Abstract
When I was invited to contribute to this forum by reviewing two documentaries on the Australian ‘Black Summer’ bushfires of 2019 and early 2020, my interest was piqued. Including other media formats in the review section is certainly an innovative idea, but also a tricky endeavor. And yet, it harkens back to Karl Weick (2007), a self-described ‘armchair ethnographer’, who wrote a seminal paper in 1993 on sensemaking based on data extracted from the 1992 award-winning book by Norman Maclean on the 1949 Mann Gulch disaster—a wildfire that killed 13 firefighters. This begs the question: if Weick can use a book as data for research, why shouldn’t organization scholars use documentaries accordingly?
In this review, I explore the possibility of ‘film ethnography’ by drawing on two documentaries as secondary data: Burning, directed by Oscar-winning Eva Orner, and A Fire Inside, co-directed by Justin Krook and Luke Mazzaferro. After discussing how their complementarity can contribute to stimulate research on extreme contexts, I then highlight the main components of their storyline using a Greimacian-inspired analysis. I close by suggesting to extreme contexts researchers—and organization scholars in particular—to consider or perhaps even seek out opportunities to integrate more ‘videographic’ data in their studies.
One Event, Two Stories
On the surface, the documentaries explore two complementary views of the Australian ‘Black Summer’. First, through the meticulous orchestration of voices representing different groups of actors, Burning provides an accurate view of the current circulating narratives—ecologists and activists versus firefighters and politicians—surrounding the increasingly material threat of climate change, evidenced through the recent exacerbation of bushfires. Then, A Fire Inside is a sensitive and existential view of this extreme event revealing the greatness and misery of Australian volunteer firefighters and devasted communities. How can this complementarity—between, on the one hand, political essay and awareness raising (Burning) and, on the other hand, tribute to the sacrifices of firefighters and communities (A Fire Inside)—inspire organization scholars?
At first sight, their complementarity invites organizational scholars to build explanations that will connect the macro and micro—political and existential—levels of the Australian ‘Black Summer’. When taken together, these documentaries exemplify the relationships between extreme events (see Hällgren, Rouleau, & de Rond, 2018) and grand challenges (see Ferraro, Etzion, & Gehman, 2015). This suggests to organization researchers that stronger links can be built between those two research communities, which tend to work in siloes. For example, members of these communities should work together to develop frameworks to help actors on the ground better understand the connections between the conjunctural occurrence of extreme events (e.g., fires) over time and the underpinning grand challenge (e.g., climate change). In Australia, regularly recurrent and widespread bushfires culminated in the 2019–2020 ‘Black Summer’, which had an unusual intensity and magnitude. All these extreme events have their own history, conditions, discourses, and so on. These documentaries provide evidence that rather than being individual occurrences, each bushfire was in fact part of a broader domino effect, complete with amplification effects. As Fourie, Höllerer, Dwyer, and Spee (2024) urge us in their review, it is time that we reconceptualize these extreme events as ‘creeping crises’. Instead of looking at them separately, documenting them longitudinally and processually might be of great help for practitioners and politicians.
The complementarity of these documentaries also invites scholars to pay more attention to the role and importance of knowledge in the dynamic of anticipation and resilience. For example, in both documentaries, certain characters insisted that they knew about the imminent fire threats: ‘We saw it was coming’ (Burning); ‘We knew that we could potentially go where something we have never seen’ (A Fire Inside). This highlights the importance of the expert and practical knowledge of people about fires and climate change. In a way, Burning prompts organization scholars to investigate why almost nothing is being done to change things despite the overwhelming evidence about climate change. Similarly, A Fire Inside invites us to deepen our understanding of how firefighters, in the heat of the moment, use their knowledge, skills and senses ‘when everything you have been taught does not work’ (A Fire Inside). In short, by providing reflexive and sensible data related to the importance of knowledge, these documentaries open up new spaces to approach the anticipation–resilience dynamic.
The Narrative Storyline of the ‘Black Summer’ Tragedy
Beyond serving as a source of inspiration, the two documentaries also contain narrative storylines, which can be helpful for analysing the data buried within the ‘Black Summer’ tragedy. Greimas (1987) suggests studying the way characters are cast in a story to explore the tensions that structure the plot. For purposes of illustration, I will focus the analysis on the characters showcased in Burning and the underlying tensions identified in A Fire Inside.
The cast. According to Greimas, there are six narrative functions in a story, each paired with their counterpoint. First, any story is built around a ‘hero’ who is engaged in a ‘quest’. Burning is narratively organized around three main heroic characters: A Fire Commissioner (Greg Mullins), a climate scientist (Tim Flannery), and a young activist (Daisy Jeffrey), who are all engaged in fighting against global warming and providing evidence of climate change. Second, these central characters are supported in their quest by a set of peripheral actors, the ‘helpers’, while prevented from success by some ‘opponents’. The helpers who periodically bear witness to the damage done by the bushfires are mainly middle-class white women. The cineaste’s arguments are strengthened by an avant-gardist ecological businessman and a solitary writer. Playing a marginalized role as helper is an Indigenous man who appears at the end of the movie, only after the overwhelmingly white cast has set up and supported the main narrative. Non-human entities can also serve narrative functions: desolate images of dead kangaroos, charred koalas, and trees burned to a crisp—all staged with dramatic music—advance the plot. The main opponent (the ‘villain’) in this story is Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his conservative allies, who actively deny the reality of global warming. Third, the ‘author’—cineaste Eva Orner—is the one who shapes the narrative to condemn the inaction of political actors around climate change. Streaming on Amazon Prime Video and presented at the Glasgow Cop26’s climate change conference, the target ‘audience’ is people and politicians from the West.
Overall, the way characters are cast in Burning aims to provide an answer to the following questions: What happened and who is responsible? To answer them, the cineaste organizes the plot around the gap between what was known by the heroes (factual evidence of global warming) and the consequences of doing nothing to save the planet. In this sense, Burning’s storyline appears to be structured around the narrative tension between ‘knowing something will happen’ while ‘not acting’. This narrative tension recalls Danner-Schröder and Sele’s (2024) conclusion: While we know that we should change our routines to mitigate climate change, it remains extremely difficult to do so.
The underlying tension. A Fire Inside invites us to better understand why someone becomes a volunteer firefighter and what are the internalized consequences of ‘running into the fire’ when ‘it is not a normal thing people do’ (veteran firefighter Brandon O’Connor). One of the main characters, firefighter Nathan Barden, says ‘firefighting is sexy’ when explaining why he joined the brigade. However, after the fire, he confides: ‘I did not know who I was anymore’. This suggests that the documentary is built on the tension between ‘being a firefighter is heroic’ but ‘not knowing who you are’ is distressful (see Figure 1). This tension is well expressed by the double meanings of the title A Fire Inside, insofar as ‘There is a fire inside all of us’/ ‘That’s why we do what we do’ and ‘We gone carry these things [terrifying scenes] forever.’
The tension between the meanings ascribed to being a firefighter and the internalized consequences of fighting against bushfires.
Figure 1 explores the contradictory terms of the tension that highlights the story’s narrative infrastructure. The first part of the documentary shows that firefighting is heroic because it is part of the firefighter’s identity to help save others (‘It is amazing how these people will give without thinking to their own situation’). Faced with these atrocities, their sense of duty takes precedence over their own life—the downside of doing an heroic job. For example, Nathan rescued people from their burning homes, but he was unable to save his colleague and some of his family members, who perished in a fire at the same time. As a result, he became detached from his former savior identity (meaning lost), which had been a big part of who he was, and he began experiencing feelings of guilt and depression.
Becoming a ‘Film-Ethnographer’
As with any fieldwork, watching these documentaries changes how we view the Australian ‘Black Summer’, and even who we are as individuals because this new knowledge becomes grounded ‘in affective and emotional engagement’ (Wood, 2015, p. 463); it constitutes an indirect way of ‘being there’. Far from being fictional, documentaries become the vehicle for the vision of the filmmakers and characters, who are both part of the historical world. Additionally, timing, field access and the need to be accepted by the victims constitute three critical difficulties for researchers interested in studying extreme contexts and grand challenges. In this light, documentaries can serve as useful and relevant sources of secondary data.
As a secondary data source, documentaries can have multiple usages: inspiration for developing a research strategy and theoretical propositions, making a textual analysis of verbatims, and examining the potential affective nature created through sounds and visuals. However, specific attention should be paid to how they were produced: How were the relationships between the cineaste and the characters cultivated before, during, and after filming? How was the editing process negotiated between the filmmaker, the crew, and the distributor? Which social groups were or were not represented in the documentary? What facts were reported and omitted? Other complementary documentation, such as press releases and interviews with filmmakers, might be available online. If possible, collecting primary data on the film production might also be relevant.
Documentaries as method can also prompt the film-ethnographer to involve participants in broader projects—whether political, social, or aesthetical—when gathering and analysing data. Based on a research process, the documentary research method offers to organization researchers an alternative way to interact with participants and present their work in a way that challenges our current research conventions. It can be one of many strategies to ensure that our work matters outside the academic world.
Conclusion
Watching the documentaries about the Australian bushfires urges us to recognize the potential of such data in organization research. More than ever, studying organizing in extreme contexts and grand challenges requires us to change the way we do research and adopt more critical stances. The underexploited genre of documentaries, used as data source or as method, certainly has the capacity to sustain such a point of view particularly in the way it connects personal accounts with political and historical issues, gives voice to marginalized groups, and provides expressive insights for raising the awareness of larger audiences. Better yet, they may even prove to be part—however small—of the solution for using our research to change the world.
