Finding beauty in destruction
Environmental film isn’t all doom and gloom
The three directors of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch are trying to describe the editing process required to bring an estimated 375 hours — 15 days! — of footage down to a 90-minute documentary.
Jennifer Baichwal likens it to a jigsaw puzzle. “Some people have the picture right there,” she says. “And some people look at it once and then hide it. This is like putting a massive puzzle together without ever seeing the picture.”
Edward Burtynsky chimes in: “And it’s got 2,000 pieces that don’t belong.”
Not to be left out, Nicholas de Pencier adds: “And half the pieces don’t actually fit!”
Editing Anthropocene — the title refers to a suggested name for the current geological era, one in which humans are the dominant force on the planet’s ecosystem — was a year-long process, after three years spent travelling to six continents to find material, including mining operations in Germany, the U.S., Italy and Norilsk, in northern Russia; a 57-kilometre rail tunnel in Switzerland; a huge seawall in China (a nation known for its wall-building prowess); and efforts to save endangered species in Kenya.
“There are more time-efficient and cost-efficient ways to work,” admits de Pencier. But the trio wanted to be open-minded in their explorations and not impose a structure on the film.
“When you go all over the world, there can be an arrogance in assuming you can convey that place,” says Baichwal.
“The ethics of the way that we engage these contacts is hugely important. It’s not an out-and-out indictment. All of us — including the three of us — are connected to all these places. The palladium from that Norilsk mine is probably in the cellphone that is sitting right here.” (This is probably a good place to mention that the production purchased carbon-offsets to make it a carbon-neutral enterprise.)
The three have worked closely in the past, most famously on Baichwal’s 2006 film Manufactured Landscapes, which de Pencier co-produced, and which looked at the large-scale photographs of Burtynsky.
For Anthropocene, they were inspired by a working group of geologists who are studying the proposed name change. But they wanted to steer clear of fashioning a negative message.
“We’re hoping (audiences) walk away with a better understanding of the term Anthropocene,” says Burtynsky. “Can we have a positive Anthropocene?”
He hopes the prevailing mood after screenings is one of enlightenment and transformation. “You’ve been there and you’ve experienced the scale and the scope of some of these incursions,” he says. You’ve also heard about conservation efforts by the Zoological Society of London and visited an experimental underground farm.
The Anthropocene epoch remains a proposal for now. Confusingly, the International Commission on Stratigraphy recently split the Holocene epoch into three ages, with the last one running from 2250 BCE to AD 1950, leaving open the possibility that the Anthropocene could be given its own start date of that year.
Baichwal doesn’t need any convincing. “It’s incredibly humbling to think we’ve only been up and running for about 10,000 years, and we now tip the planet more than all natural processes combined,” she says.