Chasing "Chasing Ice"

After the nightmare I went through on Wednesday of having lost my tickets to both "Finding North" and "Chasing Ice," I decided to attempt to see them anyway. I drove up to Salt Lake, not knowing whether I would be able to purchase scalped tickets or what. By the end of the night, I was able to see "Finding North," but unfortunately I was unable to see "Chasing Ice." Still, I was determined to see it, and I decided to chase after it. On Friday morning, I drove up to Park City to waitlist the film for the 9:00 am showing. I woke up before it was light at like 5:30, and then upon my arrival at 7:00 I was waitlisted as #6 to get in. I ended up sitting in the front row and got a crick in my neck for having to look up for so long, but at least I had finally made it. The chase was over. In case you were still wondering: yes, I'm a big fat dork.

Anyway, I know yesterday was the last day to post for our first assignment, but as for with just about everything this week, I have been running like an entire day behind, so I can only hope this still counts.

Tiara so beautifully covered the social implications of this film in her posting, as well as the structure of the film, so I am going to try to focus on the cinematography. For me, the cinematography alone was enough to warrant this film a four star rating. I had been excited all week to see the use of time lapse photography, as my brother and I have been experimenting with the medium, ourselves. So my expectations were doubly rewarded when the film turned out to be so self-reflexive, showing all of the pitfalls with the technology behind time lapse photography. The film seemed to be nearly just as concerned with the story of how it came to be made as it was with the subject of the retreating glaciers. There were two major story arcs that I could see in the film (the story of global warming and the story of how the film was made), which were given almost equal emphasis, making it difficult to tell which was the plot and which was the sub-plot at times. But of course, the story of global warming and much of mankind's seemingly intentional ignorance of its implications, was the main focus of the film. Still, the how-they-made-it elements of the film were beautifully crafted into the film's framework, almost fusing together with the story of global warming at times. This rather large sub-plot mirrored the main plot of the global warming debate and accentuated the tone of the film, which was urgency, bordering on helplessness. At one point in the film, it was sort of left up in the air whether it is already too late for us to do anything about climate change. All we can do is follow the example of this photographer, and do anything and everything we know how to do, and then simply hope that it wasn't too late.

I know that I said I was mostly going to talk about cinematography, but when you start talking about this film, it pulls you into talking about its subject matter. I guess that's what makes this such a good documentary. Like it says of documentaries in our readings, a documentary (and I'm paraphrasing, because I don't recall the Greek word that was used) inspires us to expand our knowledge. This film does exactly that. Still, I wanted to talk about the beautiful juxtaposition of the aurora borealis against the night sky as it lit up the towering blocks of ice. I wanted to talk about the majesty of the gargantuan glaciers as they were caught on film calving into the ocean. I wanted to talk about the amazing destructive power they demonstrated as they rolled around like thundering 600-foot tall whales. This film has so many amazing visuals in it that are all worth talking about, but they were used in such a way that the viewer is made to really focus on understanding and feeling the threat of global warming. Like it was said in the film, charts and numbers just don't do it for most people. But when you see the images, your jaw drops, either figuratively or literally, just as there was a 12 year old boy at one point in the film who literally drops his jaw.