Green Documentary: Environmental Documentary in the 21st Century by Helen Hughes (review)

The stated aim in this book is to give sustained critical attention to award-winning, feature-length environmental documentaries produced in this century’s first decade. Helen Hughes does this through extensive quotation from literature about communication, discussion of some overall issues involved in the genre, and analysis of key films. As a framework for her analysis, she constructs three general subgenres of “eco-docs” (her term) defined by the way films respond to environmental problems. She concludes her book with a study of a documentary that she believes partakes of all three subgenres and thus constitutes a fourth category.

In her discussion of issues in these documentaries, Hughes astutely observes that, in practice, the effectiveness of such films often depends on ancillary activities, such as the work of advocacy groups or the pursuit of film awards. (The latter is one reason she emphasizes feature-length and thus, if shown in theatres, Oscar-eligible documentaries.) But her theoretical discussion focuses on what she calls the “toxic materiality” of the ecological documentary: its involvement--through its dependence on technology, chemistry, minerals, fossil fuels, and so forth--in the very thing that it critiques. How filmmakers deal with the contradiction is a factor in distinguishing Hughes’s proposed subgenres.

These subgenres are the “contemplative response,” the “ironic response,” and the “argumentative response.” “Contemplative” films include, among others, Manufactured Landscapes (2006), Jennifer Baichwal’s film about the photographer Edward Burtynsky; Our Daily Bread (2005), Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s wordless depiction of modern food production; and Modern Life (2008), Raymond Depardon’s affectionate portraits of several families of small-farmers whose way of life is disappearing. These beautifully rendered meditative films make no argument. They are straightforward but reflective and sensitive to the complexity of ecological issues, especially the contradiction between technological advance and environmental preservation.

Hughes’s “ironic” films include the satiric The Yes Men (2003), about two men who impersonate members of the World Trade Organization to produce hilarity; The Corporation (2003), a sneering critique of global capitalism; and Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World (2007), a haunting, engrossing visit to a research center in Antarctica. For Hughes, these films employ irony (which she defines conventionally as saying one thing while meaning another), as well as broader satire and parody, to attack economic globalization and, in at least one case, scientific research.

“Argumentative” films (which do not invite alternative viewpoints) include An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning presentation of Al Gore’s global-warming lectures; The Cove (2009), director Louie Psihoyos’s account of the film team’s infiltration of a dolphin-slaughter operation in Japan; and Gasland (2010), Josh Fox’s attack on fracking.

However, while Hughes’s three subgenres provide a schema for grouping environmental documentaries, the boundaries between the subgenres are porous. Encounters at the End of the World is witty, but the film seems far more contemplative than ironic. There’s nothing ironic, for example, about a long shot of a confused penguin marching off alone to certain death. The Corporation is often satiric and mocking, but it is essentially an anti-globalization, anti-capitalist argument, with appearances from Michael Moore, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn. Conversely, “argument” seems to miss the essence of The Cove, which seems more like a “caper” film. To flesh out her “ironic” category, Hughes violates her general principle of limiting her account to 21st-century films with a lengthy section on Cane Toads (1987), which is probably her best example.

Hughes concludes her study with a discussion of Agnes Varda’s serene, charming, and quietly personal documentary The Gleaners and I (2000), which Hughes presents as a film partaking of all three subgenres. It starts with a contemplation of Jean-Francois Millet’s painting, “The Gleaners,” which depicts three peasant women gathering scattered grain that was missed in the harvest. Varda presents, often with gentle humor, present-day examples of agricultural gleaning, but expands the notion to...