Green and an Animal Rights Aesthetic

The March 25, 2012 issue of The New York Times “International” section offers a bleak picture of the plight of forestland in Paraguay. In recent years, the article explains, ten percent (at least 1.2 million acres) of the Chaco forest has been cleared by farmers and ranchers, many of them foreigners. This forest, dubbed “green hell” because of its high temperatures, “covers an expanse about the size of Poland,” the article states, and still houses bands of hunter-gatherers, jaguars, maned wolves, and biting insects that would make the land uninhabitable for modern humans if not for the bulldozers brought by Brazilian and Mennonite ranchers. As Jose Luis Cassaccia, a prosecutor and former environmental minister explains, “If we continue with this insanity, nearly all of Chaco’s forests could be destroyed within 30 years.”

This destruction of forests highlighted in this recent article is made transparent in two films by Patrick Rouxel: ALMA (2011) and Green (2012). Together, these films serve as powerful critique of this deforestation, not only because of its immediate consequences but also because of the long-term repercussions associated with the ranching, dairy farming, feedlots, and soy and palm cultivation for which these forests are destroyed.

 In Green (2012), Patrick Rouxel takes the same direct cinema approach as he did in ALMA (2011), but here the powerful images of forest destruction are juxtaposed with emotion-packed scenes of a dying orangutan mother saved from a decimated jungle. Unlike ALMA, the film is framed not by the sounds of a pristine jungle before its destruction but by images of this orangutan in a truck bed, bagged and jostling past lines of palm trees. Because the orangutan is constructed as a sentient sympathetic being from the film’s opening forward, the jungle destruction gains an added weight missing from ALMA. The species-specific animal rights focus of Green adds an ingredient missing from Rouxel’s earlier documentary that may encourage audiences to act, just as The Cove enticed audiences to fight for dolphin rights because it too drew on the emotional power of an animal rights argument.

The shot of the orangutan mother in a truck bed that opens the film is immediately juxtaposed with the same orangutan lying helplessly on a bed with only an IV to sustain it. The first scenes of a pristine forest are constructed as memories the orangutan ponders, since we see the room around its bed from her point of view: a lizard behind a clock drifts into shots of the forest before its destruction. Fog covers a forest and stream where animals call and drink. Various species share the stream: monkeys, deer, lizards, and birds. But the orangutan and her infant serve as the centerpiece of this jungle scene.

A scene of the orangutan mother nursing her child is broken by the repeated shot of her dying figure on the bed. As the dying orangutan sleeps, we see what seem like her dreams of playful tree swinging and views of beauty in a mountain jungle before the peace is broken by chainsaws. The noise is paired with the in-scene sound of a weed-eater against which the orangutan covers her ears. Chainsaws and falling trees shower the ground with leaves and bark, just as the weed-eater showers grass.

Music accompanies machinery hauling out the tree trunks and flattening the ground. A synthesizer again emphasizes the massive numbers of logs loaded onto trucks and the dire consequences for wildlife caused by this destruction. In town, monkeys are caged while more trees are removed and piled on massive barges. Indigenous workers spray lumber, creating hardwood strips for flooring, producing towers of lost hardwood. Music amplifies the montage of wood furniture, flooring, stairs, and planters constructed from this wood. Even the orangutan’s bed on which she dozes, barely alive, is built from lumber of his forest, just as the Goofy Gopher’s tree is constructed from furniture in Lumberjerks (1955).

In another memory portrait connected with the orangutan, she and her infant chew on bark in search of insect. The chewing sound is connected with the current images of the orangutan who eats only a few bites of the fruit offered to her. The infant now seems to be caged in a menagerie beside a busy city street. Other animals in small cages are exhibited for sale, just as the orangutan seems to examine a picture of jungle animals. The orangutan’s calls are juxtaposed with the cries of elephants captured from the destroyed jungle, as well. 

A pan of the landscape reveals only scrub remains for birds and monkeys. Soon that too will be gone as machines flatten the ground. The roar of machines cutting out all the forest, leaving nothing behind connects with the rumble of trucks carrying loads of tree limbs to the sawmill where flags of various countries, including the US, wave over smoking stacks. This is the ASIA Pulp and Paper Company, which makes magazines, books, and newspapers, all revealed in a montage which includes a shot of a bookstore display of Thinkers of the Jungle, a book about orangutans. Even a worker watching the dying orangutan reads magazines.

The eco-disaster surrounding the dying orangutan is emphasized with portraits of caged animals with empty eyes. Fires remove all living things on the pampas constructed from the jungle to plant palms for palm oil. Workers harvest the palm while an orangutan searches for food between rows of scrub. The orangutan crosses the road while chirping and falls into a ditch where workers capture and tie her up, stretching her between arms and legs, an image that reinforces the nearly lifeless state of the orangutan now lying on her deathbed.

The process of growing and harvesting palm contrasts with the pristine jungle of the orang mother’s memories. Palms grow taller, and nuts are harvested and trucked to plants for processing. The plant provides cooking oil for Indonesia, as well as other foods, lotion, and make-up. This montage drifts into perhaps the last memory of the orangutan’s connection with her child. On the one tree remaining in a nearly barren field, the orangutan holds her child until the dead branches crack and the orangutan crashes to the ground.

A truck’s painted message declares that they are refining the future with biodiesel from the palm nuts, but that future is connected with the dying orangutan now placed in the truck bed, taking us full circle. The lizard still hides behind the clock, and the orangutan is still lying in its bed alive only because of its IV. But now we hear the sound of a drum that replicates a heartbeat coming to an abrupt stop. This silence is broken by sounds of insects and soaring birds calling to one another, a final memory of a lost forest and its creatures.

The room is empty now, and the orangutan is bagged in plastic and removed in a wheelbarrow. What looks like an eagle overhead is revealed to be a kite flying over a vacant lot, which is also desolate and empty of life.  As with ALMA, music disrupts this otherwise powerful visual message of Green. In spite of its ending titles against deforestation in Indonesia, Green stands out as an effective eco-argument. By combining a primarily direct cinema approach with an animal rights message, Green may motivate real change. Robin and Joe