"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. 

                                          

2013: The year in movies

from top to bottom: Bastards, 

Frances Ha, Something in the Air

By the time you read this the events of 2013 will all be water under the bridge. A corny old expression, I guess, but an apt one to consider while looking back on the year in movies—so many of 2013’s most remarkable works concern both time (what it is, how it accumulates or vanishes, how its passage registers in the faces and places captured by filmmakers) and water (what it is, how it accumulates or vanishes, how its presence and movement make for breath-taking cinema). My shortlist was long, and I concede that some significant landmarks (Gravity, 12 Years a Slave) did not make my final ten—let’s take this abundance as cause to celebrate. (FYI, U.S. readers, Stories We Tell opened in Canada in 2012, so it won't be making an appearance.) I would heartily defend the greatness of any of the films below, but a certain inherent subjectivity ultimately rules the formation of any top ten list. These are the movies that struck me as most meaningful, thrilling, beautiful, diverting, moving, surprising, funny, strange, haunting.

Something in the Air

Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep, Sumer Hours) grew up in Paris in the 1970s, which means that his adolescence transpired in the immediate wake of May 1968 and the political upheaval that marked that watershed moment. (The film's French title is Après Mai.) This evocative, party autobiographical cinematic bildungsroman traces its protagonist’s struggle to balance the dictates of the era’s radical leftist ideologies with those of his own complicated creative ambitions. Part of Something’s specialness arises from its lack of emphasis: there is no single “a-ha” moment; rather, the film drifts through heady experiences and immerses us in the period’s sundry “scenes,” all with a heightened alertness to the air of potential transformation that circulates each passing moment when you’re young and seemingly taking the whole world in.

Inside Llewyn Davis

The Coen Brothers’ latest takes us back a decade or so before the period covered in Something in the Air. It’s the winter of 1961, and the New York folk revival is well underway. Llewyn Davis is there, plying his trade as an interpreter of traditional songs in Village basket houses when not busy trying to secure a pay cheque, a couch to sleep on or a doctor who will terminate a friend’s pregnancy. This character/milieu double-study is, like nearly every Coen picture, immaculately crafted, brutish, sad, inventive and very funny. Buoyed by sublime music and Oscar Isaac’s soulful lead performance, Inside Llewyn Davis also the most tender thing the Coens have ever made.

The End of Time

Swiss-Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler’s latest is a hypnogogic object of meditation and a spectacular thematic exploration. The End of Time takes us to the Hadron Collider particle accelerator; to Hawaii, where Jack Thompson knowingly lives within the annihilating lava path of an active volcano; to Detroit, where the ravages of time can be read in nature’s reclaiming of civilization; to India, where religious ritual promises escape from time’s enslavement; to some liminal space made of flickering visions generated by Mettler’s own image-mixing software. Film as journey: we’re transported, bedazzled, perplexed, enlightened, and safely returned, all in under two hours. 

Museum Hours

The woman is from Canada (in fact, she's singer Mary Margaret O'Hara), here to hold vigil over her cousin, who is in hospital, comatose, slowly dying. The man is here because he’s always here, at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, where he works as a guard, a tranquil sentinel holding vigil over centuries of art. The woman visits the museum and, later, the man will accompany her to the hospital—Museum Hours is the story of a friendship. Writer/director Jem Cohen lets the chance connection between these two not-young characters blossom in it’s own good time.

Before Midnight

The relationship at the heart of Before Midnight has been blossoming for 18 years—18 actual years, captured previously in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. An unprecedented collaboration between writer/director Richard Linklater and writer/actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, the Before project grants us the opportunity to track its characters (and actors) and their messy, decidedly un-movie-like lives in nine-year intervals. This latest instalment (the last?) reveals them to have become married parents, though how much longer their now-domesticated love story—founded in chance and youthful adventure, fortified by protracted longing—can be sustained is a question left unanswered. There are moments so resonant as to be painful—this is no date movie—but there is consolation, wisdom and humour in recognition.

Frances Ha

Blue is the Warmest Colour was 2013’s most memorable tale of young love, but Frances Ha, co-written by director Noah Baumbach and actress Greta Gerwig, pulled off something a little trickier: a tale of young folly. Gerwig is un-ingratiating and yet kind of irresistible as the bumbling, solipsistic titular heroine in this witty comic character study about all the things an educated, aimless 27-year-old in a big city with no money and no experience of actual struggle can do to tread water and, if she’s lucky, discover some sense of purpose in life.

The Act of Killing

Joshua Oppenheimer’s highly unorthodox documentary regards the massacres that followed the 1965 overthrow of Indonesian President Sukarno through the reminiscences of a handful of its key perpetrators, all of whom have not only gone unpunished for their crimes but are actually revered public figures. Oppenheimer sought out these men and offered to facilitate their writing, directing and acting in reenactments of their ostensible glory days. The Act of Killing surveys the process of casting and re-staging atrocities as appalling propaganda, and on the very gradual, psychologically destabilizing effect that this process has on one man in particular: Anwar Congo, who in one scene will seem a cuddly grandfather and in the next brags about how he was more sadistic than the Nazis. 

Bastards

The closest thing to a genre picture in the largely uncategorizable oeuvre of Claire Denis, Bastards tears some pages from William Faulkner’s Sanctuary to construct a nasty, eerily sensual, totally absorbing neo-noir about a naval captain who gives up his errant seaman’s life to return to Paris and plot revenge on the nefarious corporate titan he believes responsible for the death of his brother-in-law, the brutal defiling of his niece and the collapse of his family’s shoe enterprise. 

A Touch of Sin

The overlap between Bastards’ sordid story and certain real-life scandals that recently rocked France makes for a supplementary layer of extra-textuality, but the scathing social commentary in A Touch of Sin is integral to the film’s very conception. Already established as contemporary China’s most artful and aggressive cinematic indictor, Jia Zhang-ke (Platform, Still Life) has made his most accessible and overtly damning film with this interweaving of four tales of violence and desperation, each based on true stories. A Touch of Sin’s bloody, tawdry, tabloid-like allure grabs your attention, but its Jia’s piercing portraits of a society turning itself inside out to gain a toe-hold in the global economy that will keep you thinking long after.

Leviathan

This last selection could easily have been a three-way tie. The one-man survival film All is Lost surveys the weathered visage of a silent Robert Redford struggling to stay afloat in the Indian Ocean. Jennifer Baichwal and Ed Burtynsky’s globe-treading Watermark invites us to wonder and worry over the ubiquity of water and our fraught attempts to control it. But I want to single out Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan, the most flawed but also the boldest of these three watery titles. We can call it documentary—Castaing-Taylor and Paravel indeed document several Atlantic fishing boat journeys—but what really matters are Leviathan’s aesthetic, experiential aspects. Fastening tiny GoPro cameras to seemingly every object available, this was 2013’s most formally innovative, gloriously disorienting work of cinema: waves, sky, gulls, fish, men and machines fill the frames and transport us to the real world of work at sea. Visceral, arresting, gorgeous, Leviathan reminds us that the movies are far from exhausted when it comes to exploring the world as only movies can. Sail on.