The visual rhetoric of climate change documentary

Contemporary documentary filmmakers use high angle extreme long shots, including aerial shots and space photography, to present evidence for the considerable effects of centuries of agriculture and industry on the environment. The visibility of large-scale landscape interventions and atmospheric effects generates spectacular visual content to persuade audiences of the reality of the theoretical evidence for climate change. And yet two quite distinct and opposing directions can be discerned in twenty-first century attitudes towards aerial images. The first takes the optimistic view that the rhetoric of environmentalism, supported by still and moving images, particularly of the whole planet, is creating a growing active response from audiences. The second is a more pessimistic concern that still and moving image technologies, integral to the predominantly visual culture of modernity, and particularly significant in the development of remote control surveillance and weaponry, themselves contribute to the distortion of habitable space. Discussion of several films including Davis Guggenheim’s An inconvenient truth (2006), Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand’s Everything’s Cool (2007), John Lyde’s The 11th Hour (2008), and Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid (2009), illustrates the use of extreme long shots within the rhetoric of particular climate change documentaries