Commonwealth Club of California Podcast CLIMATE ONE: When Words Aren’t Enough: The Visual Climate Story
Guests:
Céline Cousteau, Explorer and Filmmaker
Davis Guggenheim, Director, An Inconvenient Truth; Founder, Concordia Studio
Cristina Mittermeier, National Geographic Photographer; Co-Founder, SeaLegacy
While IPCC risk assessments and emission projections can help us understand climate change, they don’t exactly inspire the imagination or provoke a personal response to the crisis. But a growing league of storytellers is using photographs, films and the human experience to breathe life into the cerebral science of climate change and conservation. So how can films, photographs, and the human experience convey the urgency of the climate story?
“15 years ago we needed to convince people that it was real,” notes director and producer Davis Guggenheim, “and then we need to convince people that humans are causing it. And then you want to convince people that this is the most urgent story of our time.”
Guggenheim’s documentaries include He Named Me Malala, Waiting for Superman, and a certain Academy award-winning film with former Vice-President Al Gore. Over the years he’s learned that good climate storytelling requires a delicate balance between a compelling character and a path to action.
“We always thought the An Inconvenient Truth was a redemption story about a politician who lost an election,” he says, “and it was his mission in life to tell this truth that he knew.”
Sometimes the compelling character in a climate narrative is the filmmaker herself. In Tribes on the Edge, a new documentary that explores the threats to the land, rights, and health of the Indigenous Peoples of the Javari Valley in the Brazilian Amazon, explorer and filmmaker Céline Cousteau reluctantly made herself part of the story.
“I did place myself in front of the camera so that I would create a bridge,” Cousteau says, “so that the audience would follow me as somebody perhaps more familiar, more accessible, the neighbor, and follow me into this adventure.”
Other visual artists, like photographer Cristina Mittermeier, try to let the images speak for themselves.
“I don't like photographing indigenous people as if they were encapsulated in the past in a romanticized way that no longer exist,” she says, “they live and walk amongst us and they look like us.”
Whatever their methods, these storytellers share a goal of trying to create a more equitable relationship with nature through images and sound.
“Do not ever forget that one of your main focus and goals is to shift consciousness,” explains Céline Cousteau, “and you may never know exactly what your films or stories have done, but you need to believe in what you're doing.”
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