Hot Docs 2010: May 2 (Sunday)

Reviews of screenings from the 2010 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Toronto, Canada.

Gasland (Dir: Josh Fox)

A first person exposé of America's natural gas industry, following filmmaker Fox on a cross-country journey examining the environmental fallout of America's "drill, baby, drill" energy policy. The visual "hook" here is undoubtedly the series of shots of people lighting their tapwater on fire, demonstrating how badly contaminated with natural gas their water supply is. But worse than the gas is the immense list of chemicals used in the drilling process — once you pump those into underground, where do they end up?

The film is ultimately about the erosion of democracy at the hands of immense corporations. One seemingly innocuous change that the film is advocating for is for the chemicals used in the extraction process to be subject to the reporting requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act — something that the Bush/Cheney energy policy specifically exempted them from. While insisting they have nothing to hide, the companies are lobbying hard to kill the bill. And meanwhile, massive new drilling operations are slated for the formerly protected areas of New York and Pennsylvania that serve as the watershed for millions of people downstream. Passionately argued, stuffed full of facts but humane throughout.

Fox was not on hand for the screening, but a Q&A with one of his activist producers was informative — and left us north of the border with a reminder not to be smug, as not only is this same process well underway in Alberta, but apparently natural gas exploration in southern Ontario is ramping up.

La Belle Visite (Dir: Jean-François Caissy)

Quel disastre! On starting the movie, it was quickly obvious that someone had shipped the wrong film here — the insignia indicating "OFFICIAL SELECTION FESTIVAL DE CANNES 2007" was a bit of a red flag. The house lights go up, and a lengthy delay ensues while the projectionist digs around to figure out if they have the movie or not. Then, it's decided to show a DVD copy, which takes a while to set up and gets restarted a couple times when the sound is messed up. Finally, the movie is showing, and I'm well into the relaxed rhythm of the whole thing, when about half/two-thirds of the way through, it just freezes. The DVD was faulty. And that was it. We didn't get to see the whole movie.

Which is a shame — I was really enjoying it. Set in a small rural nursing home in Gaspé, overlooking an endless sea, the film was rigourously slow-paced and observational, as opposed to, say, strongly character-driven. There are no interviews here, just conversations that we overhear. It moves at the pace of its subjects, such as a lengthy tracking shot near the outset when one old fellow slowly gets out of his lift chair, and then walks down a long hallway, stopping halfway to sit and rest. The seasons change as the residents slowly go about their routine. This is not a film for anyone in a rush — some people were obviously not into it as there was a stream of walk-outs that seemed more a reaction to the style than the delays.

Director Caissy — amiable and young — was on hand after the crash for an extended Q&A, and was very informative, doing a nice despite clearly suffering through a bad day. It was the sort of screening where you wanted to go and give him a hug afterward. The 35mm print has been promised for the film's second screening — based on what I saw, highly recommended for anyone who is willing to lean back and commit to it.

How I Filmed the War (Dir: Yuval Sagiv)

An experimental deconstruction of The Battle of the Somme, a 1916 film by Geoffrey H. Malins that was one of the first deployments of moving picture equipment at the battlefront. Here, Sagiv employs intertitles quoting from Malins' autobiography as well other texts examining and criticizing his work. Which means that for the first half of the film's 75 minute runtime, the movie is 80% title cards interspersed with very brief clips from Malin's film. And then we get longer excerpts from the film, followed by further examination. Although there's something interesting here, it was presented in a way that doesn't serve the topic. While the use of the titles as opposed to narration might make some point or relate to the source film's silent origins, it serves here only to drag things out interminably. As for the notion that it's building up to, that filmic reality is constructed — that editing and the things outside the frame undermine the notion of film's "objectivity", this is hardly a surprise a century into the motion picture age, is it? Malin's story, his ego and the things he fudged over in his movie were all interesting to learn about, but were presented in an extraordinarily dull way. This one also had a steady stream of people walking out, and this time, I could certainly understand why. Not recommended.

(Also, at a technical level, I found this film highly annoying in one narrow regard — the title cards were treated with computer-generated scratches¹ and so forth to give it that "old-timey" look, but the scratches and marks in the frame just kept following a fairly short loop, meaning you would see the same marks come up in the same order over and over again. One of those tiny things that, once noticed, really take the viewer out of the movie.

The film was proceeded by a short, Even Flowers Wake Up In the Morning by Tara Khalili that matched the feature with its faux-scratchy stock, again, a short loop of the same blobs and scratches over and over again. Here, it was employed behind a non-linear assemblage of home video and backwards-running funeral footage that failed to arouse much interest.

Les dames en bleu (Dir: Claude Demers)

Michel Louvain is not a household name outside La belle Province, but his appeal and audience are easily understood. A romantic crooner celebrating his 50th anniversary in showbiz, many of Louvain's fans have now been following him for a large chunk of that time. This film gives us a portrait of five of his ardent fans as a window into his career. Certainly not a celebrity profile — although we do spend some time backstage with Louvain, we spend much more getting to know these five women and learn how his music fits into their lives.

While not groundbreaking stuff, this succeeds on the strength of the subjects. Not only is it, as out programmer noted, "like a sequel to Lonely Boy made forty years later", it's a chance to peer into the other solitude and catch a glimpse of Québec's popular culture that we seldom hear about. And, at a larger level, given that most histories of pop music are made about and for men, it's important to have documentation of something that many histories would otherwise probably sweep under the rug, namely, an immensely popular musician enjoyed primarily by women, but not "interesting" in the proper ways that "important" music is for critics. In that sense, this doc might serve as a nice Quebécois adjunct to Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock'n'Roll.

---

¹ Afterthoughts: In an effort to not muddy the information pool any more than necessary, I must correct myself here. I am reliably informed that the visual noise is in fact, hand-scratched and looped 16mm leader. I can certainly appreciate that there is an element of craft to this, for which respect is due.

I also note that in my review I failed to mention Sagiv's electro-ambient soundtrack, which was enjoyable and effective throughout. In fact, if I were at a gig with someone playing this music and this film happened to be playing on a screen behind them, I'd probably be thinking to myself, "hey, this is cool shit". It's funny how the framing of this as a "movie" changed my perspective on it that much.

I often dislike cultural artifacts that are designed to appeal to the broadest popular audience/lowest common denominator, so it stands to reason that at some abstract level I should applaud works that dare to appeal to a more select crowd, even when they're not the particular ones I dig. At that level, this is, of course, a worthy undertaking.