Documentary images can document our reality in numerous ways. They almost always have this fabulous quality of showing us a reality in ways we may have seen or not seen before, they can both confirm and surprise. However, images do not just show us facts about reality, they also touch emotions in an often-strong way, emotions in people in the reality documented, but also emotions in us viewers. This is also the case with documentaries about our common earth, of the diversity of nature its plants and animals, the environment we live in locally and globally. Before 1900 images of a global earth were few and scattered. Although explorers with cameras started documenting life on our planet in a broader sense as soon as moving images were invented, our more global media culture from the 1960s and on has had a much deeper impact on how we see the globe we live on. Astronauts on Apollo 8 in December 1968 have described the emotional experience of seeing 'the blue planet' from space, the first images ever to be transmitted globally.

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       In An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006), which is in many ways a very authoritative, fact based lecture documentary, with Al Gore as centre figure, the Apollo 8 picture from 1968 opens the film. Images of planet earth continues through the film, and as the documentation of our ecological crisis gets heavier and heavier, the images of the earth change: we can literally see the ecological change in global images of our planet from 1968 and on. Factual information and visual documentation combine and speak to both the cognitive and emotional dimensions of our mind. Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore's ecological disaster documentary is connected to another very global series of nature documentaries produced by BBC and David Attenborough and his crew since 2001. For twenty years, in fact during the whole period in which the ecological crisis has become more and more dominant in public debate, these nature documentaries have fascinated a global audience. They document the diversity of our planet, the way everything is connected and shape our life, but also the way in which this diversity and life on the planet is challenged and threatened.

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       The Blue Planet (2001) - filmed from 1996 to 2000 - shows life in the oceans, and already this spectacular documentary, celebrating the beauty of our planet, ends with a special episode called "Deep Trouble" in which the rising crisis of our oceans is pointed out. This critical, ecological crisis dimension increases in Planet Earth (2006) and Planet Earth II (2016), where the natural wonders of the world meet the more and more deep changes occurring. In Planet Earth the last episode, "The Future," illustrates the problems by using both visual documentation, narrative sequences and expert explanations. The argument put forward is, that we need to understand our planet as an integrated eco-system: saving the diversity of species, of what we see as wilderness is the condition for saving our planet. It is about living together with each other and the whole natural eco-system, again demonstrated with stunning images of our earth in space. Attenborough's nature films speak to all aspects of our embodied mind: it is not just about facts and reason; it is also about the emotional power of images and narratives, and it is about using documentary genres and aesthetic forms in creative ways that underline the factual arguments. Watch for instance the fascinating episode 6 of Planet Earth II ("Cities"), in which the film demonstrates how animals adapt to the life in the big cities created by problematic growth. It is pure comedy with a serious message, and as we all know: humour and irony can often turn our mind on, where morality fails. Attenborough's films are also powerful documentary storytelling with melodramatic, comic and scary dimensions.

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Documentaries and our embodied mind

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        Documentary filmmakers have probably always been aware that making films about reality in various ways is about combining factual evidence, arguments, documentation, and elements of narrative, visuality, creativity, imagination, identification etc. Documentaries like all other forms of film use structures, forms of rhetoric, and narrative structures that appeal to both cognition and emotion. Factual information and careful documentation are essential in issue-related documentaries appealing to the public and to political decision-makers. It would however be wrong to assume that factuality cannot go hand in hand with emotional dimensions, and that rhetorical structures makes narrative structures impossible. Narrative strategies and emotional dimensions are on the contrary something that enhances our understanding of complex issues. Humans are, as many cognitive theoreticians have argued (Turner 1996, Bruner 2002, and Gottschall 2012), storytelling animals, and stories do not just belong to the realm of fiction, they are a central part of our understanding of the world around us. In Mark Turner's book The Literary Mind. The origins of Thought and Language (1996) he defines our ability to use image schemas and narrative structures as essential for our thinking and reasoning:

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Story, projection, and parable do work for us; they make everyday life possible; they are the root of human thought; they are not primarily - or even importantly entertainment. To be sure, the kind of stories we are apt to notice draw attention to their status as the product of storytelling, and they often have an entertaining side. We might therefore think that storytelling is a special performance rather than a constant mental activity. But story as a mental activity is essential to human thought.

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  When narrative structures enter documentary formats, they sharpen our attention, they direct us towards important connections between separate actions and human characters appearing. Even if the narrative structure is not particularly strong in the documentary film, we apply narrative schemas because they are built into our everyday mentality and way of understanding things. The same goes for image schemas, and the visual side of narration and rhetoric, which is so strong in all visual media, including documentaries. Just as reasoning is about drawing conclusion from facts and arguments, narrative is about seeing connections between reality 'actors', their way of speaking and appearing and the connection between them and between them and the actions they are part of. Our image schemas at the same time on a very basic level contribute to the combining of factual reasoning, narrative understanding of actions and character, and a more emotional and bodily reaction to the documentary world presented. As Bruner points out, imagination is among other things tied to our ability to match and test general image schemas to a concrete visual input: "(..) we categorize events according to shared image schemas and actions according to shared image schemas" (Bruner 1996: 30). Just as documentary filmmakers use creativity and blending when combining characters, actions, images, narrative and rhetorical structures, sound, music etc., viewers do the same. Our embodied mind is made to read and react to filmic structures based on their everyday reality and competences and their genetically and culturally shaped mind.

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 So reasoning and factuality is tied to narrative schemas, image schemas and basic emotional structures in humans. Despite the fact that also emotions are an extremely important dimension in documentary film making, and in audience responses to documentary, research in documentary have very rarely included theories of emotion. As Belinda Smaill points out in The Documentary. Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010), there seems to have been a silence around or a downplay of the role of emotions, desire, pleasure: documentary has been seen as primarily a ‘discourse of sobriety’ (Nichols 1991). There seems to be a general opposition between thinking and feeling in our culture, and when dealing especially with documentaries, who are often seen as factual voices of reason. 

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        Common sense clearly tells us, that emotions can make reasoning and debate problematic: we tend to dismiss people who become too emotional. However true this is for the pragmatics of communication, both classical theories of rhetoric and modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience tell us that emotions are intimately connected with reasoning. This is the main point in Antonio Damasio's book Descartes' Error (1994): 

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Certain aspects of the process of emotions and feelings are indispensable for rationality. At their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we may put the instrument of logic to good use. (...) Contrary to traditional scientific opinion, feelings are just as cognitive as other perceptions. They are the result of the most curious physiological arrangement that has turned the brain into the body’s captive audience.     

 

      Already the ancient rhetorical tradition knew about the relation between ethos (personal credibility), logos (the power of arguments) and pathos (the power of emotions). Where fiction has an indirect relation to reality, nonfiction claims different forms of more direct relations to reality. However, emotions in real life, in documentaries and fiction serve similar purposes. Characters and events in nonfiction can be imbedded in either a rhetorical or a narrative structure, but in both cases, emotions play a crucial role. The ’reality effect’ of nonfiction does not in itself remove emotional dimensions and impacts equal. Arguments and the documentary reality often have a very strong emotional effect. This is not least the case with eco-documentaries and the way they document serious changes to our nature and environment. The difference between non-fiction and fiction is not a question of emotions as such. It is more a question of how emotions and narratives are used, and the different kinds of identification viewers have in documentaries and in fiction. On the whole, we have to accept that film theory in general and until recently - and especially documentary theory - has paid too little attention to emotions and their role in film narratives. In his book Moving Viewers (2009), Carl Plantinga says:

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A strong strain of Western thought has considered emotion to be antithetical to reason and an obstacle to (..) critical thinking (..) Emotions are intimately tied to our cognition, inferences, evaluations and all of the other mental activities that accompany the viewing experience. Emotions and affects have implications for ideas (..) they play a role in the creation of both cultural and individual memory.

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 According to the already mentioned neurologist Antonio Damasio and the cognitive linguists George Lakoff & Mark Johnson (1980), this link between reason and emotion has to do with a very deep connection between images, metaphors and narrative structures as central elements in factual knowledge building, reasoning and decision making. Polemically George Lakoff explains this in his book The Political Mind (2008) where he analyses the use of metaphors and images in American, political debates, he clearly goes against the traditional western philosophy, where reason was assumed to be universal, disembodied and almost void of emotion:

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Language gets its power because it is defined relative to frames, prototypes, metaphors, narratives, images, and emotions. Part of its power comes from its unconscious aspects: we are not consciously aware of all that it evokes in us, but it is there, hidden, always at work. If we hear the same language over and over, we will think more and more in terms of the frames and metaphors activated by that language.

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       This has implications also for how documentaries argue, how they tell stories about reality, because even when documentaries may try to avoid using images, emotions and narratives, our mind constantly works on all those levels. Metaphors, images, narrative structures and emotions are not just elements in the construction of documentaries, they are part of our everyday reality and the way are embodied mind work with this reality.

      Images are not just elements in film (documentaries and fiction), they are in fact a basic element in how we perceive reality and mediated communication. Images are a form of thinking and a form of memory and come in different forms:

• Perceptual images – images formed by inputs from visual observations, sounds, words etc.;

• Recalled images – images coming out of our memory bank or which are formed as a biproduct of perceptual images;

• Future images – images that we construct when we imagine or plan a future action or event.

So images, visual input are part of the way we thing, and in dealing with images and visual narratives our embodied mind connect reason and emotion:

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Feelings offer us a glimpse of what goes on in our flesh, as a momentary image of that flesh is juxtaposed to the image of other objects and situations; in so doing, feelings modify our comprehensive notion of those other objects and situations. By dint of juxtaposition, body images give to other images a quality of goodness or badness, of pleasure or pain.

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       Our mind, like our verbal language and the visual and verbal language of films therefor works in line with how films work, and narratives are central to the way we experience reality:

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Complex narratives – the kind we find in anyone’s life story, as well as in fairy tales, novels and drama – are made up of smaller narratives with very simple structures. Those structures are called frames or scripts. Frames are among the cognitive structures we think with (…) The neural circuitry needed to create frame structures is relatively simple, and so frames tend to structure a huge amount of our thought (…) The same event structure circuitry can be used to live out an action or narrative, or to understand the actions of others or the structure of the story (…) narratives and frames are not just brain structures with intellectual content, but rather with integrated intellectual-emotional content.

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        The theory of the embodied mind found in cognitive theory and by now widely developed in film studies and the study of documentary (Brylla and Kramer eds. 2018, Bondebjerg 2014 and 2017) clearly tells us that we need to understand the basic dimensions of narrative and images, of the link between reason and emotion, when we deal with documentary genres, including the eco-documentary. We cannot narrowly define documentary genres as rhetoric, factuality and reason. They do in fact play on all dimensions of our embodied and creative mind.

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A typology of ecological documentaries

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       The history of documentary film in general and the specific genre of nature- and ecology-documentary show a stunning aesthetic and thematic diversity. The typology suggested by Bill Nichols (2001) is perhaps the most well-known, but I have suggested a simpler typology in my book Engaging with Reality. Documentary and Globalisation (2014). The definition of four very fundamental modes (see fig. 1) or prototypes of documentaries, which can appear with variations and can be combined in individual documentaries, suggests that there are many ways of relating to reality and of creating narratives of reality.