Subject matters

Q: Was documentary filmmaking an ambition of yours from a young age?

A: No, I actually started out as an academic at McGill [University in Montreal]. I did a master’s in philosophy and theology and I was poised to continue on and become a teacher. At one point, I took a good, long, hard look at my potential future and felt like I couldn’t be in such a rigid method of inquiry. I didn’t feel I’d be comfortable in that realm. In a way, it was philosophy that led me to film, because I wanted to explore these questions of the human condition, but in a medium that was more lateral and more emotionally accessible than an academic paper. So that’s how it started. I never went to film school; I just learned by doing. So my technical knowledge is still a little shaky. But Nick [de Pencier, Baichwal’s co-producer, cinematographer and husband] makes up for that. And he didn’t go to film school, either. He learned by doing, too, by taking cameras apart and putting them back together.

Jennifer Baichwal. (Hot Docs)

Q: What filmmakers guided or inspired you when you first started out?

A: I was always drawn to documentary. There’s something about reality that is incredibly compelling. I don’t understand the amount of effort that goes into creating a dramatic feature, re-creating reality. I feel that there are so many things that are just so interesting in the world! I’d rather focus on those. So, people like Donald Brittain. I love his films. Volcano, about [novelist] Malcolm Lowry, is one of my favourite documentaries. [Filmmaker] Chris Marker was a huge influence on me, Chantal Akerman — people who were slightly marginal, I guess, in terms of approach. I was interested in alternative approaches to journalistic style documentaries from the very beginning. Finding more creative or metaphoric ways of relating text and image in time.

Q: Your three best-known films have been about artists. Is there something about the artistic temperament or personality that makes it an especially compelling documentary subject?

A: Art is a very rich arena for examining philosophical questions, because it has the capacity to move you viscerally, emotionally and intellectually, all at the same time. It has a very different effect than going to a lecture or reading a paper. And because we try to do that in our work, I think I was drawn to those people whose work was irreducible.

[Paul] Bowles was fascinating because he rejected dominant American culture and, amongst his friends, never went back. Yet there’s something very quintessentially American about his work and, at the same time, something very other. Shelby Lee Adams takes photographs of people who are totally marginalized by dominant American culture. And Burtynsky does something in his photographs — the combination of aesthetic seduction and the horrifying realization of his subjects, the complex dialogue that that creates. That ambiguity’s at the heart of his work. That it can’t be paraphrased is what makes it so strong.

Q: You made Manufactured Landscapes with two well-known, and presumably strong-willed, image-makers in their own right — Edward Burtynsky and Peter Mettler. Was it important for you to retain a sense of personal authority?

A: Film is fundamentally collaborative. Because of the success of Manufactured Landscapes, I’ve been asked many times to do “master classes,” and I find the whole idea of a master class just terrifying. Who’s the master? I can only speak from my own experience, but I find it uncomfortable ever speaking with an authoritative voice. But I’m also not threatened by other perspectives. I have to say, from the very beginning, in Manufactured Landscapes, Burtynsky was the author rather than the subject in the traditional sense. And our work was to try to translate the power of his photographs into a time-based medium. Peter Mettler and I spent a great deal of time talking about how to do that intelligently. And we went back and forth on a lot of things. He originally said, “Let’s not show any photographs,” and I said, “Uh, I don’t think that’s going to work.” Then, in the editing process, putting everything together, it became something I did more with the editor, Roland Schlimme. It was really interesting to work with both Mettler and Burtynsky. They were friends; they went to Ryerson [Polytechnic University in Toronto] together. I didn’t know that when we first started. Peter knew Nick, which is how this began. It was a nice relationship.

Q: Manufactured Landscapes is often spoken of in “activist” terms. Do you see yourself as an activist filmmaker?

A: I think that film has the capacity to be transformational, to change consciousness. But how it does that, and what happens after that, is individual to each film. My goal in making a film is not the action that happens after consciousness is changed. But I do think changing consciousness is the first step towards action. In the case of Manufactured Landscapes, I was kind of taken aback after the first public screenings, when people said, “Well, what do we do now?” I’m like you, I’m thinking about these things, and I’m thinking about my own role in all of this. I don’t have an answer, except the answer that awareness brings change. And even small gestures are important. But if a film is simply defined as a tool for something else, then it fails. It has to have meaning in its own context as a film in order to be powerful.

Q: How do you typically go about researching and constructing a film?

A: The way that we usually work is by doing a lot of research around a subject. In the case of Shelby Lee Adams, it was everything about the South. Re-reading writers I hadn’t read in a long time — Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote. Then taking a course in the history of documentary photography. And then reading about the Farm Security Administration in particular, how documentary photography is related to the South, what happened politically to create such poverty. Trying to do all that before you shoot, to have all that underpinning what you’re doing without having a direct relationship. Then being open to the possibility that you may have to abandon your plan at any moment. It’s this funny, existential state of having enough of a plan so that what you’re doing is not arbitrary, but being ready to abandon that plan if reality or the context takes you somewhere else.

In our “lightning film,” Act of God, there is no guide. There are all these different stories that have become fairly tangential as the shooting has progressed. We’re putting electrodes on musician Fred Frith as he’s improvising, to see the electromagnetic activity in his brain. We go to Cuba to follow a thousand people at a parade celebrating the god of lightning, Chango. The question is: Will all these associations collapse under their own weight, or will they come together in their own organic way? We’re just at an assembly stage, so I don’t know the answer to that question. But it could go either way, because this is new territory: to start with a very general idea — issues of randomness and chance, what are the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning, what is electricity — and then try to turn it into a coherent film.

Q: How healthy do you think Canadian filmmaking is right now?

A: I think there have been some incredible films produced in the last couple of years. And I know that there’s going to be more really good work soon. I was on the jury at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and I saw almost every Canadian film that was produced that year. It was a very interesting cross-section of work. The thing that worries me is that we live with such a monolithic cultural neighbour. There is no question to me — and I feel this every time I go to the States — that we are not the same. I think that we have to continue to nurture what is specifically Canadian about the films we make without capitulating to a simplistic understanding of what Canadian content means. The way that that’s been framed in the past has been extremely limiting, and I think that a Canadian subject isn’t as important as a Canadian perspective. And if we’re broader about what we support, then everything gets healthier.