When we think of environmental devastation, we usually recall headlines about the vanishing rainforest in Brazil or the toxic wastes of Chernobyl and other legacies of the Communist regime that ruled the former Soviet Union. While we may be outraged at such atrocities, many people take secret comfort in the fact that, after all, they take place so far away that there really isn't much we can do about them.
Bones of the Forest, a new documentary feature by Heather Frise and Velcrow Ripper (yes, Velcrow Ripper) aims at dispelling some of this complacency. The subject is how logging companies in British Columbia are denuding the forests in that west coast Canadian province. Bones combines talking head interviews with a variety of people in both the logging and environmental communities, and quirky film and video footage, which includes time-lapse photography, scratch animation and processed archival film. Straight footage of confrontations between loggers, logging officials and police and environmental activists shows how explosive the conflict can be. Images of nature, manipulated in various ways which enhance its lyric beauty, slowly give way to straight footage of clearcut areas of forest which are not much different than photographs taken by astronauts on the moon, which shows how important the conflict is.
The filmmakers both have backgrounds in documentary and experimental film and video. Frise's video documentaries include Military Girls, Elegant Touch and The Road Stops Here: The Walbran Valley, winner of the first prize at the 11th annual Environmental Film Festival of Szabajac, Hungary. Ripper's films include Leave Me Alone: Don't Ever, No Means No and the feature I'm Happy. You're Happy. We're All Happy. Happy, Happy, Happy. He has also done sound work on such films as Atom Egoyan's The Adjuster and Bruce Macdonald's Highway 61, and has created a site on the World Wide Web called Scared Sacred.
They are also committed to the environment, particularly Frise. "As long as the environment is just a concept, well, it's probably not going to be an important concern. It's like anything, when it becomes part of your own personal experience and has a direct impact on you, you care. And when you commit four years of your life to making a documentary, you have to have a passionate commitment to your subject to sustain you through the whole grueling process."
According to Frise, the variety of visual techniques the filmmakers employed was not meant to be flashy or self-consciously experimental, but were used "in order to express the stories of the old people and the feeling of the forest, and what was happening to it, on a visceral level." She felt that conventional documentary techniques would likely not capture the essence of the ancient forest as well as the visual strategies she and Ripper used: "Conventional documentary techniques often tend to objectify the natural world with empirical voice overs and somewhat standard photography which, no matter how stunning, have been seen time and time again. We wanted to try and give [the forest] a fresh approach, a fresh look."
Ripper and Frise were the main crew on Bones of the Forest. "We shot, wrote, edited, directed, sound designed -- everything," Ripper stated. Over the four years of production, all the other people who worked on the film did so for only a week or two. According to Frise, this made the interviewing process much easier: "There's a certain amount of trust when someone allows you to come to their home to be interviewed. We didn't come in with a big crew and rearrange the furniture and set up lights. We used natural lighting. We just set the camera up and didn't fuss around with a big set up... We just tried to intrude as little as possible."
Ripper and Frise brought their dog, a beagle, to the interviews, which took them about a year to conduct. "That was the key thing," Ripper said. "We took time. I think it really shows in the film, so there is an intimacy with these people and there's a comfort in the way they talk. We created a very safe space for them." The results are never less than fascinating: a former logger talks about what he feels are the evils of the industry, for instance, or a former executive of giant logging firm MacMillan Bloedel fatuously explains the company's policies on resource management (followed by images of clearcuts which make what he's saying seem even more ridiculous).
And then, there's Ripper's grandmother.
The film compares the attitudes of natives ("those that were here") to those of whites ("those that came") on the issue of the environment, situating the struggle to save the environment within the larger struggle for native rights. As a counterpoint to this, Ripper interviewed his grandmother, who spoke about white immigrants of 100 years ago, making statements to the effect that they worked the land when natives were too lazy to, so whites deserved all the prosperity they had.
"Of course, that was a big issue, to decide to put her in," Ripper stated. "[But] it was our own history staring us in the face, and putting her in was a way of owning that history directly. Really directly, in this case. Not an abstract way, this is my history, exactly my history. So, it was definite debated and a hard decision to make. And members of my family might not be happy with it. My Auntie Jean was mad at me."
In fact, some footage of Ripper's grandmother admitting that much of what she knew came from books and questioning how accurate her perceptions of past events were was shot but not used in the film. How much of an interview to use in a film is always a tough call, but Frise argued that the filmmakers treated the woman fairly: "I don't feel like it's an attack on grandma in any way and I feel like we left it with her questioning herself. I think that there is a lot of integrity in her. They [the immigrants in her family] did work hard. They came here and they had to build up their homes and survive. I hope that comes through. That there is respect for that experience."
Although the film generally favours the environmental movement, it does allow working loggers to express their fears that they will not be able to feed their families if they lose their jobs. The response of one environmentalist to their fears (basically: "You'll adjust") seems particularly inadequate.
The logging companies did not deny the filmmakers access to sites, and there was only one incident which marred the shoot. "We taped the camera up on a stump that was overlooking the blockade scene," Frise said. "The cops put up a police line so we couldn't cross it, and we knew the camera was in there. There were some people in the woods...blowing horns and running around. The cops brought their dogs in there to get them out. So, we were hoping that somehow the camera would be recording some of this, anyway. When we went back to get the camera, it was gone. Turned out the cops had taken it and one cop had just put it in his personal locker down at the station in Victoria and sent the film off to be developed." The camera was returned, but without the film, so the filmmakers will never know what they shot.
Bones of the Forest started life as a completely different film. According to Frise: "I wanted to go out to the Queen Charlotte Islands [in BC]. It was just some place I really wanted to go. And Velcrow decided that he really wanted to come, so we got a whole bunch of super-8 film stock and bought a camera and we went out there and we shot all 30 rolls of film. A lot of it was time lapsed and object animation -- stuff that would take a whole day -- a lot of really painstaking work. After we finished kayaking, we came back and left our packs in the ferry terminal overnight and came back the next morning -- we were sure they'd be fine -- and we had been ripped off. We lost everything." Everything being 30 rolls of film shot over five weeks.
Two years later, the filmmakers still believed that the subject was important enough to keep working on, so Frise and Ripper decided to try to recreate what they had shot. They wrote a script for a 20 minute experimental film with some dramatization; on the basis of the script, they were awarded about $15,000 each from the Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council (although the film is about BC, their production company is based in Toronto). As it turned out, the new footage, particularly the interviews, expanded upon their original vision, adding new angles to the subject they hadn't originally considered. At this point, they began to realize that they had a feature on their hands.
The film, whose budget eventually came in at around $250,000, was funded from a variety of sources. In addition to government grants, the filmmakers solicited funds from environmental organizations and inviduals in the environmental movement. In this way, the subject of the film determined, to some extent, who it was logical to approach for funding.
Although they didn't get money from the organizations, the filmmakers got important support in other ways. "What we ended up with was a big package with all these letters of support, which we then used for philanthropists who had environmental concerns," Ripper explained. "Now we had the backing of Greenpeace and the Green Party and Friends of Clayquat Sound. And all these different groups that they (individual philanthropists) really approve of, really enthusiastically support. So, we were able to put together a really nice package and send that out." Ripper and Frise then went through the boards of directors of environmental groups looking for people who would be interested in supporting their project. Some -- like Farley Mowat, Robert Bateman and David Suzuki -- were well known, others were not.
Frise added that you have to be realistic when approaching individuals for money for a film. "If they're not millionares," she said, "or they don't have tons of money at their disposal, just ask them for $200 or something. If you send out 500 letters asking for $200 each, it's another approach. It's more work..." but the important thing is funding the film however you can.
According to Ripper, the average individual contribution to Bones of the Forest was about $1,000. However, one person eventually contributed $50,000 over the course of the four years of the production, which stopped and started depending upon whether there was enough money to continue working. "She came through every time our back was up against the wall," Ripper claimed. "This funder would come through and get us over the hump."
"It wasn't because she cared about filmmaking," Frise added. "It was that she cared about the message and the political stands that we took."
The interviews in Bones of the Forest were shot on Hi8 video and transferred to 16mm film. This decision was made after their first interview, with philosopher Thomas Berry, as Ripper related: "It was a horrible experience because he was an old person and he rambled -- he was going on and on and we were sitting and it was just like, 'Yeah, that's really interesting...$500...$1,000...come on, wrap it up, wrap it up.' He was costing so much and we were so stressed about [it]...we didn't want to be disrespectful to this guy and we kept saying, 'Can you talk in shorter sentences?' but he talked in 10 minute sentences. And we couldn't really go, "Okay, cut." in the middle of one of his sentences." Shooting on the much less expensive video allowed the filmmakers to do four or five hour interviews without having to worry about the cost, making the interviews "really conversational and relaxed."
Although initially rebuffed by festivals such as Berlin, Bones of the Forest was eventually welcomed at The Vancouver International Film Festival (where it had its world premiere), Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival and Nyon Visions Du Reel '96 in Switzerland. "Vancouver really backed us," Ripper said, "then HotDocs '96. The programmer from Vancouver -- we were the film she talked about all the time in the press." In addition, the Swiss festival is "the best festival in the world for documentaries. It's on TeleFilm's 'A' list. It's right up there with Berlin."
The festival circuit created opportunities the filmmakers hadn't even considered. "We just went out with our Super 8 camera and our Rolex camera. We made this film, but we never really thought about pursuing a broadcaster or getting pre-sale money," Frise admitted. "Just coming to this festival (Hot Docs), everyone says, 'So, have you got a broadcaster?' And we were just kind of, 'No, we don't even have business cards.' Frise didn't think broadcasters would be interested in the film because of the political nature of its content. However, they did make a point of inviting broadcasters to Hot Docs screenings, according to Ripper. "If you can get people in with an audience, it is so much better," he stated. The screenings did generate some interest among broadcasters, not only for Bones of the Forest, but for the filmmakers' future projects.
Critical response to the film has been positive. It won the Best Feature Documentary award at the 1996 CIFC Canadian National Documentary Film Awards and an award for Best Non-conventional Production at this year's International Wildlife Film Festival. "Audience responses have been very strong," Frise claimed. "At the Philadelphia World Film Festival, our Q and A's often went on for about 45 minutes."
Ripper and Frise planned to devote a full year to promoting the film, almost full time while they worked on other projects. This included a month and a half touring with the film at festivals. "That's the kind of commitment that you have to make when you finish a feature," Ripper explained, adding: "And we will get our business cards made now."
This article first appeared in Reel Independence, Volume 4, Number 3, May/August 1996.
