Belinda Smaill

This chapter explores connections between place, community and narrative in the context of a world beset by extreme weather events. Drawing on insights and readings from three disciplines—theatre studies, screen studies and architecture—the chapter constructs a rich picture of the ways these fields contribute to definitions of place and can potentially enhance disaster preparedness and recovery activities. Edward S. Casey’s theories of place and community provide a connecting thread throughout the chapter, along with his ideas about selfhood, “implacement” and the environment as a source of danger. As both an example of a work that begins to address these themes and a catalyst for discussion, the chapter examines the television series Fires (Ayres et al., Fires [TV Series]. Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2021), which dramatises the 2019–2020 Black Summer fire season in Australia. Starting with a broad view of the context depicted in this series, the focus then shifts to individual experience and finally emotional responses. The chapter concludes by considering future research opportunities through which the disciplines of theatre studies, screen studies and architecture can leverage applications of advanced technology to contribute to disaster preparedness, responsiveness and recovery.

This chapter reviews visual representations of climate in art and film across the last few decades, exploring shifting artistic, cinematic, televisual and narrative practices that have more recently shaped the communication of the climate emergency. It explores the iconographies that artists and filmmakers have used in the shift from representing contemporaneous and local environmental challenges to depicting the future consequences of climate warming, including widespread biospheric change. The authors sketch the shifting screen media formulations that imagine climate catastrophes, observing how both documentary film, television and contemporary art draw on popular and professional media practices, including news formats and visual effects.

Over the last two decades, documentary filmmakers have increasingly turned their attention to environmental issues, whether the climate crisis, pollution, threats to the biosphere and its species or the effects of resource extraction. Women consistently play key roles in environmental documentary filmmaking, whether behind or in front of the camera. This essay explores the nexus of documentary filmmaking, women and environment. It examines the Australian documentary sector, tracking changing pathways of opportunity for women working in documentary production, particularly in relation to the causal connections between the rise of philanthropic funding and environmental documentary. The discussion investigates two recent examples, Wild Things (2020) and The Leadership (2020), exploring how they might reward an analysis that connects environmentalism and women. Tracking the convergence of a number of factors, including the gendered composition of the documentary sector, the rise of “impact documentary” with its changed conceptualisation of audiences, and the gendered profile of environmentalism, this article argues that contemporary documentary filmmaking is a significant site for understanding the environment as a feminist concern.

Through a combination of scientific and community activity, our environment is increasingly registered and documented as data. Given the expanding breadth of this digital domain, it is crucial that scholars consider the problems it presents as well as its affirmative potential. This article, arising from collaboration between a practitioner and theorist in digital design and a film and screen scholar with expertise in documentary and environmental studies, critically examines biodiversity data through an ecocritical reading of public-facing databases, citizen science platforms and data visualizations. We examine the Atlas of Living Australia; Canberra Nature Map; the City of Melbourne’s Insects; and the experimental visualization Local Kin. Integrating perspectives from screen studies, design and the environmental humanities, including multispecies studies approaches in anthropology, we examine how digital representations reflect the way biodiversity data is produced and structured. Critically analysing design choices – what is shown, and how it is shown – we argue that biodiversity data on-screen provides specific affordances: allowing, encouraging or discouraging certain insights and possibilities that condition our knowledge of and engagement with living things. An interdisciplinary approach allows us to ask new questions about how users might experience multispecies worlds in digital form, and how biodiversity data might convey the complexities of an entangled biosphere, amplifying understanding, connection and attention amongst interested publics. We examine the visual rhetorics of digital biodiversity in order to better understand how these forms operate as environmental media: designed representations of the living world.

For most people the concept of ‘oil cinema’ or ‘petrofilm’ might conjure images of crude oil, industrial processing or wells. Instead the oil industry has, over the course of a century, harnessed the potential of the moving image to orchestrate powerful narratives that visually evoke oil only occasionally as a material substance. The public relations agenda of oil companies has utilized moving image culture in sophisticated ways, going beyond predictable advertising forms to more comprehensively and ‘seamlessly equate the story of oil with the experience of modernity’, as Mona Damluji observes. ¹ The preferred genre for petroleum companies has been documentary, and the development of petrofilm culture in the first half of the 20th century became enmeshed with the centres of documentary production. Highlighting the importance of this sphere of filmmaking, Patrick Russell and James Piers Taylor write that

Recognising his association with Australia over the course of decades, this essay explores how Sir David Attenborough’s programmes ‘remake’ Australian nature for global audiences. It examines not only Attenborough himself, but offers equal weight to the human and nonhuman world he brings to audiences. Offering an examination of ‘blue chip’ natural history programming and the two series that bookend Attenborough’s work as a presenter ‘in’ and ‘of’ Australia – Quest Under Capricorn ( 1963a Quest Under Capricorn , 1963a. Episode 1 Desert Gods. TV, BBC. Apr. 26. [Google Scholar] , 1963b Quest Under Capricorn , 1963b. Episode 2 Hermits of Borroloola. TV, BBC. May 3. [Google Scholar] , 1963c Quest Under Capricorn , 1963c. Episode 3 Buffalo, Geese and Men. TV, BBC. May 10. [Google Scholar] and 1963d Quest Under Capricorn , 1963d. Episode 6 First Australians. TV, BBC. May 31. [Google Scholar] ) and Life in Cold Blood ( 2008a Life in Cold Blood , 2008a. Episode 3 Dragons of the Dry. TV, BBC. Feb. 18. [Google Scholar] , 2008b Life in Cold Blood , 2008b. Episode 5 Armoured Giants. TV, BBC. Mar. 3. [Google Scholar] ), it is attuned to historical and contemporary cultures of colonisation and how these are located within the values and practices of blue-chip natural history programming.

This essay examines two forms of data visualization freely available on the web, shark tracking technology and, to a lesser extent, projections of sea level rise. Through a discussion of two websites—the Ocearch Global Shark Tracker and Climate Central’s Surging Seas interface—I explore how, as manifestations of visual media, these websites might contribute to a documentary studies paradigm, and interactive documentary in particular. This essay is concerned with not only the contours and limits of documentary studies but also with how we perceive and engage with the nonhuman environment. Together, the two websites provide an avenue through which to evolve the ecocritical capacities of documentary studies to critique the media forms that shape our experience. This essay elaborates an ecocritical approach to these examples by understanding how they are integrally concerned with the performance and politics of not only space but also time.

A Guerra da Beatriz (Beatriz's War) (2013) has been heralded as the first feature film to be produced by Timor-Leste, a country with one of the smallest film industries in the world. The film provides a fictional account of the Indonesian occupation of Timor-Leste over a 28- year period. It is told from the perspective of Beatriz and, against the background of actual historical events, follows her story through three decades of occupation and resistance. In placing a female protagonist at the centre of narrative events, the film declares an affinity with a history of international cinema that privileges female experience. This essay identifies a relationship between A Guerra da Beatriz and the women's film, a subcategory of classical Hollywood melodrama, in order to survey the productive intersection between the two. Building on this reading of female point of view, this paper explores the context of A Guerra da Beatriz's production and its address to the audience. Central to this address is not only the emphasis on female experience, but the way this is rendered against the backdrop of actual past events.

Chapter 11 employs a feminist lens to situate women filmmakers within a wider global context in which all women’s cinema can be considered to be “world cinema,” set apart from local contexts that fail to encompass women’s film practices in terms of resources, space, and mobility. Advocating a perspective advanced by Patricia White in Women’s Cinema, World Cinema, Belinda Smaill proposes that women filmmakers should be viewed within “whole world approaches” that comprehensively address the context of production, circulation, representation, and image of each director. While tracking the mobility of female directors, Smaill points out that while it is difficult for women to achieve employment as feature directors in the U.S., it is even more difficult to gain access to the industry from outside the U.S. Hollywood is an exclusive domain, making Bier’s transnational American work a critical site for investigation. With Serena, Smaill contends, Bier cements her place as a director who takes on the world by lending her authorial signature to a complex manifestation of world cinema.