Act of God, ostensibly a documentary exploring the subject of lightning, features conversations with people who’ve been struck by lightning (including Paul Auster), storm chasers, religious worshippers of a lightning god and family members who lost their children in a lightening strike, among others, as well as amateur youtube video and gorgeous time-lapse video of lightning.  The whole film is actually gorgeous, which only underscores the disappointment I felt about its narrative.  I appreciated Baichwal’s caution about assigning meaning to a phenomenon that carries wildly metaphorical and metaphysical connotations, but the film ends up being slippery (at best) and feeling half-baked (mostly).  At the end of the day, I don’t want a film to tell me what I should think or feel, but I do want it to tell me something.  And since Act of God never really develops even a philosophical approach to its subject matter, it ends up being a intense and interesting visual project, but a creative misfire of a documentary.  Still, it’s an oddly haunting film, and I keep finding myself thinking back to Baichwal’s crazyamazing shots of lightning storms and the rich way she captured her subjects.

The main reason I wanted to see Act of God was Baichwal’s previous, whallopingawesome film Manufactured Landscapes.  A documentary about Edward Burtynsky, a Canadian artist who specializes in large-scale photographs of nature as it is transformed through human industry, Manufactured Landscapes ends up being an incredibly compelling exploration of the impact of global industrialization. Burtynsky’s work and, by extension, Baichwal’s film, finds magnificence in the transformed landscapes in China while at the same time raising questions about its implications.  Baichwal maintains her distance from Burtynsky’s strong feelings on the matter, and one of the chief achievements of Manufactured Landscapes is that it doesn’t bludgeon with you morality statements.  Despite that, it’s nearly impossible not to pull out out your hair with guilt and frustration when you see a Chinese village surrounded by mountains of motherboards and “recycled” e-waste (it gets worse, but I want you to actually see the movie).  But Manufactured Landscapes is not quite an activist documentary, although its subject may sound like he’s an activist artist at times.  Instead, it’s about looking – really looking – at the way we’re changed the world.  As if to announce that intention, the film opens with a nine-minute tracking shot of a massive Chinese factory, a piece of film that ends up being temporally unsettling. (You can’t imagine that a factory could be this large.)  For long moments when you’re in that shot,  it seems without beginning or end.  This, Manufactured Landscapes seems to say, is the experience of really looking at industrialization. Now that’s showing and telling me something – and two years after I saw that film, I’m still deciding how I feel about it.

Reflecting on these films compels me to see Baichwal’s other works.  To make a film as impressively successful as Manufactured Landscapes and follow it up with such an impressive disappointment makes me look forward to her next project. It’s also satisfying to see yet another woman finding success in documentary films. Female documentarians are leveling the playing field so much faster than feature filmmakers.  It’s no surprise, really, but as a fan of documentaries, I’m most pleased at the progress.