Watch and learn
When it comes to green cinema, action beats aesthetics
BY Dorothy Woodend
Photography courtesy Mongrel Media
If you’d like to watch a film about the end of life on earth, there are a lot of choices at the moment. You can literally pick which incipient disaster you’d like to see: the collapse of the environment (The 11th Hour, An Inconvenient Truth), the evils of industrialized agriculture (We Feed the World, The Future of Food), drought (Flow: For the Love of Water, About Water) and so on. There are so many environmentally themed films that this year the Vancouver International Film Festival inaugurated the Kyoto Planet Climate for Change Award to give one worthy candidate a big old cash prize. The winner, a Swedish film entitled The Planet, was typical of the genre in that it presented a series of horrors not much in dispute and then tried desperately to add a little bit of levity to the proceedings with a cartoon earth, a swirling propulsive score and beautifully shot images of global decline. It’s a good film, well-made and filled to the brim with critical information. But after watching it, even the bitterest feelings of dread that The Planet expertly provokes eventually wash away.
The problem with documentaries that present the end of the world in 90-minute increments is that while the information is necessary, even vital, watching a film can leave you with the feeling that you’ve done something, when really you’ve done nothing. The transaction is well-established: I (the audience) give my money and my attention, and you (the film) entertain or even enlighten me. But then when the houselights come up, our business is complete, and I can head out into the night, my queasy sense of unease drifting away like smoke.
Maybe it isn’t the content, but the delivery. Films, as commodities, must attract, amuse, appall, whatever—but they can’t drive their audience wailing from the theatre. Invariably, they must entertain. Even if their agenda is to convey the grimmest information possible, they must do so with music, dialogue and some type of story. Since watching films is an inherently passive act, documentaries, even when they’re trying to capture the reality of environmental catastrophe, can come across as nothing more than a fictional story, since that is how we are most often trained to see and understand movies.
There are films that blend art and information, such as Jennifer Baichwal’s Manufactured Landscapes or Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread, a film that doesn’t contain a single word, but still packs a heavy punch. But does aesthetic impact ultimately matter? It might make the difference between a film that lasts and one that doesn’t. An Inconvenient Truth, a film with all the artistry of a bulldozer, did more to catapult the issue of climate change into the public mind than a tonne of scientific research and many a lyrically composed image. Would you really want to sit through it twice, though? Can any film really start a revolution or are they, by their very nature, doomed to dissipate the moment you leave the theatre?
Not necessarily. I recently saw Oliver Hodge’s documentary Garbage Warrior, which swaps the usual talk of doom for dirty, hard work. The film profiles architect Michael Reynolds, who saw the need for sustainable, eco-friendly housing some 30 years ago. Reynolds developed the idea of the “earthship”—an entirely self-sustaining house made out of old tires and empty pop bottles. Garbage Warrior takes the end of consumer-driven Western culture as a given, and basically says even if the sky falls tomorrow, you’ll still need a roof over your head. Survival will probably be the only thing that finally matters, and growing food and building shelter are what you might need to really know about.
Out of all the environmental films I’ve seen in the past few years (and I’ve seen a lot), Garbage Warrior is one where I actually thought, “I could do that!” I might not be able to singlehandedly save the mountain gorillas or replant the Brazilian rainforests but I can pound an old tire full of sand. The time for awareness—of watching and waiting—may well be past. Now is the time for action.
