Rethinking Documentary and the Environment: A Multi-Scalar Approach to Time
Abstract
This essay investigates the analytical potential of time in relation to the nonfiction moving image. Time is important because it drives understandings of environmental change (perceptions of past, present and future), and it is tied to the fundamental expectation of documentary – that it will speak to the reality of historical events (recent or distant). In seeking an approach to the moving image that might better harness the ecological work of documentary across different contexts, we propose a theory of the multi-scalar that is explicitly concerned with time and duration and has the capacity to function as a critical tool that might reveal the uneven realisation of scale across cultures and film modes. We explore how established knowledge in political ecology might dovetail with the expression of time in documentary (including the representation of history). We pose two examples. The first explores the natural history documentary, in particular, the time lapse representation of plant life and how it might offer alternative nonhuman temporalities. The second study explores an episode of an Australian television series, First Footprints (2013), which presents a history of Indigenous occupation of the continent, ranging across a 50,000 year time span, offering a way to consider colonial conceptualisations of time.
Keywords
Documentary, ecologies, environment, history, scale, time
Author Biography
Therese Davis
Therese Davis is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies and Director of the Bachelor of Media Communication at Monash University. Her research is primarily in the areas of Australian cinema and television, theories of collaboration and cross-cultural exchange in film, Australian Indigenous film and television, and women’s filmmaking. She is co-author with Felicity Collins of Australian Cinema After Mabo (CUP, 2004) and author of The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship (Intellect, 2004).
Belinda Smaill
Belinda Smaill is an Associate Professor in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University. She leads the Environment and Media Research Program in the School for Media, Film and Journalism. Her recent research projects have explored nonfiction moving image culture, animals and the environment. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (Palgrave, 2010), Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (SUNY Press, 2016) and co-author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (Lexington Books, 2013).