ABSTRACT
The undergirding concept of this chapter is the sublime, which is first explored with recourse to Alexander von Humboldt’s nineteenth-century planetary philosophy and in relation to the panoramic medium and variations. These considerations provide the conceptual bedrock for the chapter’s contemporary focus, which explores the IMAX Earth films Blue Planet (1990) and A Beautiful Planet (2016) as panoramic visions that conflate the natural and technological sublimes into a distanced view of the planet. The last two sections look at films that visualise the Earth as ground and soil: whereas Medium Earth (2013) reinstitutes the sublime geological stirrings of the Earth’s strata, the documentary Earth (2019) turns its camera to extractive activities carving out vaults in the planet’s inner structure.
