The Role of Documentaries in Disaster Risk Communication

Disasters have featured in film and television since the earliest days of moving pictures, and over time various patterns and trends have emerged in how they are depicted. Against a backdrop of natural hazard disasters as entertainment and vicarious spectacle, most obvious in the cycles of disaster movies since the 1930s, the depiction of disasters and disaster risk in film and television documentary has taken several directions. Disasters as entertainment have persisted into the era of factual entertainment television, and the rise of “disaster porn” since the 1990s, so that notion of disasters as spectacle has remained. Yet documentaries have also played key roles in bringing environmentalism into wider public and political debate, such as in the television documentary about Rachel Carson’s pivotal environmental text Silent Spring in the 1960s or the phenomenal success of Al Gore’s climate change warning film An Inconvenient Truth in the 2000s. As well as the wider environmental politics surrounding disaster and climate change risk, documentaries have been utilized directly in disaster risk communication and disaster risk reduction projects, typically targeting specific vulnerable communities. Such efforts highlight questions around the uses of documentary within science communication more generally and around notions of public understanding, public action, and behavioral change. The development of strategies in disaster documentary production with these pro-social aims highlights questions of narrative forms, functions, and impacts, as well as demonstrating the importance of the sociopolitical and sociocultural contexts in which disaster risk communication efforts occur. Using documentary for disaster risk communication therefore needs to take into account the range of uses of disaster documentary in the cultural landscape, from vicarious entertainment, through rhetorical appeals (both championing and challenging environmental concerns), to instrumental efforts at enhancing disaster risk preparedness and disaster risk reduction.