Burning coal flickers, a newborn baby cries and minuscule critters wriggle across the screen to the melancholic tune of Louise Connell’s Fruit. These images set the scene for Dr. Emily Munro’s documentary Living Proof: A Climate Story (2021), which asks: What fuels life on this planet? From which matter do we grow? And what are the ecological repercussions of growth?
Last week, the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities PhD Lab screened the film, followed by a discussion about the role of nostalgia in narrating evolving human relationships with the natural world. Afterwards, Emily shared some insights about her filmmaking process and the importance of art for inspiring climate action.
The documentary comprises montages of archival footage from the last 120 years to trace Scotland’s climate relations. Making the film involved sifting through archival footage from over 80 different films, including wartime propaganda, sponsored documentaries, corporate public relations films, educational films, and amateur reels. Emily reflected that the thing which struck her most during this process was seeing how energy production in Scotland has been caught in a ‘cycle of virtuous mistakes’:
It’s a trap that we seem to fall into all the time as a species living through late capitalism – the economic imperative to create prosperity can lead to huge technical innovations and infrastructure projects which are ‘good’ and valuable up to a point, but have often led to the neglect and damage of our environment. The footage shows us how Scotland was promoted as this great resource of indigenous energy and labour, which disguises a more nuanced account of how energy has been produced and consumed in this country and in whose corporate interests.
The film gestures to capitalist boom and bust logic through its cyclical use of footage depicting scenes of innovation, growth, destruction, and rebuilding. Time is a structuring theme in the film, compiling footage of industrial production to show how fantasies of the future have governed environmental decision-making of the past. For Emily, experimenting with this archival material can inspire alternative imaginaries of more sustainable futures:
To approach the topic of climate change from a historical perspective can take the focus away from forecasting / doomcasting and encourage more critical reflection based on evidence. Having said that, I love speculative storytelling, too! I’ve written a climate fiction novel set in the future, with much of the action taking place on a decommissioned oil rig in the North Sea, which is due to be published in 2027. While this story looks ahead, I couldn’t have written it without the historical knowledge I have absorbed over the past few years.
As a climate documentary, Living Proof diverges from conventional problem-solution narratives, instead piecing together snapshots to trace the multiple, sometimes conflicting, trajectories which have led us to the current crisis in Scotland and beyond. Emily explained that through this open-ended narrative she hoped to encourage conversations which ‘bring us out of our silos and enable us to make connections across communities and generations’.
In times of climate emergency, she argues that rather than narratives of blind optimism, ‘we need plurality of expression. More people from different backgrounds engaging with and producing more art. More critical reflection, more imagination. More evidence and more escape.’
By Anna Stacey
You can watch Living Proof: A Climate Story (2021) at the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive in Glasgow. This blog was written in collaboration with the filmmaker Dr. Emily Munro and edited by curator and SGSAH blogger Jelena Sofronijevic.
