Content area
Full text
This article situates Yann Arthus-Bertrand's 2009 ecofilm, HOME, in a pedagogical tradition of active, sensualist learning that, while not exclusively French, has long been central to French republican educational ideology. It specifically examines the film's use of the estrangement effect, a manifestation in aesthetic terms of object lesson pedagogy, in order to provoke a more careful scrutiny of its principle object of study, the Earth.
Like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Leonardo DiCaprio's 11th Hour (2007), Yann Arthus-Bertrand's HOME (2009) is a didactic film. Its message is clear. It emphatically calls attention to the problem of climate change, the rapid depletion of the Earth's resources and other harmful effects of modern industrial production. HOME, like these other films, is also a call to action: it entreats viewers to become more conscientious and responsible stewards of the planet, to become what is routinely termed global citizens. And yet, the film delivers this now familiar message in remarkably unfamiliar ways.
HOME relates the story of the Earth's origins and stages of development up through man's discovery of oil and the environmental havoc that this discovery would eventually wreak. Its stunning aerial images of the Earth taken from 120 different locations in 54 different countries document this dramatic saga with a vividness that no ordinary reportage could ever achieve. The esthetic and narratological innovations in this cinematic montage distinguish it from the more traditional modes of transmitting information that we find in the films of Gore and DiCaprio.
This essay examines more explicitly how Yann Arthus-Bertrand and (screenwriter) Isabelle Delannoy's original esthetic serves a pedagogical and, ultimately, political purpose.1 In fact, I will argue that ArthusBertrand's esthetico-pedagogical technique is not as original as it might at first seem. His bewildering images of the earth's surface arouse the viewer's faculties of perception in a manner that recalls a republican pedagogical tradition emphasizing direct, sensory observation of concrete objects. This pedagogy, known as intuitive or object lesson pedagogy, was not only an elementary form of scientific inquiry. It was also a mechanism for teaching republican values rooted in Enlightenment rationalism; it gave concrete form to abstract notions of citizenry and civic duty. In other words, a pedagogy of scientific observation also promoted the spread of republican ideology...