What is it about?
This article examines eco-documentaries - films and television programs - that use the face to engage with the notion of a universal human right to a healthy environment. Climate Refugees (Nash, dir 2010) and I Bought a Rainforest (Searle and Woodward, dir 2014) all use close-ups of the human face to bear witness to environmental damage. They each emphasise a shared human right to resources and a safe environment, but in the process often enact colonial discourses that I Bought a Rainforest begins to critique. Terra (Arthus-Bertrand and Pitiot, dir 2015) uses the nonhuman animal face to emphasise an equivalency between human and nonhuman animals in their shared environmental vulnerabilities. Hija de la Laguna (Daughter of the Lake, Cabellos, dir 2015) initially withholds the face to depict the personhood of the environment itself from an Indigenous perspective. These different approaches to the face highlight anthropocentric tensions in the environmental human rights approach to ecological ethics.
Featured Image
Photo by James Toose on Unsplash
Why is it important?
The United Nations Development Programme 2007 report, Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World, declared, “inaction in the face of the threat posed by climate change would represent a very immediate violation” of the “right to life, liberty, and personal security” set out in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Rights (Watkins 2007, 60). As such, it connects human rights with environmental rights, but in problematic anthropocentric terms. The screen texts explored in this article each grapple with the relationship between humans and their environment in different ways. Is the environment only in terms of its implications for humanity?
Perspectives
We are so used to taking a human perspective on the world - how could we not? So as viewers we can find it challenging when human perspectives (whether literally or figuratively) are decentred, in favour of non-human animals, or even the environment itself as an entity in its own right. New methods of representing environmental issues on screen are essential to prompt us to think and experience differently.
Dr Djoymi Baker
RMIT University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The face of the environment: environmental human rights on screen, Studies in Documentary Film, June 2021, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/17503280.2021.1940433.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
