"Act of God" is filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal's exploration of lightning strikes. "When you think about it, the lightning bolt coming out of the sky is kind of the perfect metaphor for the paradox of being singled out by randomness ... it embodies this tension between meaning and chance and meaning and randomness," says Baichwal.
by Susan Noakes, CBC News
Excerpted from CBCNews.ca
A month ago, Jennifer Baichwal secured the opening spot at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto with Act of God, her enigmatic meditation on being struck by lightning.
The project was three years in the making. After a couple of years of research, Baichwal sent her cinematographer husband, Nick de Pencier, out into the storm to get hypnotic shots of gathering thunderheads, then collected stories from all over the world about people whose lives have been changed by lightning.
Toronto-based director formed Mercury Films with de Pencier more than 10 years ago. In documentaries like Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, The True Meaning of Pictures and Manufactured Landscapes (her acclaimed work about photographer Edward Burtynsky), Baichwal has frequently focused on artists and the nature of the creative process. She has also made a series of short documentaries about Canadian artists, including Michael Ondaatje, Judith Thompson and Michael Snow. Baichwal’s other preoccupations are philosophical and spiritual, as seen in films such as The Holier It Gets, about her trek to the source of the Ganges River in India. Act of God pulls the artistic and metaphysical strands together.
The film opens with a reflection by Canadian playwright James O’Reilly, who wrote a play called Act of God, about surviving a lightning strike 28 years ago. “I can't accept that it happened for a reason, nor can I really accept that there is no reason. The only way to carry on is to be humble, and a little bit in awe of these things you can't really understand,” he says.
Another prominent voice in the documentary is American novelist Paul Auster, who witnessed a friend being killed by lightning when he was 14. Like O’Reilly, Auster waited years to write about it. Baichwal also tracked down a storm chaser in France, a group of Mexican mothers whose children were killed by lightning during a religious festival, and an African religion centred around a lightning god called Shango. The most enigmatic part of the film is an experiment that tested the brain signals of improvisational guitarist Fred Frith.
Baichwal is a multiple award winner at Hot Docs, and her international prestige has grown substantially since Manufactured Landscapes. Act of God is a little less startling, but it’s also a more personal film. Baichwal spoke to CBCNews.ca about the process of making her new documentary.
Q: What fascinated you about lightning?
A: When you think about it, the lightning bolt coming out of the sky is kind of the perfect metaphor for the paradox of being singled out by randomness. People use it that way. They say, “It was like being struck by lightning, it was a bolt out of the blue.” Because of that as a natural event, the fact that it embodies this tension between meaning and chance and meaning and randomness, that was really the spark of the idea.
Of course, James O’Reilly’s monologue about being struck by lightning, Act of God, and Paul Auster’s story were huge catalysts in the beginning, because both of them resist attributing unwarranted meaning to this event, but keep circling around it.
Q: Why are the voices of Paul Auster and James O’Reilly so prominent, compared to the other stories?
A: Auster, in a sense, is the philosophical anchor of the film and Fred Frith, the improvising musician, personally demonstrates that we are electrical beings and we live in an electrical world — the universe is electric.
We begin with O’Reilly because, as he says himself, he did not write about this experience for nearly 20 years, because he could not resist the temptation to intentionalize this random act. So that to me is the very essence of the question that we’re asking. And Auster, his whole body of work is preoccupied with coincidence and meaning and chance.
Q: You seem drawn to metaphysical subjects. You made a movie on the Ganges; you’ve studied theology. Are those your preoccupations?
A: They are preoccupations. I studied things that I was preoccupied with when I was in school. The reason I decided not to continue on [with theology] and become a teacher of those subjects is I thought that the method of inquiry was so limited. I would write a thesis and five people would read it. I thought, how could you explore these questions about the human condition that I think are in some ways fundamental to all of us? How can you explore those questions in a way that not only makes people think, but makes them feel and makes them wonder at the same time? The arena of documentary film is an arena that allows all those responses, the emotional response, the spiritual response, the visceral response, the intellectual response.
Read the full interview here.