"The final collaboration is between the finished film and its audience": Jennifer Baichwal and Ed Burtynsky on Watermark

Xiaolangdi Dam #1, Yellow River, 

Henan Province, China 2011. ©Edward Burtynsky

We fade-in on what I can only describe as hurtling meteors of water, deep earth-brown, white and opal, thunderous, not cascading but raging with such primal force as though giving birth to a planet. Then cut to tiles of cracked earth, the very absence of moisture, and an old woman whose face and voice seem to echo the desert floor. She speaks of a time when there was a river and fish in this place, before the government took the water away, rerouting it and leaving perpetual drought behind. This is the stuff of Chinatown, corruption, neglect, the commandeering of resources, though what I can’t get out of my head after seeing the opening scenes of Watermark is a Talking Heads song, their most popular: Water dissolving and water removing/ There is water at the bottom of the ocean/ Remove the water, carry the water…

Rice Terraces #2, Western Yunnan Province, 

China 2012. ©Edward Burtynsky

Water is this film’s fathomless subject. It’s more than a lazy metaphor to call the experience of seeing and hearing Watermark immersive. Co-directed by prolific filmmaker Jennifer Bacihwal and renown photographer Edward Burtynsky—whose work was the subject of Baichwal’s widely lauded Manufactured Landscapes—the film picks you up and sweeps you away, to 1,700-year-old Yunnan rice paddies; to kids performing cartwheels on Huntington Beach; to 30-million pilgrims bathing their sins away in the Ganges; to the Ogallala Aquifer and its land art for the viewing pleasure of gods and pilots; to the to a Bangladeshi tannery’s toxic runoff, which leads to a river where women bathe; to a subterranean industrial vampire city in China; to a boat stranded in the middle of a vast desert. The cinematography, courtesy of Baichwal’s producer, husband and regular shooter Nick de Pencier, alternates between stunning and exquisitely lulling—I could happily drift off to dreamland every night watching and listening to Watermark’s final river-run. But the film is also brimming with urgent stories of what’s happening to the water we depend on for survival.

Kumbh Mela #1, Haridwar, India, 2010. 

©Edward Burtynsky

There’s an interesting tension between the medium Burtynsky typically works in versus that of Baichwal.  Still photography renders water almost as sculpture, a surfaced thing, something frozen in time. Whereas in movies water becomes a force of emotion, drama, movement. (I think immediately of Wild River, or, from last year, Leviathan, The Deep or All is Lost.) Burtynsky, whose 30-year career has surveyed the myriad ways mankind has manipulated the earth and its resources, was already well into his Water book project when he and Baichwal decided to make this film together, which offers fascinating contrasts between still and moving images. Theirs is a collaboration founded on looking at the same subject through complimentary yet distinct lenses. I spoke with Baichwal and Burtynsky in September, on the morning following Watermark’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film has since received a number of honours, including placement in Canada's Top Ten. Just last night, Baichwal and Burtynsky were given the award for Best Canadian Film by the Toronto Film Critics Association at their surprisingly rockin' annual gala. 

Baichwal and Burtynsky

JB: In Manufactured Landscapes Ed was, in a sense, the film’s subject or its inspiration, whereas Watermark credits you two equally as co-directors. How did you two divide the workload?

Jennifer Baichwal: Ed had a head start—he was working on Water for two years before we got together. Once we were making a film we continued to location scout as a team. And once we found our locations we agreed that things had to be rooted. That meant finding people. So on some days Ed might be sorting out that one big money-shot of the dam while Nick and I would follow the workers home for lunch. I felt we needed those daily life details to root the aerial shots or we would have floated away. Sometimes we all worked on the broader pictures together and sometimes we didn’t. It was very organic in that respect. Then in the editing room it became a very day-to-day collaboration between [editor] Roland [Schlimme] and I. Then Ed and Nick would come in for screenings of the various assemblies and we would discuss. In a nutshell, Ed did a lot of the heavy lifting at the beginning and I did it at the end.

JB: I read the piece in The Globe & Mail this morning and it struck me as funny, how it would describe certain moments in Watermark as obviously bearing the Burtynsky signature, while for me those exact same moments feel entirely in keeping with your work, Jennifer. All of which, I suppose, functions as a testament to the harmony of your collaboration.

JBa: I suspect one of the reasons why we came together in the first place is because we have similar perspectives.

Edward Burtynsky: And neither of us has oversized egos. There was no need to enforce a calm discussion as to how we were going to work. It came easily.

JB: I spend time in Mexico City, where water is a valuable commodity and only rich or stupid people can think of it as something that doesn’t need to be rationed. But there’s something about being surrounded by water that makes it hard for many ostensibly ecologically conscious Canadians to reconcile themselves to the fact that it may very soon be scarce. Something I love about the opening of Watermark is the way it offers you these incredible images of deluge and follows them with images of drought. That contrast plants a useful seed in the viewers’ minds, I think.

JBa: From the very beginning we talked about illumination through juxtaposition. On one level those two places depicted in the opening have nothing to do with each other, but on another they’re directly related because it’s all about control of water. The Colorado River Delta is the result of control. These kinds of juxtapositions became our version of narrative.

Colorado River Delta #2, 

Near San Felipe, Baja, Mexico 2011. ©Edward Burtynsky

EB: Abundance versus scarcity, East versus West, pristine versus tainted—meaning can be coaxed out of contrast. In one place water is contaminated and placed in a sewage ditch. In another we have Oscar Dennis talk about how water is integrated into a First Nations view of the cycle of life. And it’s not that we’re wagging a finger at those working in the Bangladeshi leather tannery—they’re making those shoes for us. We’ve just managed to export most of our nastiest industries to the developing world.

JB: When writing about Watermark I find myself avoiding the word documentary. Not because it doesn’t fulfill the requirements of the form in many regards, but because certain viewers equate documentary with activist or didactic films. I keep bumping up against this insistence that everything be clearly spelled out, as though viewers play no critical role.

JBa: We keep bumping up against that too. To be sure, in Watermark there are hard facts that are interesting and pertinent, things you need to know to contextualize what you’re looking at. For example, Owens Lake is the largest source of dust pollution in the U.S. I didn’t know that when we were filming there. That information gives you an important tool—it doesn’t, however, tell you what to think. I don’t know how often I’ve had to make the argument that the documentary form doesn’t need to be defined by journalistic criteria. It’s a question about truth. Just watch the news. I mean, who in their right mind thinks that everything on the news is true?

EB: I think our work falls somewhere on the spectrum between what, say, Al Gore or, in a more exaggerated way, Michael Moore do, which is to barrage you with damning facts, and something like Samsara, which is entirely non-verbal filmmaking in which the visuals carry the freight. I like the idea of a film functioning like a showing of my work, where the viewer has to complete the meaning. The more you bring to furthering your understanding of what’s in the picture, the more you bring to the picture itself. Last night we had dinner with various people who had attended the premiere and I was enjoying listening to the comments. Everyone seems to have a different idea as to what the film is about. Really, the final collaboration is between the finished film and its audience. 

                                          

Let there be lightning: Jennifer Baichwal discusses Act of God

The cloud looks lonely and monstrous, cradling some dying sun inside it. Though it’s only the first of many such ominous masses of droplets to loom throughout the film it’s the one that lingers in my mind. It seems to hold an unusually potent charge of destruction and wonder, but it rests there in the sky, suspended static, all threat. Act of God by contrast could be described as all question, an essay on chance and meaning that uses stories of being struck by lightning as a platform for meditation, without concern for hard results.

Paul Auster

Featured among the film’s subjects is novelist Paul Auster, modern literature’s custodian of chance, and musician Fred Frith, for whom improvisation forms the bedrock of his practice. Act of God ends not with a summation of theoretical points but rather a sort of duet between these two, with Auster describing an incident from his childhood where the kid next to him was fatally struck. The interplay between narration, guitar and percussion is buoyed by the filmmakers’ reining in of atmosphere, their evocation of the electrical brooding that precedes a great storm.

Fred Frith

There’s also James O’Reilly, whose monologue about death by lightning inspired the film. There’s Dannion Brinkley, the Las Vegas Lazarus whose near-death experience spurred a career as caregiver and New Age guru. There’s Alex Hermant, who remains off-camera while his lightning museum in Marcenat, France is on curious display. There are trips to Cuba and Mexico, where reverence for lightning assumes religious properties. There’s also a trip to a lab where we get to peek inside the electrical currents flowing through Frith’s brain while he develops one of his spontaneous creations.

Jennifer Baichwal

Jennifer Baichwal’s previous films Let It Come Down, The True Meaning of Pictures and Manufactured Landscapes profiled author Paul Bowles and photographers Shelby Lee Adams and Edward Burtinsky respectively. In each case the subject served less as material for straight biography than as a launch pad for a discussion of larger themes extrapolated from their lives and work. Act of God breaks from Baichwal’s established model by using a chorus rather than a single subject to address its theme. The result—sculpted in part by Baichwal’s husband and cinematographer Nick de Pencier, not to mention editor Roland Schlimme—works quite well more often than not, and the coda is exquisite. I spoke with Baichwal during the film’s premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto last spring. Appropriately, her responses to my questions rarely leaned toward conclusions.

JB: Act of God proceeds along these two distinct parallel thematic trajectories. It addresses a phenomenon that directly effects only a very small number of people, yet at it also invokes ontological questions that effect everyone. Which aspect sparked the film?

JBa: My background is in philosophy and theology, so I think about these sorts of questions a lot. How much meaning can you ascribe to events before becoming deterministic? How little meaning can you ascribe before becoming nihilistic? I read James O’Reilly’s monologue Act of God, about being struck as a young man and this existential crisis that happened as a result. His description of the moment of the strike and his immediate response to it were so interesting. On one level there’s this physical event, something that can be explained by weather and science and probability, et cetera. On another it’s the perfect metaphor for this struggle between meaning and chance. So what sparked the film was really both things simultaneously. I mentioned to Michael Ondaatje that I was thinking of doing this and he suggested I talk to Paul Auster. As well, Nick has always been fascinated by lightning.

JB: Funny that someone whose medium is photography would be so fascinated by something so difficult to photograph.

JBa: Almost impossible. It’s so fleeting. But Nick taught himself to be an electrician when he was young and knows a thing or two about electricity. We wanted to shoot our own images of lightning. If you look at the existing archive, most of it’s very unsatisfying. It’s generally only about the event itself. It gives no contextual information whatsoever.

JB: Your films thus far has been to some extent profiles of artists. I wonder if Act of God somehow also emerged from a desire to understand generative acts or creativity, accidents that bring flashes of insight or inspiration.

JBa: It’s no accident, I guess, that two people in the film are writers, and one’s a musician. I always turn to art when examining questions of the human condition. Even though Auster and O’Reilly resist ascribing meaning to what happens to them they can’t help but frame it in narrative, which you could argue is another way of doing just that. If the film’s thesis is that narrative is the most basic way we can create meaning, then the parallel of that was Frith’s improvisation, which struck me almost as an existential state of being between meaning and randomness. The fact that he embodies an electrical current somehow; to be able to see what that internal electrical storm in his brain looks like; to hear Frith’s brother explain how the brain learns by being confronted by the unexpected; to hear Auster describe his essay ‘Why Write?’ as an ars poetica but without theory, just stories—these are the essential things the film tries to address.

Plugging into Fred Frith's brain

JB: By creating these narratives we’re also attempting to free ourselves of the burden of these experiences on our consciousness.

JBa: It’s true. Why does that process allow us to be free of these experiences? Is it just because it stands in for making sense where sense can’t really be made? We tell stories about these things and it’s a way or ordering, of creating coherence.

JB: Did you ever consider a more didactic approach? Bringing in some sort of authority on meteorology, say?

JBa: I did wonder at one point if we might bring in someone to talk more about the science. The funny thing is that whenever you see TV shows about lightning, for example, the emphasis is always on demystifying it, where I really kind of wanted to do exactly the opposite. I wanted it to remain a mysterious force that precipitates all of these questions. I’m never really interested in making things didactic because I feel like if these questions we’re asking were very easy to answer then the subject wouldn’t be a very interesting thing to spend five years of your life working on. I don’t think it would be interesting for a viewer to spend 80 or 90 minutes on. Making a film like this is about opening up a space to think about something that’s not easily dismissible.

JB: There’s a significant gamble making a film like this because while it is a sort of essay film you’re entirely dependent on the quality of material you get from your subjects. How do you get them to align their statements reasonably closely to the thread of your film?

JBa: Finding the right stories is part of the process. When we went to France, for example, we didn’t know that Alex Hermant was going to say that he didn’t want to be on camera. We went a long way to interview him—the guy wasn’t in Paris, he was in the mountains. We went there with the kids and my mother, who was there to take care of them. So when Hermant laid this on us, Nick and I just looked at each other and thought, Well, this must be the essential thing about this person. This is the key to him. Let’s use it. Your relationship with our subjects is the most important element in any documentary. Unless there’s some exchange of vulnerability, some sense of authenticity, it’s not going to work. Finding a place where you can communicate can sometimes take days. Sometimes it can happen immediately. With Paul Bowles it took 30 hours to reach that place. With James O’Reilly, just the act of taking him back to this place where he hadn’t been for 30 years, watching him walking around trying to find the site for two days, watching him perform this spontaneous recreation, it seemed to find us all together in that place we needed to be. Because we didn’t set up that recreation. I could never set that up. I just don’t do that. I feel like I can always tell the directed act in a documentary. The person walking away thoughtfully, or whatever. You can always tell when it’s something they’ve been told to do.

JB: That’s something that Herzog seems to have mastered though, the created/spontaneous act. Of course he also made numerous fictional films before he was able to do that. But I was thinking that you do have one very Herzogian character in your film, this Dannion Brinkley. Were you ever concerned about the authenticity of his testimony?

JBa: There’s something completely bizarre and coincidental about him living in Las Vegas, the city of odds. When I asked him why he lived there he said it was the most spiritual place on earth. [Laughs] I don’t quite agree with that. But I absolutely believe that Dannion’s transformation is real. I’m sure there’ll be people who feel what he’s saying is untrue. But in some ways it’s not important whether you believe him or not. I wanted his story to be told the way he wanted to tell it.

Baichwal and Nick de Pencier at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival

JB: Given that Act of God is so much about the search for meaning, I wonder if you feel like your own beliefs have made their way into the film, even if only through some unconscious process.

JBa: It’s impossible for me not to be in every frame in some way. It’s not like these stories are somehow being directly transmitted and there’s no author behind it all. There’s no question that we—Nick, our editor Roland, myself—had an enormous impact on how those stories were told. Yet despite the fact that I would disagree strenuously that objectivity is ever possible in documentary, I do think truth is possible. We tried to shape things to retain as much fidelity to how people tell their own stories as possible with the tools at our disposal. It’s the way the whole is framed that’s very much informed by my own personal questions about these things. And also my lack of an answer. I don’t mind living in that uncertain place.