An Inconvenient Truth: The Grounding for Chasing Ice

In Chasing Ice (2012), the goal is to provide a visual portrait of climate change. Director James Balog even exclaims of the images his many cameras capture, "If I hadn't seen it in the pictures, I wouldn't have believed it at all." Another quote from the film, however highlights the film's strong connection with the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Balog declares of his images, "This is the memory of the landscape. That landscape is gone. Never to be seen again in the history of civilization, and it's stored right here."

That same visual rhetoric grounded in nostalgia underpins the earlier documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.  An Inconvenient Truth argues powerfully for sustainable environmental policies by invoking both personal and universal ecological memories, as do Silent Running (1971), Omega Man (1971), and (even more closely entwined with Gore’s narrative) Soylent Green (1973). The film opens with two scenes illustrating two historical memories of the world thirty years ago. One of those memories grows out of a meandering river that flowed near Al Gore’s family farm, a river we see flowing clean and clear through a pristine green landscape. The year is 1973, and Al and wife Tipper float along in a canoe over gentle ripples of the Caney Fork River. Living nature is highlighted here by the river, the foliage that lines it and the fact that Tipper is close to giving birth to the Gores’ first child. The footage shows its age, showing us that this is a memory, not a view of the present, and that it rests on personal history.

The other more universal historical memory is highlighted by images of Planet Earth shot from outer space, beginning with the 1968 shot from Apollo Eight and the 1972 shot from Apollo Seventeen (the last Apollo mission) and continuing through a series of satellite images that show all Earth’s continents and seas. The images serve as a starting point for a poignant slide presentation that shows us the impact humans have had on the Earth during the last thirty years especially. But beginning with thirty-year-old shots of a river and photographs of Earth shot in outer space from the Apollo missions also introduces the most powerful tool behind the documentary’s success—environmental nostalgia or what we see as “eco-memory.” Gore’s personal memories not only add to his credibility by drawing empathy from his audience; they also serve as powerful environmental messages that connect tightly with the science on display in his slide show because they are framed by scenes of river near his family home.

An Inconvenient Truth’s pictures of Planet Earth shot from space provide not only a view of an eco-memory but of what some may see as the present state of our world—pristine and untouched. But the views also serve as a bridge to Gore’s discussion of our thin atmosphere and how changing its composition has contributed to global warming and its repercussions. The juxtaposition of the shots of Earth from space with shots of a polluted Earth below draws further on our nostalgia for an environmentally sound world.

Gore reinforces this message by countering photographic evidence from thirty years ago with that from today, highlighting clear changes in the global environment. A shot of Kilimanjaro from 1970 sharply contrasts with photographs taken thirty years later, for example. The amount of snow capping the mountain has obviously receded, and in a shot from 2005, the mountain is nearly clear of ice and snow. Similar photographic evidence shows Glacier National Park losing more and more of its glaciers. And images around the world tell the same story of rapidly receding ice, snow, and glaciers. These images gain force in opposition to one another. The current views of parks and mountains, even those now without snow, mean nothing unless juxtaposed against earlier shots that show the devastating changes that have occurred there, at least partially because of our contribution to global warming.

Because of these earlier shots, we look back nostalgically on this world on which our own footprint might seem lighter. And then Gore shows us further evidence that we have made the negative impression those shots of glaciers imply. Ice cylinders taken from Antarctica paint a picture of earth’s temperature over the past 650,000 years, pointing to 2005 as the hottest year in the cycles revealed there. Gore shows us some of the repercussions of this overall warming trend, focusing on heat waves and strengthening storms across the world. He reinforces his more general claims with a series of images highlighting the devastation in Hurricane Katrina’s wake, images that not only remind us of the destruction there but also of our cry to save the city of New Orleans, our nostalgia for an untouched city prior to the hurricane and levee breaks.

The same pathos is in effect when Gore notes other consequences of global warming, including an increase in pests like pine beetles that destroy trees we yearn to save. Trees serve as reminders of a natural world we seem ready to preserve, and images of a treeless Haiti beside a tree-covered Dominican Republic again broach our environmental nostalgia. The images of the impact development has on the world add weight to the wish on which the film seems to rest, a wish for a return to a world like that of 1970. In fact, Silent Running, from 1971, sends a similar message regarding saving trees, but the film ends tragically, with hope for life other than humans in the hands of a lone robot. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, ends with some effortless (and painless) ways we can change our future, without sacrificing ourselves, a point perhaps missing from Chasing Ice.

Ballast director Interview from Film Comment

Lance Hammer interview

By Rob Nelson

t

(More when my elbow is healed).

Lance Hammer’s debut feature, Ballast, involves the spiritual and economic struggles of three African Americans in the Mississippi Delta: a suicidal store owner named Lawrence (Micheal J. Smith Sr.), his late brother’s fiercely determined widow Marlee (Tarra Riggs), and her preteen son James (JimMyron Ross). Hammer, 40, spoke to Film Comment by phone from his house in L.A.

R.N.: What’s your relationship to the Mississippi Delta?
L.H.: I’m from Los Angeles, I’m white, I’m definitely an outsider in Mississippi. I fully accepted that before I started to make a film there. But I love the place. I lived there intermittently over the course of eight years, for weeks or months at a time. I would drive around and talk to people. There’s no rush in the Delta, and people took their time telling me stories. Making the movie, I wanted to capture the way time works down there. And the way the geography speaks of history—the relationship between the tenant houses and the older manors that are vestiges of a system that’s dead now, but still has long fingers. It’s the history of white brutality against black. When you visit there, it’s like landing on the moon. There’s an overwhelming sense of sorrow, of a longing for something you can never have. It’s painful, but it’s also a place of intense beauty.

Your visual fidelity to the environment is interesting in part for how it represents the polar opposite of your previous work in Hollywood as an art director. Was that shift as deliberate as it appears?
Yes. I wanted to make a film that was antithetical to the experience I had working in Hollywood. It’s a soulless content that they create [in Hollywood]; it has no social meaning. It has a lot of commercial meaning. And it means a lot culturally. What Hollywood says about us as human beings is immense. These things are fascinating. But in terms of art? It’s nothing. It’s empty.

Did you begin your tenure in Hollywood with some optimism about the potential to make art?
I guess so. What happened to me in Hollywood was a discovery process. It started when I was 19 years old and saw Wings of Desire in Tucson, Arizona. I had just ventured away from home to go to college, studying English, and I went to see every film I could. I discovered I was in love with cinema. And when I saw Wings of Desire, it was a sea change for me—the only moment like that I’ve ever had in my life. I’m very skeptical of people when they say they’ve had life-changing moments, but I had one watching this Wim Wenders thing. I think it’s a beautiful piece of poetry. I realized that [Wenders] doesn’t even know the impact it was having on me, sitting there in Tucson and being moved to tears. That’s a powerful thing. I thought, “I want to do that, too.” I didn’t know how to do it. I thought you had to be a Coppola, in one of the families. So I ended up at USC studying architecture, and out of that I moved to Warner Bros., designing architecture for a Batman film. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world—one step closer to what I wanted to do.

And you were watching films, too?
Yeah. I developed an appreciation for German and French and Asian cinema. And I became very much a cinephile—at the same time I was becoming very good at what I was doing as an architect in Hollywood, on big projects, doing these photorealistic things with computers. At first it was tremendously exciting, because they pay you a lot of money, and the people I worked with were wonderful—extremely intelligent, enthusiastic people, very kind, like a tribe. Life was great. But you can never make a deal with the devil like that and not have to pay something in return. It’s a Faustian deal. You’re devoting your life to these final products that are just shit. I started fearing for my soul. Life is very, very short. I thought, “I’m on the road to becoming a production designer on these gigantic films, and is that what I want to do with my life?” When that thought crept in, it was over and I knew it. My conscience got in the way.

Is there an article you could recommend to people like me who want to know more about you?
Not really. I’m a little shy. In the press kit [for Ballast] I’ve kept it as minimal as possible. I feel like I made a film, and hopefully the film can speak for itself and I’m unimportant in that process. It should be about watching a film. Yet I have to admit that I’m fixated on learning everything I can about every filmmaker I respect. I understand that people are curious.

Which filmmakers are you fixated on?
Well, there’s Robert Bresson, first and foremost—for his conviction and austerity, for his courage to remove everything that’s not absolutely essential. That’s always been very powerful to me. I’m really influenced by Bresson’s writings. I kept Notes to a Cinematographer in my pocket while shooting Ballast. It’s funny, some reviewer wrote that I had probably kept Notes to a Cinematographer in my back pocket on the set. And in fact I did.

The approach to the screenplay was Bressonian, too?
Somewhat, yeah. It’s such a simple, stupid screenplay, but it took two years. For me, every word is a symbol of something visual. That’s why it took so long. I was always constructing a visual film in my head and trying to commit that to the page. What I was trying to capture wasn’t really something I could put into words. It was about capturing an emotion that human beings have when they’re in a place. It was essential not to present a document—a screenplay—to the actors. I wanted them to rely on their own ways of engaging with the world, to respond to these artificial scenarios that I would present. I had to accept a certain level of artifice from the beginning—the scenario that is not true. Imagine if it were true: how would you respond? Without the benefit or curse of acting experience or a printed document, people just respond as if it were really happening to them. More accurately perhaps: they respond the way they did when they were children, who know how to role-play really well, with true emotion.

Would you say that your use of nonprofessional actors is the greatest of all influences you’ve taken from Bresson?
Bresson talks about his “models” not having the ability to act—therefore they can access something more truthful because it’s the only way they know how to present themselves. They don’t filter it. That was very important to me. So when it came to casting, I looked for people who naturally had that unfiltered quality—which took time. The auditions were basically trial-by-fire rehearsal sessions where I’d say, “Here’s a scene, let’s talk about it, and let’s do it.” The people who could just naturally do it, I knew they could do it again. Some people just can’t do it at all. By far the best parts in the film, when I look at it now, are the parts where the actors just completely owned or invented something that wasn’t in the script. When someone begins to own their own words and begins to think their own way, and has the courage and the freedom to do what they want, really good and unexpected things can happen. People like Mike Leigh and Wong Kar Wai have been doing this kind of thing for decades.

Was it important to you that the performers came from similar places as the characters did—that there would be some similarities in their backgrounds?
That was very important to me, yes. And it’s funny because when you start a project like this, people are strangers. I don’t know anything about their lives. They’re guarded; they don’t tell you the things that I really want to know about them. I want to know the conflict and the nasty shit in their lives, because that’s what makes for a complex human being. Our manifesto on the set was basically “We have to have a lot of faith in our intuition. We have to trust that intuition and be brave. We have to jump and the net will appear.” In the casting process, I decided I was going to turn off my mind, and engage energetically with people and get a sense of who they were by looking at their temperaments, at the way they moved within a space, the way they walked into a room.

You were struck by how [actor] Micheal Smith moved?
Micheal Smith came into the room, after months of my looking for a lead actor, and I could sense a genuine sorrow in him—from somewhere very deep in his spirit. He carries a deep wound somewhere; maybe it’s psychic and old, this wound. I don’t know. He’s the sweetest human being I’ve ever met. He’s a quiet man, very gentle and funny, and very complicated. To this day, Mike generally insists he doesn’t have that sorrow, that he’s not the person he seems to me. But it’s funny because as we began to know each other and as he played the role, as he became open to accessing those sorrowful parts of himself, he discovered that sorrow really is there for him in a significant way. He was surprised by that. But I had seen it in his flesh. I had seen it in the way he walks.

How about Tarra Riggs?
I was looking for a very explosive woman when I was writing—because the film is so much about the strength of this woman who has her back to the wall and who won’t give up. She’ll do whatever it takes to protect her child and not fail. And this is Tarra Riggs. The woman you see on screen in Ballast is Tara—there’s no filtering. And it’s the same with young JimMyron Ross: The boy he plays in the film is him. Everybody is completely naked.

Would you ever work with a movie star?
Yes. I’m working with a movie star right now, as a matter of fact—a really huge actor, a bankable star who I happen to respect tremendously. Both of us want to make a film in a nontraditional way—for very little money, a million and a half [dollars] tops. He and I would maintain complete ownership of the film, and we’d distribute it as well. I think there’s a chance that such a film could be modestly profitable—largely because of the actor’s bankability and because of his support of my approach to the project. The thing is, I don’t want to compromise artistically on a film, not at all. If I have to do that, I’ll quit. If the choice is between making a film where you have to compromise—on the outline of the script, on the casting, and all that other shit—and not making a film, then I won’t make a film. It’s a difficult time to tow that line because the realities of the independent film landscape right now are horrific. In the United States, these [small, independent] films simply cannot make profit.

Is there anything more you want to say about your recent break with IFC Films [which had agreed to distribute Ballast]?
The people at IFC are the greatest people, really. They wanted to release the movie in the South, but they really didn’t know how to do it. And I thought that to not show the film to African-American audiences would border on racism. IFC is certainly not racist in any way, but they didn’t think the movie was going to make any money in the South. And they’re a company that has to make money in order to survive. The only way to attack something like that is to be in a position to say, “Well, I guess I don’t have to make money.” I think it’s really important. And maybe it is possible for filmmakers to make that kind of approach work now that the box office has become so poor for small films in conventional release.

So you decided to take the film out on your own?
I decided to say, “Fuck it.” With a traditional release, through a distributor, the gross at a chain theater like Landmark, if you’re lucky, is $3,000 a week. So I’d make a third of that—$1,000—and less in a second week, if there is one. There’s overhead: regional publicity and ridiculously expensive ads, which don’t really do any good because no one reads the newspaper anymore. The movie opens and nobody comes, because nobody cares. On the other hand, there are still rep theaters, calendar houses, film societies, museums, film schools, et cetera, and their audiences are rabid for film. They come in droves to a special event because people trust the curators in those places. So I’m setting up a tour, like a band, traveling with the film for single screenings, as many as 70 over the next year. For one screening, you can get as much money as you could in an entire week in a city like Seattle. More important, I feel like I’m accessing the core audience in a way that wasn’t possible with a distributor.

Does this feel to you like it could be a model for others—maybe even the start of a movement?
Well, if the studios don’t care [about specialty films] anymore, then that’s great, because we can do what we want. Maybe we’ll die because we can’t find food. But at least we’re not gonna get our knuckles rapped. The mini-majors knocked the edges off of everything until it was boring and vanilla, lacking risk. Which is okay, I suppose—I mean, it’s their right to do that. But the problem was that it influenced every other young, independent filmmaker, consciously or otherwise, to the point where young writers and directors felt like they had to make films that would speak the “independent” language that the public would understand in order to get the films into Sundance or get distribution or whatever. Now our language is Juno and Napoleon Dynamite. But the studios have decided there’s not enough money in it. They’ve decided to pull the ripcord, and I’m happy that the whole thing is falling apart. Call me totally delusional, but every time another [distribution] company goes out of business, I get a little smile on my face. It just feels like another weight has been lifted.

Do you see the movie as hopeful, too?
I think so, yeah. When I wrote the screenplay, I was going through a long period of depression. I was very hopeless in my life. So it’s important to me that this film talks about hopelessness, futility. At the same time, in terms of my own nature, I know I’m never prepared to give up. It’s simple in a way—survival of the species, I guess. No matter what happens in your life, you can still think that in the future something might be okay—that you can make it better somehow. You don’t know the solution today, but tomorrow maybe you can figure it out. On the most simplistic level, I just wanted to communicate something about human resilience. When all is hopeless, people still find some glimmer of optimism.

Do you see this hope in activist terms?
Well, I’m a very concerned person. And certainly I was drawn to Mississippi because of the tremendous injustice that occurs there and continues to occur today. The legacy of violence and racism is directly present in the poverty and in the callous disregard for it. So yeah—I’m angry. And I’m white, so it’s weird—to be a white filmmaker and go down [south] and try to talk about that. You have to be extremely careful, because even with the best intentions, if you try to say too much about a place where you’re an outsider, you can really do damage, even when your intentions were to do as much good as you could. I had to modulate my anger and my enthusiasm to make a project that shines a light on some of this stuff. In the end, my decision was not to talk about race at all. The only thing I know as a human being is the range of universal emotions. I know about grief. I know about hopelessness. I know about intractability and the refusal to give up in the face of great adversity. These things are meaningful to every human being. So I realized that was how I had to approach the story.

The Delta speaks for itself, as you said—speaks of its history, right?
Screams of it, yeah. In a certain way, by simply turning a camera on the Delta, you’re doing all you need to do. As I learned more [about the history of region], I realized how little authority I have to speak about anything—how little I understand about an extremely complicated situation between whites and blacks in Mississippi. I was aware that I can’t even talk about it. More than being sensitive, I wanted to be authentic. I wasn’t going to be the one to bring that authenticity to the film—it would be the people I chose. And if I had cast, say, Denzel Washington or Forest Whitaker, he wouldn’t have been able to bring it either. Those actors are black, but they’re not from Mississippi. The specificity had to come from what the camera would capture on its negative and from what the actors would convey. Hopefully the viewer is watching the film with race issues in mind, seeing that the film is critical of white oppression. Hopefully it encourages you to be critical of white people who keep poverty in existence because it’s convenient. I hope that encouragement is present in the film, but I honestly don’t think I can claim any credit for it. I think the credit belongs to the actors. And to the viewer.

The Music Documentary on Martin Luther King Day

The Music Documentary on Martin Luther King Day

The influence of American culture on silent film music was wide reaching; conversely, so was the influence of silent film music on American culture. Audiences were exposed to existing classical music, some for the first time, as well as popular and newly composed works. New instruments were developed, an accepted musical practice was conceived that is still evident in today’s film music, the US Copyright laws were refined, and an entirely new genre of American music was born. These innovations made the music documentary possible.

There are as many different types of music documentaries as there are styles of music, but one of the first instances of music actually being combined with “film” in the United States took place in 1894. New York sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George H. Thomas and various performers to promote sales of their song “The Little Lost Child.” Thomas photographed people acting out the song; the photographic images were then printed on glass slides and painted in color by hand. Musicians played and sang the song live in the theater while the slides were projected on a screen by means of a magic lantern. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the “illustrated song,” the first step toward music video. Thanks to illustrated song performances, “The Little Lost Child” became a nationwide hit, spawning a huge industry. At one time, as many as 10,000 small theaters across the United States featured illustrated songs. For music publishers, it was a gold mine. Marks, a former button salesman, and Stern, a one-time necktie hawker, became Tin Pan Alley titans.

Some of the earliest American music flicks, so-called “promotional shorts,” featured the jazz stars of that time. Among the jazz world’s most flamboyant luminaries was Cab Calloway. The Hi-De-Ho Man’s signature tune “Minnie the Moocher” served as the soundtrack to Max Fleischer’s 1932 Betty Boop cartoon episode of the same name. Calloway also recorded “St. James Infirmary Blues” and “The Old Man of the Mountain,” which were likewise featured in Betty Boop animated shorts.

Through rotoscoping, an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement frame-by-frame, Calloway not only lent his singing voice to these cartoons, but his dance steps as well. He appeared in a series of Paramount “shorties” in the 1930s, where he can be seen performing a gliding backstep dance move – a precursor to Michael Jackson’s “moonwalk.” The orchestras of Calloway and Duke Ellington appeared on film more than any other group of the era.

According to Richard Brody, Shirley Clarke’s 1985 documentary, Ornette: Made in America reveals much about the seminal jazz innovator. In this amazing music documentary Clarke joins an impressionistic portrait of the musician with an informative overview of his life, work, and ideas. The documentary also poses painful questions about a mid-career artist whose restless curiosity is yoked to the glory and burden of a public persona—questions that apply as well to Clarke and her methods.

The film’s fractured, collage-like composition is anchored by Coleman’s 1984 visit to his home town of Fort Worth, where he received official tributes and performed his orchestral work with the local symphony and his own band. Dramatized reconstructions of his youth, filmed performances from the sixties onward, and discussions with him and other musicians and associates (including William Burroughs and Brion Gysin) mesh with Clarke’s diverse array of video manipulations and her flamboyant, rapid-fire editing, which break through the reportorial evidence to evoke the visions and fantasies from which Coleman’s music arises. Clarke relates Coleman’s grandly transformative multimedia projects (including one involving satellite transmissions) to her own; his troubled effort to rehabilitate a Lower East Side building highlights the free-flowing connection of art and life. Although not explicitly eco in their themes, these music "documentaries" showcase an urban environment to which musicians respond in multiple ways.

Changing Views of Nature in Rosetta, Wendy and Lucy, and The Girl

In both 20th and 21st century movies, nature and culture are bifurcated, with the urban representative of the culture binary usually constructed as dangerous, suffocating, and sometimes deadly. Nature, on the hand, is primarily represented as a haven, a pastoral escape from a deteriorating city environment where all life seems to be threatened.

In Nicholas Ray's great film noir On Dangerous Ground (1952), for example, Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) finds solace in the rural hills, away from the decaying noir urban setting he escapes. Because Wilson, a hardboiled police detective, has become embittered by his dealings with the heartless criminals of the urban underworld, he begins beating his suspects and is sent away from the city to the “country” to pursue a young girl’s killer and curb his violence. In this idyllic pastoral setting, Wilson gains self-awareness, with the help of Mary (Ida Lupino), the murderer’s blind sister, and frees himself of his own rage. Urban shots in the film maintain Wilson’s cynicism and desperation, but gradually, as his view of the world changes, rural shots brighten, suggesting that Wilson’s own blindness about himself has lifted. This perspective on the nature/culture binary, however, changes in several recent films with women at their center. In Rosetta ( Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, 1999), Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008), and The Girl (David Riker, 2012) the nature/ culture binary blurs or reverses in less explicit ways. 

Rosetta promotes a separation between nature and culture but valorizes the bourgeois lifestyle "culture" will allow over the lack of security found in what counts as "nature" in the film. The Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne) of the film's title fights to escape the hopeless "natural" life she and her mother survive in a trailer park on the other side of a forest lining a highway. The 18-year-old title heroine (a remarkable nonprofessional) lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother,  suffers from stomach cramps, and battles to find a steady job that will free her from the burdens a hard life outside of culture. In a powerful scene in her one friend's apartment, Rosetta's mantra highlights the drive for identity showcased in the film. Over and over she tells herself, "Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You found a job. I found a job. You've got a friend. I've got a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won't fall in a rut. I won't fall in a rut. Good night. Good night."

Wendy and Lucy also reverses the binary, but only for the film's protagonist Wendy (Michelle Williams). The film recalls the dangers associated with wild nature in films such as Agnes Varda's Vagabond (1985). In Vagabond,  Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) becomes so tied to the natural environment that she is nearly lost in it, buried in winter weeds on the side of a road. In Wendy and Lucy, Wendy Carroll has left a home behind to search for a job and a new life in an Alaskan cannery. When her car breaks down in an Oregon town, her dog is stolen when she ties it outside a grocery store. During the rest of the film, Wendy seeks to reunite with her dog Lucy, but when she finally finds it living happily on a farm, she leaves it behind. The pastoral environment does not offer Wendy solace in this haunting film, but it does offer Lucy a happier life than she can provide.

The Girl  comes closest to reinforcing the traditional view of nature and culture presented in films with masculine protagonists. Here, however, the binary is not between nature and culture but between two rural ecologies separated by boundaries. In The Girl Ashley (Abbie Cornish), a young rural Texan mother who loses her child to foster care, begins smuggling Mexicans across the border. After a failed smuggling attempt, Ashley is left with a Mexican mother's daughter Rosa (Maritza Santiago Hernandez). Ultimately, Ashley returns Rosa to her grandmother's rural home. In The Girl, the Mexican village is idealized despite its poverty. Ashley's rural Texas home becomes livable only because Ashley secures Rosa's future. Now she too can work to reunite with her child, the film suggests. All three of these films complicate the traditional views of nature and culture to differing degrees. Perhaps because of its female director, Wendy and Lucy provides the most complex vision of the binary, highlighting how individualized our responses to it may be.