interviewees such as researchers and locals. In such a way, their presence and interpretation of the events that are recorded can be seen as translations. In particular, it seems that they act as the emotional interpreters of what is shown and said by others, which means they, indeed, do not qualify as objective outside voices, but as subjective interpreters. Thus, this interpreting and sculpting of meaning by the filmmakers does not only take place in the film’s post-production techniques such as editing or in the framing of the camera during takes, both of which I will discuss later, but also in their own on-screen presence. An example of this would be a particularly affective scene in which seabird biologist Dr. Jennifer Lavers has lined up a number of deceased shearwaters. She cuts open one of the birds’ stomachs and showcases the contents on the table next to the dead birds. Here, with a close-up of Lavers fingers pushing into the plastic filled exposed stomach of the shearwater followed by a close-up reaction shot of Craig Leeson, we can see the central role

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of the filmmaker in this type of scenes. Accompanied by verbal reactions of the director such as “stuffed full of plastic” and “ah, it’s awful”, this montage, like many others in the film, frames the situation as observed by the filmmaker, from his point of view and his emotional response. This returns us to what Pier Paolo Pasolini stated by writing that “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). The perceiving subject, in this case, is the mediator of the information from the events of the film to the experience of the spectator. The central characters of the film, Leeson and Streeter, thus become not only the filmmakers that provide their audience with visual traces and evidence of the presented issue of plastic pollution, but also with the affective framing of these instances.

However, as I have noted above, the presence of the filmmakers in the interviews, experiments and visual instances of pollution is not the only way in which A Plastic Ocean tries to affectively represent the complexity of the global issue and, thus, stages a media-experiment to bridge the gap between the physical complexity of pollution and discursive representation. The documentary also relies heavily on citing scientific research, showing the data and numbers associated with pollution and inserting graphic representations of larger trends or microscopic instances of the subject matter; the film’s persuasion relies on the authority of science. This is explicitly the case, for example, when the filmmakers include microscopic images of plankton species consuming plastic particles (Figure 1). The latter sequence of shots seems to be of value to the general aim of A Plastic Ocean to persuade its viewer of the ubiquity of plastic particles: if the substance enters the food chain even on a microscopic scale, it must be everywhere. These images of plankton, for Sean Cubitt, would likely not qualify as data visualization, or even the “data-fication of the photographic image” (282). They show mere instances of the pollution in real time, instead of global trends or its historical development, that is, they do not depict “massive but slow change” directly (280). However, the shots do show instances of pollution that are out of reach without measuring equipment, that go beyond human perception in the sense that they are too small to see, instead of too massive or slow. I want to argue that, like data visualization does according to Cubitt, these images speak from a “scientific rationalism” (281), and differ from a traditional practice of picturing, in the way these recordings of plankton and microplastics are represented in A Plastic Ocean, that frames “the human as species”, instead of “the human individual as the measure of perception” (284).

Let us take a step back and examine Cubitt’s claims upon which I base this assertion. Picturing, as a testament of photographic realism, he notes, “wants to maintain a 500-year-old thesis that the world is its own cause, and that the human being alone is its witness” (282). This kind of picturing, then, takes the human subject, the human individual, as the central observer, and the observed phenomenon as the object. As such, it upholds a relationship with

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the environment that, according to Cubitt, “has deep roots in the historical formation of concepts of the human and natural”, and he calls a subject-object relation (294). There is, however, another “mode of imaging involved in ecocinema” (282). It corresponds to the general tendency of environmentalism to employ a rhetoric of scientific rationalism, and works at the contradiction of the environmentalist movement of having a demand that wants to voice the non-human, while it, through the logic of populism in its discourse (the people and the underdog), reproduces an essentially human discourse. The mode of imaging that is data visualization, presents an imaging “which seeks to give a voice to nonhuman actors”, tries to break with this contradiction (281). Data visualization, Cubitt explains, is the result of a translation of researchers’ empirical data into “visually legible symbols for the mass population”, to “mobilize at an affective level” (282). Thus, contrary to pictorial realism, which takes the human individual as the condition for seeing, data visualization frames the mass population, the human species, “as the universal subject of politics” (284). In this, it parallels Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Cubitt claims, which “takes the mass of the population as its object, statistical management as its method, and the regulation of life as its goal” (284). As I have stated above, while the recordings of plankton and plastic particles do not qualify as data visualizations in the way Cubitt describes these, in the context of A Plastic Ocean they do seem to correspond to the same tendencies as the second mode of imaging he describes. While the image in itself is quite abstract, almost non-representational, the way the recording is framed in the narrative of the documentary is very clear. The shot in the scene’s montage that precedes the image of the plankton eating plastics, is a shot of a small crab surrounded by pieces of plastic and searching through them. The text overlay reads: “In

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some places there is more plastic than plankton… and that plastic is being eaten by marine life” (Figure 2). Only some scenes later in the documentary, the film starts showing the implications for seafood consumption by humans, claiming that “the ocean is the world’s largest source of protein”, and that “more than 2.6 billion people depend on the ocean for their primary source of protein” (Figure 3), showing shots of crashing waves and a school of fish, respectively. These images in the montage put the recording of the plankton and microplastics in the context of marine food chains and eventually human consumption. In such a framing, A Plastic Ocean places the plankton at the bottom of the food chain, and the human population at the top, and thereby it poses that the human species (as it claims that roughly one-third of the world’s population is directly dependent on seafood) is ultimately the last to be affected by the plastic pollution. In this sense, it declares the “mass of the population as its object”, it declares “statistical management as its method” in naming the numbers of affected human bodies, and “the regulation of life as its goal”, especially as the film, in the segment of microscopic shots, demands that the global use of microplastics in cosmetic products must be stopped (284). It thus corresponds to the way Cubitt describes Foucault’s biopolitics. This “regulation of life as its goal”, as Cubitt claims, “extends to the life of the biosphere”, and thus is also about the regulation of all life forms, beyond the human body (284). Thus, perhaps it could be said that this depiction of the plankton is a sort of hybrid of the two modes of imaging Cubitt highlights, in that it still relies on the human mode of observation, since, to a certain extent, it relies on pictorial realism, but it does so in an inherently mechanical manner, due to the usage of scientific equipment. The microscope, the media device that allows for a picture

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of the plankton, is a technology that, in this case, is extended by the camera in order to be able to distribute and reproduce the image.

Discussing the properties of measuring media technologies, Wolfgang Ernst, in his essay “Experimenting with Media Technologies: Pythagoras, Hertz, Turing”, stretches the importance of regarding the recordings of media technologies in the manner mentioned above. Ernst claims that the setups of media-enhanced experimentation “belong to what we call and describe as cultural history”, but there is also “something at work [...] that is indifferent to the historical” (185). For Ernst, the physical events of media experiments “cannot be reduced to discursive effects”, because “there is always the imminent ‘veto’ that comes from physics” (185). This fundamental statement, that announces that there are things that are ahistorical, universal, even “cosmic”, is at the basis of Mark B.N. Hansen’s argument about medium-oriented ontology. Hansen, in citing Ernst, highlights the fundamentally non-human way of thinking about experiments and how Ernst’s understanding of media experiments emphasize that the media technologies act as a hinge between the micro-temporal, the incomprehensible, illegible, and the realm of cultural experience and discourse.

The microscopic view of plankton and the plastic surrounding it, then, seems to be a very explicit example of media technologies acting as this hinge. The media technology of the microscope serves quite literally as a bridge between the invisible and microscopic and the discursive and cultural. However, here, as I mentioned above, it is not only the microscope that functions as this hinge. The recording device that films the microscopic scene extends the image of the plankton into the realm of mass media, and so it bridges between the media technology observing the event and the cultural context of the spectator. The “time-invariant

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event”, as Ernst calls it, the ahistorical physical event of measuring, takes place within the microscope as well as within the camera (185). Such an understanding of recording an event or a phenomenon diminishes the importance of the question of the supposed referent in the ‘real world’, the question of the indexicality of film, as it assumes the “the superior wisdom of media themselves” in measuring and recording (Hansen 384).

I want to cautiously show that this notion of the camera as a media device in a media-experiment setup does not only work on the level of these microscopic recordings, but can generally also be applied as a concept to the functioning of the camera in documentary filmmaking, in the sense that the positioning of equipment and the framing of the recordings are choices by the filmmaker that define the result of the filmmaking experiment. To show a straightforward example and go back to the sequences in A Plastic Ocean of the reviewing of the amount of plastic in shearwater birds’ stomachs: the filmmaker Craig Leeson joins Dr. Jennifer Lavers and her colleague in performing an experiment on a young shearwater. They put a tube into the bird’s stomach, fill the stomach with water, until the shearwater regurgitates the water with some of its stomach’s content, including pieces of plastic. Recording and filming this experiment might be called, in the context discussed above, an experiment in itself. Cubitt, in his conclusion of the essay I have discussed, states that “science is no more unmediated than any other human activity”, and that the choice of scientific instruments influences the kind of science that is performed (294). Hansen calls the media-enhanced experiment “simply a staging of the operation of the machine, [...] a forging of contact between the physical and the experiential domain of cultural life” (385). While the measuring device constructs the recorded phenomenon, the researcher, or in this case filmmaker, and their interaction with the instrumentation as well as with the observed phenomenon, determines the outcome of the experiment. Placing a camera with a wide-angle lens in the tub in which the shearwater empties its stomach, has certain effects on the working of the scene (figure 4). It is a matter of framing: the shot of the bird dramatizes its actions, by enlarging its movements and putting it in a strange perspective. The perspective used, which centres the distressing movements of the bird, seems to formulate the affective experience of the creature, emphasizing the negative experience of plastic pollution. Furthermore, the camera, the use of the wide-angle lens, and the editing are indeed translating the events of the experiment on the bird into a legible narrative, by showing a chronological sequence of images and emphasizing the bird emptying its stomach. Crucially, the shot shows the face of director Craig Leeson in the background, while the scientist’s face is hidden by the flares of his headlamp, a subtle indicator of the fact that we are watching Craig Leeson’s experience of his environment.

There is, however, an important difference between recording an experiment on a bird and recording infinitely small phenomena (such as quantum phenomena) or massively big and slow processes (such as global warming): in the latter case, the researcher or the filmmaker

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is not able at all to influence the observed event directly. This is why it is important to see scenes like the one discussed here in light of Bill Nichols’ classification of certain documentary films as participatory documentaries, as it prevents us from reducing the filmmakers role in setting up not only the recording equipment, but also shaping the event that is recorded. In the case of the shearwater bird, Craig Leeson might have told the biologists how to hold the bird and where to place it in front of the camera, the very presence of the filmmaker might have led the bird to act in a certain way. In the case of the plankton, the method of the experiment influences the outcome, as the plastic particles are made fluorescent so they are visible in the microscopic image. In experiments such as the one involving the shearwater, the filmmaker might have given directions in setting the scene up, so what we see through the camera recordings are not the events as they would happen when it would be just the camera and the shearwater involved, but as they happen when already anticipated and interpreted by the filmmaker. In the recording of the experiment on the shearwater, the filmmakers depict an event that happens in real-time and is obviously framed from a human perspective.

While the example is useful to introduce my analogy of the autonomous power of media technologies and documentary filmmaking, my claim becomes much more fruitful when used to review documentary filmmaking that engages in depicting the massive and slow. This will be my undertaking in the following chapters.In this segment, I introduced my interpretation of the camera as mechanical medium in the context of a shot of plankton, and highlighted the irreducible role of the filmmaker in setting up the experiment of recording certain phenomena, in light of two segments in A Plastic Ocean. The documentary film shows a preference for witnessing the issues it depicts through the eyes of the filmmaker, and through their interpretation. In this way, A Plastic Ocean is similar to Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, which I will discuss in the following part of this chapter, to examine rhetorical strategies and data visualization in the classic environmental documentary film.

An Inconvenient Truth

In terms of Bill Nichols’ documentary modes, An Inconvenient Truth is somewhat harder to assign a mode than A Plastic Ocean. The central narrative in the film is that of the lecture that former presidential candidate Al Gore gives on the characteristics and effects of global warming. This presentation, however, is alternated with archival footage and original material that focuses on Gore’s personal life and motivation for his investment in combating global warming. Davis Guggenheim’s documentary does not necessarily depict Gore researching the issue or travelling to spots that grant evidence for climate change, but is mostly a recording of one of his talks. As such, a large part of the visual information in the documentary actually

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comes from Al Gore’s slideshow presentation. As a documentary about Al Gore and his stance on global warming, we might see An Inconvenient Truth as a film in the observational mode, as there is no direct sign of the filmmaker, even the voice-over is Gore’s; the documentary then merely observes its subject and grants him a voice. As a documentary about climate change and as a call to action to reduce human impact on the environment, a perspective which forces us to see Al Gore as one of the filmmakers, An Inconvenient Truth would most certainly qualify as a participatory documentary. Al Gore is obviously the focalizer of An Inconvenient Truth’s narrative. As the film switches between accounts of carbon dioxide levels and melting glaciers and stories of Al Gore’s youth, the former presidential candidate is always in the centre of the story: the spectator is always witnessing through Al Gore’s perspective.

An Inconvenient Truth seems to deliberately show a tension between the personal narrative of Al Gore and the planetary environmental issues. The difficulty in pinpointing a single genre that categorizes the documentary is a symptom of this tension. Thomas Rosteck and Thomas S. Frentz note in a paper from 2009 exploring the rhetorics of the film that most discussions up to that point had classified the film as “science documentary, personal narrative, [or] political jeremiad”, with corresponding readings offering “rich, but at best partial, accounts of the film” (4). The authors introduce a fourth genre, namely that of the (mono)myth, a narrative that centres a heroic figure that returns from an otherworldly journey to teach others what they have learned, to “show how the whole of AIT is greater than the sum of its generic parts” (4-5). The argument Al Gore makes in An Inconvenient Truth is indeed a combination of these different rhetorical devices in speech and film . Helen Hughes, in Green Documentary, notes that documentaries in an argumentative style are often “an attempt to make an

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visual version of the personal intuitive process of coming to a point of view” (119). This is, as Hughes writes, quite salient in An Inconvenient Truth, where the scientific argument is intertwined with the focus on Gore’s youth, tragedies and successes, which function as arguments for his own legitimacy and credibility. This, precisely, is what Rosteck and Frentz want to emphasize when talking about the mythical aspect of the documentary: the myth of Al Gore, “the quest story and the drama of Gore’s personal story”, occupies a considerable part of the documentary’s argument.

At least as important in the argument, however, is the use of scientific data and its visualizations. It moves the focus away from the personal, biographical aspects of the narrative and into the domain of the human as a species. As Sean Cubitt argues, while numbers seem to be more credible and persuasive than pictures, “numbers are not intrinsically photogenic” (281). Al Gore is clearly aware of this fact, and ends up on an elevator rising to meet the prediction of future CO2 levels in a graph depicting its presence in the atmosphere in the past 650,000 years, that continues off screen as it rises “off the chart” (figure 5). The composition of the total shot of the projected screen of the graph, the graph’s extension and Al Gore in the top right corner of the frame, mirrors the graph’s composition in that it shows a diagonal line starting on the bottom left and ending at the top right corner. Interestingly, Al Gore’s small figure on the lift at the end of the graph does not only indicate the magnitude of the graph and thus of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but places Al Gore precisely as the central character of what Thomas Rosteck and Thomas S. Frentz call the mythic frame of An Inconvenient Truth. The image of Al Gore climbing to the top of the unimaginable levels of carbon dioxide positions him as the hero that is able to declare the issue of global warming with clarity. This affective usage of data, of graphs, depends on both the comedic effect of Gore’s performance interacting with it, emphasizing the absurdity of CO2 levels by taking a slow elevator to the top of the graph, and the urgency of a statistic that literally goes “off the chart”. It is a central strategy for Gore’s presentation in An Inconvenient Truth, with which he constantly alternates between scientific data and its affective dimension. In its rhetoric, the documentary reproduces the notion of the mass population as “the universal subject of politics”, as Cubitt argues data visualization does (284). In his call for action, Gore repeatedly addresses not only the national population of the United States, but the global population. The text that is shown at the end of the film, for example, reads: “You can reduce your carbon emissions. In fact, you can even reduce your carbon emissions to zero”. Gore uses the pronoun ‘we’ most of the time he talks about what should be done, what could be done, to reduce carbon emissions and stop global warming, addressing the political subject as a universal human, the human as a collective. If we follow Cubitt’s claim that data visualizations produce such an image of the human species, then An Inconvenient Truth cleverly adapts its discourse to that effect of data images.

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Apart from data visualization, Al Gore makes use of photographic images in his presentation. Especially when discussing the glaciers that have been melting and receding for decades, the persuasive power of these images becomes quite clear. Gore’s slideshow shows the audience historical images of large glaciers, juxtaposed with present-day pictures of these same glaciers receding, melting or even having completely vanished. Al Gore presents these with short commentary on the place and time the image is taken, but at some points also additional information, most notably at showing a photograph of a glacier in Glacier National Park in Montana, U.S.A, about which Gore states that he has climbed it in 1998 with his daughter, joking that “within 15 years, this will be the park formerly known as glacier”. This, again, is a sign of his rhetoric that interweaves affective, comedic or personal expressions with scientific data and descriptions of large climate events.

Sean Cubitt discusses this particular scene in the context of the “data-fication of the photographic image” (282). He notes the following about An Inconvenient Truth:

An Inconvenient Truth primarily relies on the technique of photographic stills taken from the same vantage separated by years: for example, of Kilimanjaro’s vanishing snows and the retreating glaciers in Glacier National Park—in effect an extreme form of time-lapse. But these photographic images seem to raise the question of credibility: Were the conditions comparable in successive frames? Are they evidence of atypical seasons rather than larger tendencies? And the question that scientific empiricism has taught us to ask: Exactly what degree of change is occurring beneath the appearances? (280)

Indeed, in contrast to the cinematic technique of time-lapse, a moving image of long time spans, two juxtaposed photographic images that bridge the decades between them raise questions of continuity. It obscures the time between the two pictures, while anything could have happened to the glacier in the meantime. Al Gore, however, uses the footage as a kind of visual evidence of global warming, and includes a real time recording of a large piece of ice that collapses from a glacier into the water to remind his audience of the violent forms that the melting of glaciers might sometimes show. The confidence in the validity of these pictures that speaks from Gore’s presentation draws us to Cubitt’s understanding of picturing as a fundamentally human act, placing the human observer at the centre of relations with the environment. The sentiment in An Inconvenient Truth surrounding these glaciers echoes that “the humanism of pictorial realism appears nostalgic, which explains the elegiac tone of so much landscape cinematography in ecocinema” (282). We might definitely call Gore’s remembering of the ice elegiac, as he laments their amenity, stating: “and it’s a shame,

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because these glaciers are so beautiful”. This inevitable humanism of photographic realism, is, even in this scene, shortly alternated by the populist mode of imaging that, for Cubitt, is data visualization. Cubitt describes the visualization of the receding ice of the Columbia Glacier as “data-fication of the photographic image, by concertinaing past time into brief sequences” (282) (figure 6). The shot consists of a satellite’s image of the glacier and an overlay of colored of a geographic information systems visualization. The mechanical origin of this latter image, combined with the fundamentally humanist mode of picturing of the photographic image is, according to Cubitt, precisely where the plight of ecocinema is found:

“integrating the oscillation between modes of imaging, between demand and nostalgia, populism and humanism, is a key strategy in ecocinema” (282). Functioning similarly to the satellite imagery, the juxtaposed photographs are a translation of slow time into comprehensible bits. By capturing two different points in time from the same vantage point, the time span is bridged, but the violence of the vanished glacier is even more salient because of that quick bridge. This is what Jussi Parikka writes of in his first chapter of A Geology of Media, when he concludes from the speeding up of an audio recording of earthquakes, making the violence audible, that the moldability of media products, the possibility of audio and video manipulation, enables them to make visible what might be itself invisible or inaudible for the human senses. It leads Parikka to claim that “this means the portability and repeatability of the Real: the geophysical that becomes registered through the ordering of media reality” (13). It is precisely the media technology of image manipulation that allows Al Gore to bridge decades and to show the irreducible impact of global warming on the global presence of

Figure 6: Drawn lines over satellite imagery depicting the recession of the Columbia Glacier in An Inconvenient

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glaciers. We might even say that the moving image of the collapsing ice that is put in between the juxtaposed photographs of the ice masses is a way to order “media reality”, to access a mostly inaccessible event such as the collapsing of these pieces of ice and to place them in the context of receding ice masses due to global warming, to get a full grip on the urgency of the situation by showing a visible instance of the larger trend. The medium of film and the slideshow of Gore allows for a repeatability of this instance, of “the Real”, as Parikka calls it.

Furthermore, to refer back to Wolfgang Ernst and Mark B.N. Hansen, the images in the glacier scene of An Inconvenient Truth act as the medium between invisibility and visibility, between geological time scales and human temporal experience. As Ernst notes: “One level of temporality is the microtemporal behavior of the object in question (that is, ‘under experiment’); the second is what it does to (or with) the ‘temporal sense’ of the human experimenter” (185). If one would understand the microtemporal as being in a scale that is outside of how human beings experience time, and could thus also be geological time, this claim by Ernst makes sense in the context of the glacier scene in An Inconvenient Truth. The behaviour of the glacier “under experiment” is invisible for the human senses, and can only be seen in the representation of time passing from the medium that captures it. The “‘temporal sense’ of the human experimenter” is thus met by the affordances of the medium. In the setup of the experiment, an elusive physical reality is addressed and achieved by translation between time-scales.

This type of media-experiment, in An Inconvenient Truth, of bridging temporal gaps by the juxtaposition of two images depicting the change in glaciers overtime, is a subtle version of the cinematic media-experiments I will discuss in the coming two chapters. What I discussed here, on Al Gore’s presence and the affective use of scientific data, is important to highlight in my undertaking of regarding documentary filmmaking as a media-experiment, in the sense that a discussion of An Inconvenient Truth’s devices shines a light common tactics of eco-documentaries that introduce scientific data and personal investment of the filmmaker into their narrative. Both An Inconvenient Truth and A Plastic Ocean are documentaries that depend on the accounts of filmmakers to cite scientific research and both rely on ways of filmmaking that centre the human experience of global warming and pollution rather than taking advantage of cinematic devices to provide, in some way, visual evidence of the issues that they raise. As I showed, both the central figures in the two films in this chapter, Craig Leeson and Al Gore, are not only spreading knowledge about environmental issues, but perform a central role in the film’s narratives to affectively interpret the information and in their own ways convey this emotional layer, that is clearly a manner of conveying information that implicates only human consumption.

In the following chapter I will search for ways of picturing environmental issues that rely less on a human mode of perception and on a personal interpretation of events and

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footage, and show more direct footage of natural processes that is less dependent on human intervention and is sometimes even inherently mechanical. I will use the notions that I examined here, those of the filmmaker as experimenter, filmmaking as a medium bridging between “the Real” and human experience, and the experimenter as tapping this capability of the medium to set up the experiment, with analyses of films with different characteristics than the ones discussed in this chapter. The documentary texts in the following chapter engage in a more unified experiment of the filmmaker, frame the filmmaker as experiencing a certain reality in a narrative that centres the filmmaker’s experience in seemingly chronological time, with less focus on data, research and personal sentiment, and more on the experience of measuring climate change with recording devices, and the mechanical recording of environmental processes.

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Chapter 2 The mechanical eye

Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral

In the previous chapter I discussed how documentary films use data visualization and scientific rationalism, focussing on techniques that combine visual evidence and pathos to convey the violence of slow processes or the urgency of climate change from an undeniably anthropocentric perspective. I also introduced my argument by analysing A Plastic Ocean, examining its use of microscopic images and the filmmaker’s presence in the documentary. Subsequently I explored An Inconvenient Truth’s use of data visualization and a time-lapse-like usage of photographic images, as translations of the decade-long violence that the rising global temperature has inflicted on glaciers around the globe.

Narrowing the focus on documentary filmmaking as media-experiment, in this chapter I want to examine the role of filmmaking and recording equipment in depicting and mapping climate issues. I have chosen to analyse two films by director Jeff Orlowski, that both feature a project to capture issues of scale by way of recording them and manipulating those recordings. Thus, in this chapter I will discuss the central notion of my argument: the setup of the camera as a media-experiment. Wolfgang Ernst’s notion of the media-experiment and Mark B.N. Hansen’s medium-oriented ontology will play a fundamental role in the development of my argument in this chapter. I will focus on the portrayal of recording technology and camera setups in the natural environment and how both documentaries propose the camera as a kind of scientific instrument, as providing objective measurements of natural phenomena. I argue that this positioning the camera as a source of knowledge, as a kind of epistemological measuring medium, is a perspective that, contrary to the portrayal of environmental issues in A Plastic Ocean and An Inconvenient Truth, approaches a media-centred and non-anthropocentric perspective on cinema’s representation of environmental issues and natural processes. Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice (2012) follows photographer-scientist James Balog and his project Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), which consists of setting up cameras in the vicinity of rapidly melting glaciers, in order to visualize the effect of global warming in time-lapses of the disappearance of these ice masses. James Balog, in the beginning of the documentary, explains that his project is to offer strong affective and clear visual evidence of global warming, instead of the hard data that has been offered before. This sentiment makes Chasing Ice an interesting case for my argument, as it equates scientific data with its own project of recording receding ice masses, and already by itself fortifies the notion of the appearance of climate change constituting the larger phenomenon: for James Balog, “the story is in the ice”. While it also uses data visualizations for the larger narratives of global warming, the film focuses on Balog’s project EIS, and thereby centres an audio-visual experiment in its narrative. Similar to

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An Inconvenient Truth’s director Davis Guggenheim, the director, producer and cinematographer Jeff Orlowski does not appear on screen. Instead, the central figure in the film is James Balog, the founder of EIS. Thus, in my discussion of Chasing Ice, I will focus on the role James Balog takes in the narrative of the film and in the transfer of visual information regarding climate change, while also focussing on the role recording media play in capturing global warming in terms of the media-experiment.

The second film I will discuss is another film by Jeff Orlowski, namely Chasing Coral (2017). With even the titles of the two films being similar, it is not surprising that both Chasing documentary films share a theme, narrative and focus. As it is in Chasing Ice, central to Chasing Coral is the production of time-lapse footage of the degradation of a natural phenomenon, in this case coral bleaching in reefs around the world. The film follows a group of people in finding visual evidence for the disappearance of coral reef ecosystems. Interestingly, Chasing Coral differs from its predecessor in the fact that its experiment for producing time-lapse footage works in a way that involves the continuous vigilance of the filmmakers. As I will argue in this chapter, while Chasing Ice reflects on the equipment as autonomous and static, Chasing Coral’s events frame the media-experiment of producing time-lapse footage as a dynamic, dangerous and time-consuming effort. I will analyse this film in terms of the media-experiment and the camera’s capability of producing non-anthropocentric perception, while also discussing the apparent role of the filmmaker in the camera setup, a dimension of the experiment that is quite apparent in Chasing Coral.

Chasing Ice

“The modern world of science was all about statistics and computer modelling, and that just wasn’t me”. Photographer and geologist James Balog starts a project to affectively depict the warming atmosphere, not via data and simulations, but simply by recording it. Following Balog’s hunt for visual evidence of climate change in the form of time-lapses of receding glaciers, Jeff Orlowski’s Chasing Ice is not only a documentary of the photographers efforts and a platform for his conclusions, but also a testament to the importance of visual media in conveying the urgency of climate change. This is continuously confirmed in Chasing Ice by the endeavours of Balog and his team. Already in the introduction of the film, the photographer states that for his series of wildlife on the verge of extinction he would have to show the animals “in a more seductive fashion”, that he had to “engage people, pull them in”. This translates into the project that forms the basis of Chasing Ice, and Balog claims that after his research on “the climate change story”, he was “trying to find what you could photograph about climate change that would make interesting photographs”, and he concluded that “the only thing that

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[...] sounded right was ice”. Balog’s accounts emphasize the affective quality of images of calving glaciers, which, as I discussed in the segment on An Inconvenient Truth, represent real-time visualizations of the violence of global warming. Chasing Ice culminates, however, in the success of Extreme Ice Survey in the form of time-lapses spanning several years of receding glaciers in Alaska, Greenland and Iceland. Thus, the documentary revolves around the notion that images can be as powerful, or even more powerful, in shaping public opinion regarding climate change than scientific data.

In some ways, Chasing Ice is similar to Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth. Most of all, both films feature a male protagonist who has taken up the role of conveying the message of climate change to the general public. In that ambition, both James Balog and Al Gore rely on affective images of the violence of global warming. Explaining Balog’s fascination with receding glaciers, Chasing Ice, like An Inconvenient Truth, shows juxtapositions of photographs taken of glaciers from the same point of view at different moments in time. While in An Inconvenient Truth these images are only one of the ways in which Al Gore tries to depict the seriousness of the global issue, in Chasing Ice these images are the instigator of the project that the documentary revolves around. As such, the documentary does not only show the pictures in themselves, but also shows an account of their production and Balog’s reaction to the apparent amount of disappeared ice. While Al Gore deems these images as sufficient evidence for global rising temperatures and sea levels, Balog, consistent with how Chasing Ice depicts him as a persistent and stubborn artist, wants to accumulate even more affective images of the impact of global warming on the glaciers, which is the aspiration that instigates Extreme Ice Survey. The narrative of the film, is, contrary to An Inconvenient Truth’s narrative, not a mere celebration of such images, but a climbing towards the result of research and artistic effort to find an engaging visual representation of climate change. This narrative finds its peak in the presentation of actual time-lapse footage of receding glaciers.

In my discussion of An Inconvenient Truth, I examined how the juxtaposition of two images taken at different points in time works to show the impact of rising temperatures on the presence of glaciers. As Sean Cubitt also mentions, such images raise questions of validity: “Were the conditions comparable in successive frames? Are they evidence of atypical seasons rather than larger tendencies? And the question that scientific empiricism has taught us to ask: Exactly what degree of change is occurring beneath the appearances?” (280). These images, indeed, present only two moments in time, decades apart from each other and are not evidence of what might have happened in the time between the production of these images. The time-lapses of EIS, however, do not seem to leave such questions unanswered. A camera, continuously shooting frames in daylight every hour, for several seasons on end, leaves little room for criticism regarding “atypical seasons” or the change “occurring beneath

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the appearances”; the time-lapses show that some glaciers even continue receding during winter seasons.

This time-lapse technique, even more so than the juxtaposition of images used in both An Inconvenient Truth and Chasing Ice, is what Cubitt calls a “data-fication of the photographic image, by concertinaing past time into brief sequences” (282). As a kind of stop-motion animation of past time, a compression of years into seconds, of the for human perception invisible shifts of colossal ice masses into the ostensibly fleeting movement of floating glaciers, these time-lapses present a mode of picturing that is particularly non-human. It is an explicitly mechanical type of depicting slow but impactful environmental changes, because it constructs an image that is immediately recognisable as mechanically constructed. While recorded images are often invoked to mimic human perception, as real-time representations of events, in twenty-four frames per second to make the picture’s movement as smooth as possible, a time-lapse such as those in Chasing Ice looks unnatural: the splintered movement of the image and the uncontrolled fast twitching of the ice masses make the footage look unusual, constructed, mechanical. The scope of the image, manifested in the quick passing of time and the vast landscape caught in a wide-angle lens, makes it clear that the pictures are perceiving the environmental change in a notably extra-human fashion.

In some particular scenes in Chasing Ice, the autonomy of the cameras that could produce such images is emphasized. When, for example, Balog and a fellow researcher climb up to “camera #15” overlooking a glacier in Greenland, the excitement of the two at opening the footage and see whether the camera worked is very apparent. Once they find out that the camera has been shooting continuously, the two clap, cheer and high-five, saying that they’re “unbelievably surprised” and that they “can’t believe it”. The production of the time-lapses requires for the experimenters, the photographers, to be absent from the experiment. It requires that the camera be left alone for an extension of time. It is because of this that Balog is excited to view the footage, and it is because of this that we might say that, apart from the ‘unnatural’ look of the time-lapses, the recorded images are autonomous, even mechanical, in their production, because its experiment requires its presence in the environment by its own faculties and without any human aid, except to start the shooting process.

With this, I want to turn again to Wolfgang Ernst’s notion of the media-experiment. In this context, I would argue that the time-lapses in Chasing Ice work in the same manner as the juxtaposition of images from different points in time in An Inconvenient Truth: they are a visual translation of events that are incomprehensible in human experiential time and space into cultural forms, they transform past time into clearly defined bits by compiling the recorded data and showing it in another temporal mode. As I stated in the previous chapter, these images act as the medium between invisibility and visibility, as the medium between different temporalities. Where Chasing Ice fundamentally differs from An Inconvenient Truth in this