From the Margins: Thoughts on Film and Climate Change

FLYING OVER THE SNOWY TUNDRA WHILE APPROACHING GOLOVIN, A VILLAGE WITH APPROXIMATELY 150 PEOPLE IN NORTHWEST ALASKA, NOVEMBER 2021

I recently returned from over a month-long trip to Golovin, a village in Northwest Alaska, on the literal and figurative margins of the United States. The only commonality between Golovin and Bombay, the city where I grew up, is that both are on the coast. Little else was familiar, from the white, wintry scenery to the eyelash-freezing temperature. Since I was on a production trip to make a short film about how climate change is impacting the village, it was impossible not to think about the creative challenges and responsibilities of cinematic depictions of climate change.

Only days after my return, Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up released on Netflix, entailing Hollywood’s first forays into climate-related movie-making. Expectedly, perhaps, the film received a mountain of attention, given a cast comprising a passel of Hollywood mega-stars. Quite besides the impassioned judgements ranging from cinematic ineptitude to political percipience, watching the film was a helpful exercise in reflecting on the thoughts I had whilst in Golovin. What are the artistic challenges and responsibilities of making films about climate change?

By way of unreserved endorsement, I’d like to set aside platitudes and truisms outlining how, when faced by climactic apocalypse, art should help elicit climate-related concerns among the wider populace at least and occasion a re-evaluation of everything under the sun at most. The topic deserves more than bromides.           

As an exploration of artistic choice, McKay’s analogy for climate change is instructive: an extinction-level asteroid hurtling towards the earth; those expecting a thunder-and-lightening Armageddon are not disappointed. Filmmakers are unsurprisingly attracted to sensation. Something needs to happen before the camera for a film to be made. Oncoming comets, falling chunks of ice, starving animals and fiery forests all make for good, dramatic cinema.

Nevertheless, there is a remarkable dissonance between the process of environmental breakdown and its depictions on-screen. The climate crisis is so removed from sensation that perhaps the word “crisis” might well be a misnomer. Little is visually happening which can be discretely associated with planetary warming – there are few reasonable ways to film rising sea levels or melting ice caps. That McKay chose a storyline as exaggerated in itself is telling. This poses significant artistic difficulty, especially for documentarians, who don’t have the luxury of inventing situations wherein a crash and bang threaten to destroy everything.

A FISH-DRYING RACK IN GOLOVIN DURING A WINTER SUNSET, NOVEMBER 2021

An attraction to sensation can have significant consequences, since there need not be any overlap between the importance of stories which merit telling and the level of drama on filmable offer. Worse still, if a film is being made about a climactic catastrophe, it is already in some sense too late.

These are precisely the sort of challenges confronting me as I’m making a documentary about climate change. On cursory visits, a traveller to Golovin would be forgiven for believing that there are no problems in the village beyond the quotidian quibbles of human life. In a sense – primarily the visual one –, there is nothing happening. More careful visitors, however, will discover a plenitude of problems: one of the quickest rates of coastal erosion in Alaska, increasingly frequent and destructive storms, declining fish yields and concomitant food insecurity, melting permafrost, an immanent relocation from the low-lying downtown area; I could go on.

Few of these issues are immediately amenable to film. For instance, melting permafrost either can’t be filmed or makes for poor cinema. Same for coastal erosion and declining fish yields. Nevertheless, this does not obviate the need to make a film. That the symptoms of a rate of warming almost four times as rapid as the rest of the world are indifferent to the camera is no reason to not pick up one. Since it is borderline impossible, mercifully, to film the coastline eroding, I need to find a better way to depict the issue.

Faced with a series of issues not amenable to filming, an option might be to wait for there to be a story befitting a film. For instance, I can wait until Golovin is hit by a devastating storm to film the befores and afters, and couch the happenings in the context of climate change. Empirical impossibilities aside, this would be a mistake. Unlike other injustices documentarians might expose – government excesses in violating privacy, for example – waiting for the emergence of trouble does not guarantee the prevention of future damage. Quite the reverse, in most cases, since as the worst consequences of the climate crisis materialise, much of the warming will have become irreversible.

A RESIDENT OF GOLOVIN SITTING ON HIS ALL-TERRAIN VEHICLE IN GOLOVIN, OCTOBER 2021

Unless one views documentaries as literal documentation, of simply telling what happened to whom and where, albeit with a sprinkle of verisimilitude, the challenge posed by the climate crisis is one of prevention in the most concrete of senses. Post-facto filmmaking is uncomfortably close to futility. In the best of worlds, the film I make can sufficiently elucidate issues to enact actions to prevent the worst of the climate crisis in Golovin. This raises what I think is a great responsibility borne by artists depicting the climate crisis.      

Despite its elusiveness, there seems to be some consensus about the role of art in the contemporary world, where something clearly needs to change. Art, it is held, must enliven and expand our sense of possibilities. Take the latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who feels that besides reflecting on problems, literature ought to manifest “what can be otherwise.” For similar sentiments, take your pick of writers, from Amitav Ghosh and Ursula le Guin.

While it is virtually impossible to disagree with this view, it is surprising how rarely artists reflect on concrete possibilities. Ethically, how can one take interest in a crisis with such stakes without showing any interest in remediation? Why does a sense of possibilities preclude the proposition of actionable measures? How can possibilities be expanded if not by showing how some things could be done differently?

Especially because Golovin is a native village, I have tried to avoid the platitudes which often slip into a condescending romance. For instance, important as they might be, I don’t wish to dwell for too long on abstract, mystical questions about identity or the relation between humans and nature. Probably for the better, film is not philosophy. If I am successful, then the audience of my film will know both the precise problems resulting in Golovin due to the climate crisis, and concrete ways in which those might be addressed.

It ought to be clear by now that although the timeframe to maintain a habitable planet is fast attenuating, most of us are still able to live highly functional lives. As after World War II, those who expect thunder and lightening will still be disappointed. My basic conceit is that films, especially documentaries, about climate change ought to resist the temptation to sensation, become ex-ante rather than post-facto, and help the audience think meaningfully and precisely about what might be different in a more sustainable, more caring world.

Atman Mehta is a recent graduate of the University of Chicago, where he studied Political Science. His primary interests are in political theory and the political economy. Before those four years in Chicago, he grew up in Bombay, India.