Under the Dome and the Power of Credibility

Under the Dome and the Power of Credibility

As in An Inconvenient Truth, Chai ends her documentary with a view of Earth from space to universalize her argument.  For Chai, we must protect the rivers, skies, and land for all children, enjoying the clean nature of individual and collective memory. But to restore these memories, all of us must act, Chai declares. As Mufson asserts, Chai’s conclusion “does something few Chinese ever do publicly: She calls for action, urging her fellow citizens to ‘stand up,’ report violations of environmental laws and demand change.” Although Senses of Cinema critic Dan Edwards asserts Under the Dome responds to Chinese documentary traditions that include “address from a Chinese citizen (the filmmaker) to a wider public of fellow citizens (the audience)” and  “an overtly expository approach,” Chai’s call to action gains strength because of its roots in nostalgia. 

What makes this call reach such a large audience so quickly, however, is its medium and distribution model, a model that also may be inherently more “green.” Instead of taking a more traditional route to the production, distribution, and viewing options for her documentary, Chai used her own money, “more than 1 million RMB ($159,000…) to fund the film,” according to Celia Hatton’s BBC China Blog, and posted the film online rather than distributing through DVDs or in theatres. These choices increase both the ethos and green footprint of the documentary. 

Chai Jing’s expertise remains unquestioned in reviews and critical responses to Under the Dome.BBC News reporter Celia Hatton praises Chai as a “renowned investigative journalist.” History professor Dwight W. Morrow also notes Chai’s success as “a former investigative reporter at CCTV, China’s national television network.” It is because of the respect Chai has earned as a reporter that she “manage[s] to film so much raw truth. Everyone seems, if not eager, at least willing to answer her questions. In some cases her Western counterparts wouldn’t have managed to get through the door or past the ‘no comment’” asserts Diana S. Powers. And even though critic Dan Edwards suggests Chai draws on Chinese documentary’s focus on the filmmaker as ordinary citizen, he too states Chai “requires no introduction, since she is one of China’s best known and most trusted investigative journalists, and was a constant presence on local television screens until her pregnancy in 2013.” 

The conclusion of Edwards’ review also highlights some of the ways Under the Dome moves filmmaking towards a greener future. Although he ties Chai’s film production and distribution to Chinese documentary tradition, Edwards emphasizes the rhetorical power Chai’s work gains by “bypassing of traditional broadcasting and film exhibition by rapidly disseminating her work on the Internet to generate online public commentary and debate.” In Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge (2009) and Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters (2014), we highlight how the turn to digital has helped move the film industry toward “green.” As we note in the conclusion of Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters, 

Computer-generated video production and exhibition … ends the chemical links of producing film prints, eliminates the need to create and deliver thousands of prints for exhibition, and obviates the need to destroy the prints after their theatrical runs. This transformation also means millions of dollars will be saved on every major release, while also substantially reducing the carbon footprint that creating, delivering, and exhibiting films has caused since their invention in the late nineteenth century. (187)

The changeover to digital eliminates production of celluloid, chemical processing, and the physical delivery of thousands of film prints per major feature release, according to ecocritics and film scholars Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, authors of Greening the Media(71-75). But theatre exhibition still remains a huge contributor to energy consumption and CO2 emission levels in the U.S. and around the world. Because it was almost exclusively experienced online, Chai’s Under the Dome eliminates the environmental problems associated with maintaining theatres for film viewing.