The view from a body of water: representing flooding and sea level rise in the South Pacific

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article critiques the representation of sea level rise in environmental documentaries, positioning Briar March’s There Once Was an Island: Te Henua e Nnoho (2010) as an essential rejoinder to more prominent representations of oceanic climate change, exemplified in An Inconvenient Truth (2006). An array of recent documentary productions, seeking to draw attention to rising seas and other anthropogenic disasters, turn to the Pacific Ocean utilising a wide range of mediatic regimes and visual apparatuses – from cinematic long takes to satellite imagery and digital animation. Among these films There Once was an Island offers a crucial perspective in its representation of the Takuu atoll, where residents faced with rising seas consider migrating en masse, prioritising subjectivity and physical reality as it foregrounds the cultural, material, and personal specificities of the atoll and its inhabitants. It offers a powerful counterpoint to dominant techniques for visualising climate disaster, which are characterised by spectacular imagery and logics of global mastery. By counterposing the perspectives offered in divergent documentary tendencies and examining their resonance with other cinematic strategies for representing catastrophe, from Hollywood CGI to post-war Italian neorealism, this article works through some ethical considerations for this growing subgenre of eco-cinema.