The favorite tool of popular-poetic documentery
California on Fire
dir. Jeff Frost, 2018, US
genre: poetic, essay film
One gets used to seeing aesthetically pleasing cinematography in films, but there is a certain look associated with both fine art photography and commercial photography. It’s hard for me to describe it, but it is slicker, often with a higher contrast and more dynamic use of color.
California on Fire has this look. The maker, Jeff Frost, is an artist and photographer who trained as a fire fighter and filmed California wildfires for 4 years. The resulting footage is stunning, and yes, even beautiful in an awe-filling way. Frost shoots/presents much of it in time lapse. The immediate effect is of a digital-age Koyasnisqatti, a poetic documentary form heavy on time lapse and amenable to popular taste. (And, yes, Koyasnisqatti was not the first or only film to use time lapse for poetic documentary, but it popularized its use.)
But there are other resonances here, as the time-lapse has specific effects with this subject matter. On one hand, it gives a sense of fires as progression over geographic terrain, something not always fully captured in news footage. On the other hand, its jerky temporality captures the subjective sense of attack, confusion, and loss. And, too, Frost cuts back on the time lapse at the right moment in the structure, signalling a climax that’s striking for not being as frenetic or spectacular as the first two thirds of the film.
I certainly had misgivings watching and appreciating such footage on an evening when a particularly bad series of fires rages in California. But the essay film structure gives form to the footage, providing an analytical framework for the act of pure watching. In fact, it guides the spectator to reflect on what it means to look on while California burns.
Of the films I’ve seen lately, California on Fire strikes me as both arty as a documentary (no voiceover narration, mostly poetically driven image selection) yet fully accessible in its meaning to a broad audience.