The Visual Rhetoric of Climate Change Documentaries: Aerial Shots and Interviews

This paper discusses the ways in which a number of documentary films on climate change attempt to represent a consensus view through the use of the aerial perspective. It analyses the ways in which conflicting uses of the aerial view, to represent both industrial progress and environmental damage, are reconciled in documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth. It goes on to discuss the relationship between the aerial perspective and the interviews also represented in the films, with the latter demonstrating a wide variety of possible political interventions. Like aerial shots, interviews are used to construct consensus and conflict but they can also demonstrate the difficulties in generating genuine participation and in using conflict constructively