August 4th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Picture of Light
Director: Peter Mettler
(Microcinema)
 

Most documentaries have a straightforward mission. They shoot footage of something and intend to present to you the thing’s reality. It’s a visual dissection, stripping mystery from the subject in a clinical manner. Picture of Light is a different type of film. Ostensibly about the aurora borealis, the documentary follows a film crew to Churchill, Manitoba where they attempt to film the Northern Lights. What emerges, though, is a much more enigmatic piece which explores the landscape of the north, the psyches of the people who live there and the lights themselves. Despite the fact that an astronaut is filmed in the space shuttle giving an explanation of the phenomenon, his words still do not fully concretize the footage and the lights playing across the screen appear to owe as much from Inuit folk tales as they do from science. Science’s hold over winter on the tundra seems tenuous at best and as sparks shoot through the air inside a train car the elements willfully defy any attempt at rationalization.

There is certainly breathtaking footage of the aurora contained in Picture of Light, but almost more notable are the snapshots of humanity not often seen—of people living on the edge of civilization (the edge of the world, as they put it). People who develop a symbiotic relationship with their dogteam (without one, the other will die), and people who will put a bullet through their exterior wall to watch snow seep in through the knothole and develop in drifts across the floor, simply to relieve the monotony. And then there are the scenes of the frigid snow, the endless cold, the trackless waste, impermeable and unstoppable, majestic and terrible in its own right, possessed of its own very real and unpredictable personality.

Picture of Light is a singular film, haunting and evocative, not explicit in any regard. It shows you what the landscape has to offer, then leaves you to your own conclusions. Perhaps it’s best to accept its offering without putting too much weight of explanation on it, perhaps its best to appreciate the north for what it is without trying to unravel its mysteries.

January 7th, 2009 by Chris Eng

Watch Escape to River Cottage - Episode 1 in Faith Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

 
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has been living my dream life for over a decade. Tired of city life and the London rat race (where he was a celebrity chef and professional food critic) he fled to Dorset in 1997 and moved into a small country estate named River Cottage with the intention of living (as he calls it) a downsized life, where almost everything he consumes is either grown or bred in a natural setting. Since 1999, he’s put out several River Cottage TV series, books and has founded his own restaurant and grocery store in the UK.

The first of the TV series, Escape to River Cottage, documents his initial transition to rural living and features several instances of earnest ineptitude. It’s not that Fearnley-Whittingstall is incompetent, he just doesn’t know his way around country life and is enthusiastically determined to learn much of it in front of the camera—an attitude which has documented him falling flat on his face in a few different ventures. It is, however, much the same as if you or I headed to the countryside tomorrow, set in our mind that we were going to start raising pigs—we would quite possibly be able to do it, but we’d make perfect asses of ourselves while learning the proper techniques. (As a side note, I’m pretty sure no matter how much of a n00b I was I wouldn’t enlist a couple of hippies with crystals to try and drive away my mouse infestation using telepathy. I would, however, use fresh roadkill as he did in one episode. I mean, if you’re raising your own meat but turn up your nose at a wild animal carcass simply because it was already dead, well, that belies some weird double standards.)

His capacity to fearlessly dive in and do what needs to be done makes Fearnley-Whittingstall the perfect role-model for people seeking a downsized or greenpunk life. It’s exceptionally daunting to look at the vast amounts of information you are supposed to know to live a self-sufficient life, and option paralysis while trying to determine where to begin could stop you before you start. Fearnley-Whittinstall takes the opposite tack, however, and simply jumps in with both feet. Anything I need to know, he seems to say, I can just pick up along the way.

Still, it can’t help but be noted (both through his general demeanor and ostentatious last name), that Fearnley-Whittingstall belongs to the upper class. He also had the privilege of being a celebrity chef before moving to the country, and as a result one wonders how much of a factor his affluence played on his ability to “downsize.” It’s easy to take risks and jump in with both feet when the only major potential consequence is you’ll have to spend more money. If you screw up a year’s worth of crops (which he doesn’t), all you have to do is go out and buy some groceries and wait for the next season. People in lesser situations would be forced to work around that fact or go without, rather than simply picking up whatever was needed.

But at the end of the day, his ability to not worry about risk or cost or making a fool of himself is what makes Escape to River Cottage so endearing and inspiring. He walks into nearly every situation completely enthusiastically and possibly unprepared. I don’t have any illusions that when I finally secure my own piece of property, I’m going to walk onto it like some seasoned farmhand and set about cementing my new life with an Errol Flynn-like swagger. *cough* No. It’s gonna be a lot of trial and error and making a complete ass of myself, and that’s why I’ll keep looking to Fearnley-Whittingstall for guidance on immersing myself in a new (and yet utterly old) way of life.

(The video at the top is of episode one. If you want to buy the DVDs—bearing in mind they won’t work with most North American systems—you can do so here.)