Sense and Sensibility
——Comparison of "My Teacher Octopus" and "Blue Planet 2"
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"You are a part of this place, not a visitor." This is the sentence that impressed me the most. Different from David Attenborough's high-standard documentary filmed with three-minute editing in two years, this documentary took one and a half hours in total and only took more than 100 days to shoot. Unlike other documentaries, this one is more of a biography and more of a true miracle. Here, the so-called waste mirror does not exist at all, you have seen the entire life of an octopus, and you have developed feelings for it.
At the beginning of the story, the protagonist reveals his relationship with the ocean: he grows by the sea, the ocean is a part of his life, and the seaweed forest is his spiritual home. It's a very microscopic, personal, and very emotional story. Compare the beginning of Blue Planet 2: Blue Ocean and Blue Sky:
It is obviously another kind of macroscopic, scientifically objective, and unsentimental narration. Emotional colors can more resonate in people's hearts. Usually in documentaries, humans only appear as narrators,
But in "My Octopus Teacher", the protagonist did become friends with the octopus.
We can see that octopuses are curious about cameras and trust humans. The protagonist gets nervous when attacked by the nightgown shark, and grieves when the octopus dies. When Miss Octopus abandons the school of fish and sticks to him like a kitten, we realize: Ah, octopuses have feelings too. We have a sense of awe for natural oils.
Such an octopus was also photographed in "Blue Planet: Blue Sea and Blue Sky". But her role is only a few minutes. We also saw her arm herself with shells, and put her tentacles into the jaws of the nightgown shark to fight her natural enemies. Naturally, the shooting standard of "Blue Planet" is much higher than the former, and the audience can be convinced by the exquisite pictures. However, it represents the type of traditional documentary: focusing on close-quarters or eye-popping shots, accompanied by objective and scientific explanations, reflecting the beauty of nature. But watching too many good-looking pictures can also cause aesthetic fatigue. If you read a lot of pictures, you will find that the poles, Africa, Costa Rica sea turtles, the Great Barrier Reef, the Red Sea, and New Guinea are the places where the pictures are taken. Audiences will boo: Okay, we know the turtles are going to be eaten, so what? So, this new type of documentary has won our favor. Story comes first, and documentaries with technology second seem to resonate more with us.
We realize that animals don't always struggle with big, exciting events like predation or reproduction. They also have more complex lives and emotions. Animals are not only intelligent, but also emotional. The documentaries we usually watch are just group dramas, and they have never focused on a single individual. Blindly grandeur can easily cause aesthetic fatigue. And individual creatures have more fresh details.
In a way, this also reflects Leopold's ethic of nature. Nature does not exist for commodities, nor does it exist entirely for scientific research. It already exists. Humans have completely reversed the order. Man is just a part of nature, and the connection between man and nature cannot be severed no matter how hard they try. As the leader of all things with self-awareness, human beings must deliberately maintain the disrupted ecological balance. This is exactly what all documentaries strive to convey to townspeople living far from nature. In the age of consumerism, we are sitting on a long conveyor belt. Habitat destruction, environmental pollution and over-hunting are on the far end of the conveyor belt, and we receive cheap food and live a "high-quality" convenience without seeing the other end of the conveyor belt. We have empathy, but we cannot see reality. The lies of consumerism have stretched the conveyor belt longer and longer. We are in vain and powerless. It seems that the only way is to join various organizations, but this is a temporary solution. In this world where capital decides everything, feelings seem to be getting weaker and weaker. As long as there is a conflict of interest, the environment will become the second choice. How much do we still love nature?
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