Studying the fierce beauty of a rapidly collapsing Earth
(out of 4) Documentary on the wide-scale damage mankind is causing to the planet. Directed by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier. Opens Friday at the Varsity and at TIFF Bell Lightbox. 87 minutes. STC
Superlatives abound in ANTHROPOCENE: The Hu
man Epoch, the third documentary collaboration by Canada’s Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier.
Most of the records cited are grim, as is the film’s title, a scientific reference to the human assault on planet Earth:
á We gape at the world’s largest excavating machines, straight out of a sci-fi nightmare, as they gobble Germany’s farmland;
á We’re taken to Africa’s largest garbage dump, a scavenger’s mecca that grows by 10,000 tonnes of trash each day, near to where 750,000 people live;
á We visit Norilsk, the mostpolluted city in Russia, where kids ride their bikes near oil and chemical plants;
á We watch as a pile of ivory tusks, seized from poachers who slaughtered 8,000 endangered elephants and rhinos, is set ablaze in Nairobi as a deterrent against future poaching, in the largest-ever bonfire of its kind. ANTHROPOCENE — a companion piece to exhibitions of the same name opening Friday at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery in Ottawa — is rife with such horrors, yet there’s a fierce beauty to the work of Baichwal, Burtynsky and de Pencier. They travel the world with an artful lens that makes human constructions seem awe-inspiring — but only from a distance.
The close-up truth is that people are rapidly depleting the Earth with ever more efficient methods of extraction and harvesting, resulting in pollution that threatens a new mass extinction potentially worse than the Ice Age.
This riveting film is narrated by Danish actress Alicia Vikander with a voice of rage and sorrow. She notes that the current Anthropocene Epoch, identified and named by scientists to describe humanity’s increasing toll upon the planet, has seen human-caused changes to the Earth and its systems exceed the combined effects of all naturally occurring processes.
A trek to the Atacama Desert in Chile illustrates the paradox of human existence, where respect for nature and abuse of occurs of it simultaneously. The Atacama is the driest desert on the planet, with a soil aridity similar to that of Mars and a sparseness of human habita- tion similar to polar regions. This makes it almost entirely free of clouds and light pollution, attracting scientists from around the globe who have built observatories so they can gaze with wonder at the universe.
Yet the Atacama is also home to some of the Earth’s most invasive mining. It’s a major source of the lithium used in smartphones and electric vehicles.
The latter are supposed to be virtuous alternatives to even more destructive vehicles that run on petroleum products.
To say that there are no easy answers to planetary woes is to state the obvious. But the film seeks to reveal rather than lecture, in the hope that our eyes will convince our brains to act before it’s too late. ANTHROPOCENE follows the earlier Baichwal/Burtynsky/de Pencier collaborations Manufactured Landscapes and Watermark. It may be their best. It leaves the unmistakable sensation that mankind is busily choreographing its own destruction.
Baichwal, Burtynsky and de Pencier will participate in post-screening Q&A sessions at TIFF Bell Lightbox tonight at 7 and Sunday at 3 p.m.