History, Fire, Cinema
To begin I briefly gesture to two films that bookend Australian screen culture’s relationship to fire. The first is The Squatter’s Daughter (1933), a successful colonial adventure melodrama in which the final revelations of the plot take place against a raging bushfire. To create greater spectacle, the production team doused nitrate film with old sump oil and diesel fuel and hid amongst the trees. The resulting fire was intense and uncontrollable but made for a fantastically authentic action spectacle. The second is Scorched (2008), a sci-fi disaster film produced for television in which bushfires encircle and threaten metropolitan Sydney. Scenes feature reconstructions of firefighters caught in vehicles on the fire front and archival footage of actual fires that took place in and around Canberra in 2003. While an unremarkable tele-movie, Scorched marks the end of the action genre treatment of fire in Australian film and television. It appears just before Black Saturday, a moment the narrative possibilities of fire as entertainment changed absolutely.
This moment also coincides with a shift in the history of fire as a planetary phenomenon. Fire scholar, Stephen Pyne, argues that we have now entered a new global age of fire that he terms a ‘Pyrocene.’ One of its attributes is the advent of megafires (Pyne 2021). Bringing fire into dialogue with aesthetics, T. J. Demos takes an international perspective on the increasing intensity of fire around the globe and the circulation of images of fire:
Despite all the pictures of devastation circulating online with each new wildfire, we face the insufficiency of the image. Frozen and flattened, images of fire present a misleading visual field of aesthetic contemplation. Framed and objectified, they offer only a privileged sort of distanced voyeurism, a reassuring domination of disaster (Demos 2019, n.p.)
Demos is writing months before the Black Summer fires in Australia. Fires in most of the locations he mentions were to worsen in the summers of 2020. He is referring to still images produced and disseminated largely as journalism but I turn my attention to the mode of storytelling constituted by documentary film, a mode that transforms fire aesthetics and offers very different aspirations. Documentaries are stand-alone public sphere interventions that can craft significant characters, narrative arcs and an enhanced emotional appeal. I evaluate how these features are synthesised with a changing fire aesthetic to offer greater understanding of the way screen culture is responding to the contemporary history of fire in the Australian national context.
Firestorm Aesthetics: The Rupture of Black Saturday
On February 7, 2009, also known as Black Saturday, an unprecedented series of firestorms swept through Victoria in southeast Australia. While in previous decades residents could reasonably take precautions to stay and protect houses and other buildings until the fire front passed, on Black Saturday the fire was so intense it incinerated everything in its wake.
With the advent of ‘pyrocumulonimbus’ storms or firestorms, new forms of fire preparedness and warning were required. Film and television storytelling, especially in nonfiction form, was an important part of the cultural response over subsequent years, including the feature length productions, Inside the Firestorm (ABC, 2010), Aftermath: Beyond Black Saturday (ABC, 2019) and Then the Wind Changed (ABC, 2011).
These documentaries all circle around the exceptional status of the Black Saturday fires. I suggest they also signal a rethinking of previous attitudes to Australia’s bushfires.
Produced for the ABC, and broadcast on the one-year anniversary of the 2009 fires, Inside the Firestorm confronts, in the most tenacious way, the aesthetic presentation of fire on screen while composing a televisual experience that prepares the viewer for a new phenomenology of fire. Inside the Firestorm recounts events as they unfold over the course of the day. It includes interviews with survivors, firefighters and fire experts as well as a narration by actor Hugo Weaving. Images include not only interviewees addressing the camera but also graphics of the fire, still images taken before the event (such as homes and photos of those who did not survive) and firsthand photographs and footage of those who experienced the fire. In combination, these features construct a narrative that gradually reveals the space and time of the evolving fire.
The focus is strongly experiential and sensory. One interviewee describes ‘a sound like trains or jets coming towards you in the distance, getting louder and louder’ and the experience of ‘being in the middle of a hurricane, but everything is on fire,’ or the noise of trees exploding in the heat. These descriptions are accompanied by, for example, footage of the skyline and ominous grey plumes and clouds as the fire approaches. The images inside the firestorm are dark, grainy and blurred tones, shades of red with dark outlines of trees and other structures or cars. In some ways, these low-quality images, combined with the many faces of witnesses that people the film, make Inside the Firestorm well suited to television. Indeed, it is an example of sensational television – it privileges an address to the senses and evokes the feeling of being in a firestorm. Favouring this temporal finitude, the film denies the possibility of longer or personal histories of survivors and also forecloses a sense of the future, what happened in the aftermath or how to live with a changed relationship with fire. This is a compelling aspect of Inside the Firestorm, especially in light of the documentaries to follow. It highlights, perhaps, the character of Black Saturday as a shock or rupture, a singular sudden event, that first and foremost required comprehension. Nevertheless, in context this documentary must be understood in wider relationship with the new age of fire.
Megafire Aesthetics: Black Summer and Confronting the Future
The summer of 2019/20 marks the next crucial moment in the contemporary history of fire. Over this bushfire season a series of fires merged to create megafires. The most severe fires peaked across Victoria and New South Wales from December 2019 to January 2020. Black Summer was met by the filmmaking community with a handful of award-winning feature length documentaries that circulated on the festival circuit in Australia and in some cases, internationally. None repeated the close attention to the development of the event in the manner of Inside the Firestorm. A number, nevertheless, offer sound and vision to the experience of the fire and as a group, they are predominantly interested in the future, whether the direct aftermath and/or confronting the new age of fire to come. The three documentaries that have circulated most significantly in Australia are Fire Front (2022), Burning (2021) and A Fire Inside (2021). Notably, several TV series were also produced in the wake of Black Saturday. The People’s Republic of Mallacoota (2022) and Wild Australia: After the Fires (2020) explore the aftermath of the fire for community and wildlife respectively. I also include Fires (2021) in this cluster although it is a fictionalised account. This is due to its strong narrative relationship to actual events. All series were funded by ABC TV.
By implicating climate warming and emphasising recovery (while sometimes indicting government and other authorities), these documentaries and series demonstrate a certain recognition that megafires and firestorms will constitute an ongoing and increasing threat. Fire is presented in ways that are in dialogue with this future.
Returning to my consideration of fire aesthetics, it is notable that some examples include minimal images of the fire, while others make significant use of photographs and footage, some of which has become iconic.
The most widely circulated images feature people sheltering on Mallacoota foreshore and in boats lit in the dark daylight by shades of red light. The Fire Inside is a rich example of post-fire filmmaking, for my purposes, because it crafts stylised fire aesthetics to focus the experience of fire around one individual in order to then connect to several linked themes. It features montage segments of fire images that are highly defined and coloured, either as slow motion or still photographs, sometimes organised as reconstructions to convey memories narrated in voiceover. Some sequences include dramatic orchestral music, adding to the highly crafted depiction of the fire and firefighters, a contrast to the grainy amateur images of Inside the Firestorm. This aesthetic takes the viewer away from the immediacy and rawness of the point of view of amateur footage and privileges a more distanced, self-conscious recounting. While Inside the Firestorm demonstrates a film modality that privileges comprehension, the maturation of fire aesthetics aspires to an exploration of broader themes and contexts related to a cultural response to and humanisation of fire in the Pyrocene. This aspiration orients narratives towards the future, whether in relation to issues of recovery, mitigation or preparation for the next fire.
Rather than encouraging a ‘reassuring domination of disaster’ as described by Demos (2019, n.p), the examples I have outlined serve to accentuate human vulnerability in the face of fire events. Some also evoke the sensory experience of unpredictable and overwhelming fire, allowing the viewer to glimpse the changed world of the Pyrocene. As the documentary response to the changed status of fire has unfolded, it has moved from aesthetics that convey immediacy and rupture to stories that emphasize living with the future of fire as a cognitively graspable reality. With the new ontology of fire cemented in the national psyche, it is increasingly important for filmmakers to engage audiences in the problem of the future, especially in order to mitigate future devastation, including for biodiversity and wildlife. Part of this project must be to also keep in play the immediacy of experience and the stakes of preparing for new fire events.
References
Demos, T.J. 2019. ‘The Agency of Fire: Burning Aesthetics,’ E-Flux Journal, March, no. 98, Accessed 15 April 2024, < https://www.e-flux.com/journal/98/256882/the-agency-of-fire-burning-aesthetics/ >
Pyne, S.J. 2021. The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, University of California Press, Los Angeles.
Belinda Smaill is Professor of film and screen studies at Monash University in Melbourne. Her work focuses on nonfiction and documentary screen culture. Her recent research explores the ethical, cultural and institutional issues that pertain to the presentation of the environment and biodiversity on screen. She is the author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010), Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (2016) and co-author of Transnational Australian Cinema: Ethics in the Asian Diasporas (2013).