Ocean Review by Lorraine Mortimer

OCEAN

A POLEMIC

Leonard Miall [British broadcaster and administrator at the BBC between 1939 and 1974] summoned me to his office. It was time, he said, for me to consider my future. I ought to be applying for some of the administrative jobs that were coming up… After all, he said, ‘you won’t want to be gallivanting around the world when you are fifty’. I was not convinced of this.

David Attenborough, in Life on Air

It’s unlikely that either man could have imagined that on Attenborough’s 99th birthday, Ocean would premiere worldwide. It’s a film where he’s the human voice and face uniting all of its elements—creatures and plants that are mesmerizing in their colour and motion, grey undersea graveyards of destruction and devastation driven by ‘business as usual’, and an undersea voyage of spectacular proportions showing a world as abundant and exotic as anything conjured up by Jules Verne in the nineteenth century. Ocean addresses a broad public, seeking to educate and motivate people with the threat of climate catastrophe already hanging over our heads and permeating our lives—some people’s more immediately than others.

Beginning with birds flying over dark, breaking waves on the open seas, Attenborough notes that the ocean has been revered and feared. This reverence and fear can be found across the world. There are countless myths and illustrations of this, Russian paintings where fisherman and their small craft look like tiny toys in the midst of gigantic waves enfolding them, and as on the West Coast of Ireland, there are fishing villages whose dwellings turn their back to the sea—which has taken so many of their community over the ages. Now more and more drastic ‘weather events’ destroy homes built for their closeness to the ocean’s beauty. Reasonably, given the enormity of what the film takes on, this fearful majesty isn’t an aspect it deals with. Attenborough says that for him as a boy, the sea was a ‘vast wilderness to be tamed and mastered for the benefit of humanity’, but as he approaches the end of his life, ‘we know the opposite is true’. He hopes we all come to regard it as the ‘lifeblood of our home’.

Attenborough tells us why he’s the front man for this film. It’s because he’s now able to present what was something of a revelation to him and will be for many of us in the audience. While the ocean is ‘at the crossroads’, there’s now strong evidence that there can be hope for conservation and renewal as the sea can recover faster than we ever imagined. It can continue to freely provide its bounty if we stop treating it as a garbage dump and allow it to restore itself. After seven decades with the BBC, Attenborough doesn’t so much provide that ‘voice-of-God’ narration so decried by many filmmakers and anthropologists, as appear as an educator who’s lived and explored the world for almost a century, as an activist and icon who pulls together all the strands of a work of symphonic, even operatic proportions. Ocean’s in broadly three parts or acts, going from exposition of the richness and beauty of our world under the sea, to its devastation by profit-hungry companies subsidised by governments; and finally to the key revelation, we can have hope, if we can only respect the life of ocean in its balance and complexity. With three directors and many contributors, here the single expert is replaced by a WE, including Indigenous Coastal peoples whose lives are directly dependent on a healthy ocean. In this story of our ocean and at the film’s very centre, is the invitation/injunction that we must write its next chapter together.

For Australian mainlanders, the small figure of Sir David in his blue wind jacket in indifferent weather on a windswept British beach is likely to elicit a little sympathy from us. As someone who was a ‘beach baby’ who spent each weekend and holiday on Coogee Beach and in its waters, the beach and the sea were a huge part of my life, and certainly a big part of the sun-drenched, seemingly carefree life our government and tourism officers wanted to sell to prospective visitors and immigrants. (It was even a little exciting when the shark bell rang from the shark tower and we all scurried out of the water together.) But I’m not alone in feeling very different about these places now. Last year, what beachgoers and scientists called ‘disgusting’ black balls washed up on Coogee and other neighbouring beaches. This human-generated waste included faeces, cooking oils, soap scum, PFAS (forever chemicals) and more filthy and dangerous substances. They were enough to give you a feeling very different from the joy you had when you contemplated plunging into the water and feeling like you were part of it all. Soon more and more attention was and continues to be paid to the diseased salmon and other fish that have resulted from the industrial-scale fish-farming off the coast of Tasmania whose waste in its present proportions could eventually kill life on the sea-floor. Bacterial outbreaks mean salmon are pumped with antibiotics. There are viruses too and once again rotting fish and oily globules of fish matter have washed up on beaches south of Hobart.

There’s been much education and activism about the unsustainable scale of production of the big companies involved in these events. But to this moment, those who govern continue to opt for jobs over every measure of health we can imagine. It’s like our government (and it’s not alone) hasn’t heard of the possibility of a Universal Basic Income that could properly compensate those who’ve been employed by big industry, halt the onslaught on and spoiling of undersea life, and the contamination of the whole food-chain. The loud and clear message in this film is that with present practices, we ‘may now be removing the foundation of an entire eco-system’. The thread running through Ocean, and what stops Attenborough from losing hope, he says, is the ‘remarkable discovery’ that ‘the ocean can recover faster than we have ever thought possible. If left alone it might not only recover, but thrive beyond anything anyone has seen … if we just let nature take its course, the sea will save itself…’ 

I was glad that Attenborough put the contemporary situation truthfully and baldly:

Three billion people rely on our ocean for food but ships sent by a few wealthy nations are starving coastal communities of the food source they have relied on for millenia. This is modern colonialism at sea. Some 400,000 industrial vessels now hunt in every corner of the ocean. Nowhere is too far or too deep. Even the most remote parts of the planet are no longer safe.

There’s competition between nations right now about who gets to exploit the Arctic and Antarctic most profoundly. While so many around the world recognize this need to ‘let nature take its course’, to ‘leave alone’ portions of the earth, sea and sky for renewal, we know that to do this in our greedy world system would involve changing a whole cosmology. In the present ‘world order’, characterized and enabled by the delusion that captains of industry can continue to extract and produce without limits, ‘moderation’ and ‘maintenance’ have become dirty words. It’s like nothing can be left alone without it being commodified and monetized—including human lives. This ‘order’ also has little to do with justice. The possibility of change will also be dependent on countries not having psychopaths and sycophants at the helm of government decision-making.

In Ocean, we have footage of a young Attenborough snorkelling off the Australian Coast in 1957. He’d also filmed on the mainland in the early 1960s, at a time when 16mm filming technology was making important advances, synchronous sound and light and portable cameras enabling more and closer observation than previously. He had a skilled sound recordist with him on this adventure. Now Indigenous people could be heard ‘talking, arguing and singing, just like everyone else’, Attenborough wrote. In the Top End of Australia, he learned that there were Aboriginal people who largely continued to organize their lives in traditional ways. At the very same time, the newly established AIAS, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now AIATSIS, to acknowledge and include Torres Strait Islanders) was established and would soon look for a ‘photographer’ who would document Aboriginal life for the record, sometimes requested by anthropologists working with particular people and often at the request of Aboriginal Elders who wanted important, secret-sacred ceremonies to be filmed for those who followed them. While researching at the Institute, I learned that in the Aboriginal Council on what was Goulburn Island, some members were debating a grievance about what they believed was a film produced by the Institute and they expressed their concerns and objections to its Chairman and Secretary who at last went on a field trip to talk with people in or close to their communities. It turned out that it was Attenborough’s films that contained shots of sacred ceremonies and had been screened not long before these administrators’ visit. I was surprised by this, given the respect I’d thought that Attenborough showed all his subjects. It was only when I read his account of his encounters with Aboriginal people and secret men’s ‘business’ that I learned that he had indeed gotten the permission of a Burada (Burarra) artist and Elder preparing objects to be used in a coming ritual, objects not to be seen by women or uninitiated boys. At the time, Attenborough asked the Elder if showing the art and rituals to people in general back home in England would be disrespectful and offend him and those taking part. He was told that since his home was a very long way away, it would be alright to show these things—just as long as they weren’t shown in his place. As communications technology exploded during the 60s and 70s, and as some Aboriginal people travelled more widely and engaged more politically, this question of distribution and viewing would become more and more vexed for the AIAS itself. (Attenborough and his sound man also received a sacred object from the ritual to take back home as part of a gift exchange.) In what will likely be Sir David’s final Australia-connected chapter, just last year, Jamie Jungarrayi Hampton, a Warlpiri Repatriation Officer at the South Australian Museum, was able to meet Attenborough in London and talk about his trip to Central Australia in the 1960s. Attenborough donated photos he’d taken on his trip to Yuendumu and in return was given a T-shirt celebrating the Warlpiri Project.

I’m wanting to give full credit where it’s due to Attenborough’s life work, at the same time as stressing the number of people involved in financing, filming, editing and distributing Ocean. (I love the fact that the Don Quixote Foundation partly produced it.) Many organizations and people have contributed to the wonder and devastation of the grand visions we see, including Australian underwater cinematographer, filmmaker, and conservationist, Tom Park. And Attenborough’s right when he talks about the ‘mesmerizing’ quality of the life we now have access to and the great leaps forward in underwater filming technologies. We see meadows of subtle green seagrass, forests of kelp, oases or ‘pittstops’ for undersea communities that in effect function as allies of one another. People are also discovering submarine mountains and more and more marine species of all shapes and sizes, some of which you’d think were dreamt up by a fantasist, by Pixar, or earlier almost psychedelic-looking Disney animation. Along the way, in Ocean the camera was able to capture everything always in motion. (Including the view from a trawler as if eating up the ocean floor.) It’s great that Twiggy Forrest’s Mindaroo Films, a branch of his and Nicola Forrest’s Mindaroo Foundation, helped finance the film. Twiggy gave full credit to Attenborough, who among other things, inspired him to go back to university to do a PhD in his 50s, called ‘Pelagic Ecology and Solutions for a Troubled Ocean’. (Looking it up, I found ‘pelagic’ means relating to or living in the open sea.)

An aspect of the film I also particularly liked was some focus on the relatedness and transformations highlighted, the underlining of the fact that corals are animals, for example, and that we get to see this in the film. As we learn more and more, categories are broken down and boundaries dissolve. And this kind of relationship where we belong to our waters rather than them belonging to us is highlighted by Indigenous people’s voices and presence in the film. Right now on the ABC, we can see Mark Coles Smith’s presentation of Kimberley, where the reciprocal relation of well-being between rivers, their species and coastal peoples is highlighted, the need for an interactive rather than extractive belief system something that sustains the people’s and the river’s health. In such a series and in Ocean, close-ups of the tiniest creatures reveal their pulsating with life, something like the worthiness of their existence. Though the technology was more primitive, it’s interesting that early film theory caught some of these aspects of life on/in film so well. In the first half of the 20th century, Jean Epstein wrote about the fluid universe of film, that what was then called the cinematograph represented the universe as a perpetual, mobile continuity, more fluid and agile than directly sensible continuity, where nothing separated mind and matter. On film, metamorphoses of time revealed metamorphoses in the universe itself that generally passed unnoticed:

The whole man is no more than a being of smooth muscles, swimming in a dense environment, where deep currents still carry along and fashion this clear descendant of ancient marine animal life, of the mother waters… Slowed down still more, every substance returns to its fundamental viscosity, lets its basic colloidal nature rise to its surface.

Epstein was also a literary critic, filmmaker and novelist who saw the human not as master of the universe, but a being reinserted in the natural world and the cosmos—all full of force.

Epstein spent plenty of time on the Breton coast in France, and the sensibility of his films is both poetic and ethnographic, combining qualities that haven’t always been evident in the English-speaking approach to things. Indeed, it’s the one real disappointment for me in in Ocean. I was surprised when at the film’s beginning, Attenborough told us that the ocean until now remained ‘almost entirely a mystery’ to us and that until recently ‘we assumed it to be a largely empty desert’. Given the well-earned ‘matchless’ and ‘moral’ authority that most commentators note Attenborough has earned, it’s a pity that at least one whole body of work is effaced by such statements. And I say this not to be picky or to detract from this super-important film, but in the spirit of this narrator’s record as an educator, along with his acknowledgement that we must write the ocean’s next chapter together. There has indeed been some good work in the past.

Jean Painlevé, for example, was born a year before Epstein and started taking pictures underwater off the Southern Coast of Brittany at the age of eight, at first with a self-made 4×4 cm. box whose lens was made with the bottom of a glass bottle! Like Epstein, he also defied the boundaries of art and science. He was passionate about jazz and many of his (often playful and surrealistic) films, like The Seahorse (1933), The Love Life of the Octopus (1967), Freshwater Assassins (1947) and Sea Ballerinas (1956), have jazz or other avant-garde soundtracks. An anti-fascist activist, he lived and worked with Ginette Hamon his whole life, Hamon coming from a Breton family whose home was open to young artists and scientists who challenged the notion that business and exploitation should forever and always carry the day. Painlevé screened his first film at the Academy of Sciences but like an Attenborough, he and Hamon also made films for the general public. They faced some ‘worthy’ audience members who stormed out of their films, declaring that things like the cinema were not to be taken seriously, that film was ‘frivolous entertainment for the ignorant’. This kind of prejudice against film can still ‘come to the surface’ today with people who’re quick to point out how film can lie, that an impressive juxtaposition of images can be staged, manipulate the audience’s emotions, etc. (Think of the amazing shots in Ocean of West African coastal peoples in their small fishing boats with their small hand-made nets beside a giant trawler-factory on the sea that is plundering the commonly owned ocean for monocultural booty, discarding all they don’t want—while robbing the villagers of their rightful share). Of course editing’s involved in the crafting of a film-document—as it is in any document, including the written!

As Attenborough told us in Life On Air, at the beginning of his career at the BBC,

Auntie…had a view on what and when viewers should view. News, it was felt, was not really suitable for television. Pictures were not to be trusted… Pictures would also, inevitably, focus viewers’ attention on a particular happening when a better impression of national and world affairs would be gained from a generalisation by a skilled reporter.

The evening’s programmes started at about half-past seven, ‘introduced by a male announcer wearing a dinner jacket and black tie…or a dignified young lady in evening dress’.

The last Frenchman whose film and television work people those of my generation grew up with was Naval Officer, oceanographer, filmmaker, author and conservationist, Jacques Cousteau. Back in 1943, he invented the Aqua Lung with Émile Gagnon and with Frédéric Dumas, he wrote The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure. In 1956, Cousteau, with Louis Malle, co-directed a film with the same name as the book and he helped set up an Environmental Protection Foundation. The first many of us knew of him was through the television series he hosted for nine series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.

In his review of Ocean, Mark Kermode suggested it might seem churlish to be critical of the ‘bombastic’ music in the film and I too feel it didn’t need the overwhelming, suspense-thriller-type soundtrack often kicking in on top of an already dramatic and powerful film. In fact, Ocean is both a polemical and emotional film. How could it not be, given what is happening to our environment? Early on in the film, its makers allow us to glide along with a diver as he tells us of his ‘heartbreaking’ experience swimming over a corner of the ocean after a scallop dredger has just been there, ‘smashing to pieces all sorts of animals’. For him, what was once a ‘Garden of Eden’ was transformed into something like a ‘Nuclear Winter’. And we can see such great patches of devastation from space! Being emotional and polemical doesn’t detract from the film’s truths. Rather, Attenborough and company understand the urgency and the necessity of action now. In Ocean Attenborough’s been able to drive home to me and millions of others around the world that so much of what dwells under the sea, if left alone and allowed to flourish, can help absorb carbon and be our ally in avoiding climate disaster. Fishing people acknowledge that existing marine reserves and no-take zones, even in places like the Mediterranean, if left alone, come back to become ‘thriving and bustling neighbourhoods’ that spill over even outside their boundaries. This is now happening in a very small percentage of the ocean at present, so it’s great that this evidence and Attenborough’s plea come around a month before the United Nations Ocean Conference in France in June this year, when nations will have the chance ‘to make history by agreeing to create fully protected marine reserves in 30% of their waters by safeguarding the high seas and by ending the most damaging fishing methods. All the while supporting their fishing communities’. The italics are mine.

During the School Climate Strikes, where students were joined by many of us in the wider community, I liked seeing placards saying ‘We Can’t Do This to Sir Richard!’ What I liked was the way it wasn’t so much the authority of the man that so many writers talk about as the fact that he’s an old man who by now has long struggled for more sane and informed attitudes and practices towards nature, recognizing and stressing that we are all part of it. Polluting the sea, earth and air, we’re poisoning life on earth. In the end, in Ocean, I saw less the authority, expert and icon than a human acknowledging his end is near, that he’ll be returning before too long to the proverbial dust. Fortunately, he’s not to be buried just yet. But the film is a plea for us all to continue to write our next chapter. And if it’s any good, it will be written from below and at the margins by people who don’t need to appease the vested interests that could push us to extinction.

References

David Attenborough, Life On Air: Memoirs of a Broadcaster, enlarged ed., BBC Books, 2016.

David Attenborough, Life on Earth, produced by Richard Brock and John Sparks, BBC&BBC2, 13 episodes, 1979.

Jean Epstein. ‘The Sea Speaks’ was a retrospective that included some of his short films that included some local Breton language Mor’Vran (The Sea of Ravens, 1930), Le tempestaire (The Storm Master, 1947), and Les Feux de la Mer (The Fires of the Sea, 1948), along with longer silent ones like Finis Terrae (End of the Earth, 1929) and Coeur Fidèle (Faithful Heart, 1923). See https://bampfa.org/event/sea-speaks-short-films-jean-epstein for example. There are other retrospectives and his main writings on film, like Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna (1926) and L’Intelligence d’une machine (1946) are now available in English. See, for example, Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations, Sarah Keller and Jason N Paul eds., Amsterdam University Press, 2012. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/34548/413034.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

Jacqueline Lambert. ‘A History of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1959-1989’, Unpublished PhD, Australian National University, 2012.

Jean Painlevé. See the ‘Archives Jean Painlevé’ in French and English. https://jeanpainleve.org/films and also Science is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé, The Criterion Collection, 2009.

Jules Verne. A prolific French novelist, playwright and poet, who also did a great deal of research on subjects he wrote about, Verne’s work included ‘Voyages Extraordinaires’, like Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), and The Mysterious Island (1874). Sometimes regarded as a father of science fiction, his works have been made into silent, then sound films again and again. Many of his works have been translated and children around the world have been introduced to him by abridged comics versions of his tales. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Verne.