‘Gore is the world’: embodying environmental risk in An Inconvenient Truth

Abstract

The challenge of constructing documentary films about environmental risk in order to ‘change political understanding and promote action’ (Corner 2016) is well recognized. Cinematic attempts to shock the public into action through images of future environmental catastrophe have been criticized for their counterproductive effect. This article looks closely at the most high-profile and commercially successful environmental risk documentary of all time, An Inconvenient Truth (Dir. Davis Guggenheim, 2006). Often dismissed as little more than a recording of former VicePresident Al Gore delivering a slide-show (Aaltonen 2014), closer inspection reveals a work that skilfully interweaves Gore’s slide presentation with a narrative strand of personal recollection that creates a reflexive ‘risk biography’ (Beck 1992). Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawn from risk research, documentary scholarship and ideas of film performance, the article demonstrates how the film constructs Gore as a model of the risk-aware citizen exercising self-efficacy in the face of climate change. More subtly, the film employs a range of careful compositional and editing choices to shape and frame Gore’s performance. The climatic becomes climactic in large part through the ways in which Gore embodies risk through his performance, with his voice, movements, gestures, and other non-verbal cues combining with cinematic formal and narrative technique to convey the sense that he is, in effect, the vulnerable world incarnate.