ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how director Louie Psihoyos and company's campaign for filming in the cove, which operation is reflexively featured in the film itself, makes visible the capacity of documentary film not only to sense and to represent but actually to remap and remake the natural environment. The Cove builds its pro-cetacean argument on the basis of protagonist Ric O'Barry's critique of anthropomorphism, the attribution of human characteristics to non-human animals. The challenge was to present the full sensory environment of the slaughter as, in Psihoyos's words, a 'three dimensional experience of what's going on in that lagoon'. Barry and the Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) refute the avowed educational value of captivity-based programmes that supposedly teach children and adults to love dolphins and other sea creatures. Fauna and Flora and Bottlenose are not endangered. But the film also demonstrates Taiji's centrality and linkages to the seaquarium industry's dissipated accountability', to adopt Anil Narine's significant concept.
