ABSTRACT

This article critiques the representation of sea level rise in environmental documentaries, positioning Briar March’s There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho (2010) as an essential rejoinder to more prominent representations of oceanic climate change, exemplified in An Inconvenient Truth (2006). An array of recent documentary productions, seeking to draw attention to rising seas and other anthropogenic disasters, turn to the Pacific Ocean utilising a wide range of mediatic regimes and visual apparatuses – from cinematic long takes to satellite imagery and digital animation. Among these films There Once was an Island offers a crucial perspective in its representation of the Takuu atoll, where residents faced with rising seas consider migrating en masse, prioritising subjectivity and physical reality as it foregrounds the cultural, material, and personal specificities of the atoll and its inhabitants. It offers a powerful counterpoint to dominant techniques for visualising climate disaster, which are characterised by spectacular imagery and logics of global mastery. By counterposing the perspectives offered in divergent documentary tendencies and examining their resonance with other cinematic strategies for representing catastrophe, from Hollywood CGI to post-war Italian neorealism, this article works through some ethical considerations for this growing subgenre of eco-cinema.

摘要

本文对环境纪录片中海平面上升的表示进行了批评，将《野蔷薇》的《曾经有一个岛：蒂·埃努阿·诺诺（Te Henua e Nnoho）》（2010）定位为对更重要的海洋气候变化表示的必要补充，例如《不便的真相》（2006）。 。一系列近期的纪录片制作，试图引起人们对海平面上升和其他人为灾难的关注，并利用各种媒介和视觉设备将目光投向了太平洋-从电影的长镜头到卫星图像和数字动画。在这些电影中，曾经有一个小岛在代表Takuu环礁的过程中提供了一个至关重要的观点，在该岛上，面对不断上升的大海的居民考虑大规模迁移，将主体性和物理现实性作为优先考虑因素，因为它突出了环礁及其居民的文化，物质和个人特征。它以可视化的图像和全球精通的逻辑为特点，为显露气候灾难的主流技术提供了有力的对策。通过对不同的纪录片趋势中提出的观点进行反省，并研究它们与代表灾难的其他电影策略的共鸣，从好莱坞CGI到战后意大利新现实主义，本文从伦理角度考虑了这种日益增长的生态电影类型。