The Bearers of Bad News: Doc Makers on How to Engage Viewers While Delivering Dire Facts
How do you convey bad news? That’s one of the questions that faced Festival documentary filmmakers this year, who arrive with a roster of films that chronicle environmental devastation.
“I didn’t want to make a natural history film. They lie essentially. They tell a story about a perfect primeval system.”
– Rupert Murray, The End of the Line director
– Rupert Murray, The End of the Line director
How do you convey very, very bad news? And how do you do it in a way that’s inspiring, provocative, perhaps even uplifting; in a way that engenders a positive, active — and even activist — response?
These are the questions that faced Festival documentary filmmakers this year, who arrive with a roster of films that chronicle environmental devastation and its dramatic implications for our all-too-near future.
For co-directors Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, the key was character and conflict. No Impact Man follows Colin Beavan, his wife Michelle, and their daughter Isabella over the course of one year as they try to bring their net impact on the environment to zero. This task involved radically reducing their garbage output, buying only food produced within a 250-mile radius of their New York City apartment, and giving up electricity, among many other things.
The power of the film centers on the engaging dynamic between Colin and Michelle, who initially have very different levels of interest in environmental activism as it comes into their home.
“For me, and my work with social issue documentaries, the character provides the emotional road in to the subject — that’s the way I like to explore social issues,” explains Gabbert, whose 20-year acquaintance with Michelle allowed the filmmakers a special kind of access from the start.
Schein says he and Gabbert worked hard on building trust to get the kind of intimacy they sought. “The filming was usually just one person with the camera — usually me — and I became part of the family, and they became accustomed to the process,” he said. “You have to give your subjects the ability to turn the camera off, and with that there is some trust.”
That trust resulted in a deeply personal portrait and an intense struggle, especially for Michelle as she relinquishes beloved habits, faces ridicule, and sacrifices many of the niceties of contemporary life, including toilet paper. Initially, she’s pretty unhappy, which is understandable. “Because Michelle is the point of access for people,” said Gabbert, “her gradual change gives the audience permission to change.”
No Impact Man reveals troubling facts about environmental devastation through the heartening experiences of a single family. Dirt! The Movie, an engaging examination of the title namesake's role in the global ecosystem, opts to use colorful animations to enliven the film’s more technical moments. The film, directed by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow and inspired by William Bryant Logan’s book, Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, includes interviews with a long list of activists whose work is literally grounded in the earth and soil increasingly encased in cement and polluted with toxins.
“What we found is that there are sequences for which you would either have to use time-lapse photography or giant aerial views of the land to explain,” Benenson says, “and instead, to describe something like nitrogen poisoning, we used simple, graphic animation. There really is no other way to convey this in a visually interesting and engaging way.” The sequences add texture and variety to the film, which also builds on the energy and passion of its subjects, who are nothing short of inspiring.
Robert Stone’s Earth Days hovers between No Impact Man and Dirt! with its use of memorable, compelling subjects — nine key voices in the history of environmental activism from the 1970s onward — and a sophisticated visual style that sustains interest throughout.
Similarly, The End of the Line, a gripping survey of over-fishing based on Charles Clover’s book The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat, also gains momentum from the passion of its subjects, who are mainly scientists studying the links in a chain of destruction currently being encountered at different phases all over the world. For director Rupert Murray, the key was to bring together these scientists and his own self-described “strange passion” for the sea.
“I didn’t want to make a natural history film,” Murray says. “They lie essentially. They tell a story about a perfect primeval system, excluding the one key element that is affecting the whole thing, which is man. A story about the oceans without man is a fabrication. I wanted to tell the real story. But when I say the ‘real story,’ I have to add that with the ocean, you never have the whole story. It’s impossible to really know the ocean because it’s so huge, so vast. So the process of making the film was also a process of trying to understand something virtually unknowable.”
The End of the Line unites exotic sea creatures from all over the world and many interviews, as well as plenty of images of fish struggling in nets or at the ends of massive lines. The result is a passionate plea for people to do one simple thing: stop eating so much fish before they’re all gone.
Murray traveled the world shooting incredible footage, but filmmaker Richard Knox Robinson stayed closer to home and used experimental filmmaking techniques to illustrate the plight of bees which, says Knox, are our canaries, our environmental monitors. Thanks to pesticides and environmental pollutants, bees are suffering Colony Collapse Disorder, which in turn affects pollination and our food supply.
The Beekeepers opens with striking black-and-white photographic negative of a bee, along with the music of an Ambrosian Chant. “Documentaries can be very didactic,” says Robinson, who cites Jem Cohen and Chris Marker among his influences. “[Documentaries] get stuck in this procedure in which they talk about something and then they show you the same thing, and there’s a sense that they can’t be poetic.”
The Beekeepers features lyrical imagery depicting bees and hives, crafting a visually provocative artwork that captures Robinson’s own awe for bees. “I was intrigued with the idea of putting together seemingly discordant formats,” Robinson says. “Rather than lure my audience into a comfort zone, I wanted to keep reminding them that they're having a media experience and force them to put things together themselves.”
Louie Psihoyos went in a decidedly different direction for The Cove. “I didn't start out to make a horror film, but we did,” he acknowledges. “Our story involves dolphins, and the horror story happens to them. But the bigger horror story is that we're polluted.”
Psihoyos ratchets up the suspense as he engages viewers in his attempts to uncover the truth. It’s nearly impossible to not want to take action alongside the film’s gutsy activist and subject, Ric O’Barry, who was the trainer for the dolphins used in the Flipper TV series. O’Barry’s guilt about how those dolphins were treated has compelled him to become a forceful activist fighting dolphin capture across the globe.
“The whole idea of our film, hopefully, is that we get people to become activists,” Psihoyos says. “There's a line in the film that says, ‘You’re either an activist or you’re an inactivist.’ I wanted to be active on the subject, to make a change. I think everybody who looks at this film is motivated to make a change.”
Other filmmakers experienced similar transformations. “I’d love to make a romantic comedy next,” says Rupert Murray, “but in my mind, it’s quite difficult to go from something like The End of the Line and have the same level of engagement. There’s something very invigorating about working on something of this scale — it’s global, it affects the world and history and time. It’s incredibly rewarding. Not to continue to do that would be really hard.”
Justin Schein agrees. “You start asking questions about how you live your own life, and I can list a number of changes that I’ve made,” he says. “But it has also crept into our filmmaking. What’s the most low impact way to make a film?”
