FILM AND IDEAS

BEYOND BEAUTY AND TO THE UGLY TRUTH

Chi Po Lin's irrefutable documentary on global warming

By Nick Hou

Chi Po Lin documenting from above

Scientists have failed to persuade politicians and the public that human activity is the main reason for climate change. The temperature of Earth has skyrocketed and the situation seems to be accelerating in the 21st century. The Union of Concerned Scientists states that, “every single year since 1977 has been warmer than the 20th century average, with 16 of the 17 warmest years on record occurring since 2001, and 2016 being the warmest year in recorded history.”

We tend to ignore specialists and scientists and the damning statistics they produce. Why? There’s a simple, sad answer: we are visual creatures. A single image of a scarred landscape has greater force than all the evidence in a book. You don’t need to be a scientist to see that many local farms look like chapped skin; that lush forests are burned to the ground seasonally; that chunks of glaciers the size of San Francisco are breaking off Antarctica's most endangered glacier due to global warming. Instead of relying on numbers and statistics, Chi Po Lin’s Beyond Beauty: Taiwan from Above wisely documents the dramatic transformations in the world’s landscape by concentrating on one small part of it.

That's not a piece of modern art, but our dying planet

Chi has been called the grandmaster of aerial photography and uses its possibilities to document the extreme changes in the world’s landscape in his Beyond Beauty. It’s a convincing case for climate change as you could hope for. Before producing Beyond Beauty he had worked as a civil servant for 20 years filming highway infrastructure. Logging over 1600 helicopter flying hours and shooting three hundred thousand pictures, he claims that “you can only understand the beauty of the landscape when you look from above.” The idea of producing the film came from his shock at what he saw over those two decades of filming Taiwan from a helicopter. He saw green forests turn into so-called concrete jungles, verdant mountains that all of a sudden look like the surface of the moon. What Chi makes clear is that our island is being destroyed.

Taiwan lies on the Tropic of Cancer, and its general climate is marine tropical though it is also located in an active tectonic area. There are several peaks over 3,500 meters, making Taiwan the world’s fourth-highest standing island. National Geographic mentioned that, “Taiwan is blessed with incredible biological diversity due to its range of climatic zones and varied topography. The island, which features soaring mountains, sprawling forests and stunning coral reefs, is home to at least 56,700 species of fauna and flora, of which around 30 percent are endemic, ...contains approximately 400 species of butterfly, roughly seven times the number found in the United Kingdom.”

A breathtaking country

In the first 10 minutes of the film, I was blown away with all the breathtaking shots of Taiwan’s well-known natural beauty. The film gives us a bird’s eye view of Sun Moon Lake, which perfectly mirrors the blue sky, and Chiaming Lake, which people refer to as the Angel's teardrop. Chi catches our attention with all these stunning landscapes and I was eagerly planning future trips when he starts showing us how these places have been damaged by human greed and negligence.

Chi shows us how these landscapes have changed over a three-year period. He demonstrates how human activity has created so-called natural disasters like floods and landslides. The most devastating tragedy in the film is the Eight-Eight Flood in 2009, a “catastrophic mudflow that completely covered the northern half of Xiao Lin village. 471 people died in the incident and 18 people went missing.” However, the most staggering image in the whole film is Houjin River which runs through the capital and has turned red because of the illegal discharge of sewage. It looks like we have cut the earth open and blood is rushing out everywhere.

Because visual evidence is much more compelling than statistics, it feels like a horror movie. And it’s important that this is not happening in some third world backwater country, but in Taiwan, as first world a country as you can get. Or to put it in personal terms, this is ten blocks from my neighborhood. Beyond Beauty might be a Taiwan-Centric documentary, yet it stands for the world.

What have we wrought?

If there’s any hope for the future we need more films like this.

©Nick Hou and the CCA Arts Review