During the years that director Jennifer Baichwal and her husband/creative partner Nick de Pencier spent researching their latest film, the duo developed an enviable repertoire of lightning-related conversational fodder.
There’s the story of the two young women found dead on a bench in a London park, the victims of a lightning strike that fatally travelled through the underwires of their brassieres. There’s the fact that the country with the highest incidence of strikes is Rwanda. And then there’s this valuable advice to anyone worried about lightning hitting the ground nearby: if you keep your heels close together, the electricity will pass in and out through your feet and not travel through the rest of your body.
You never know when that sort of information will come in handy. Then again, Act of God — which opens the Hot Docs festival April 30 before beginning its Toronto theatrical run on May 1 — is hardly an educational film on surviving encounters with bolts from above. As de Pencier admits in an interview with the filmmakers in a Sutton Place suite last week, “Anyone expecting a very traditional, Discovery Channel–type treatment of this subject will walk away scratching their heads.”
More open-minded viewers will enjoy having their synapses stimulated by the team’s thematically adventurous and visually ravishing follow-up to Manufactured Landscapes. A meditative portrait of photographer Edward Burtynsky that became one of the decade’s most successful Canadian documentaries, that 2006 film was a compelling showcase for the often unconventional strategies of Baichwal and de Pencier, who had previously delved into complex matters of art and life with Let It Come Down, a biodoc on writer Paul Bowles, and The True Meaning of Pictures, about Appalachian photographer Shelby Lee Adams.
Directed by Baichwal with de Pencier serving as cinematographer and co-producer, Act of God is their strangest work to date. The stories of people whose lives have been affected and often radically altered by encounters with lightning become a springboard for a wide-ranging rumination on our electrical universe, the vagaries of fate and what Paul Auster calls “the mechanics of reality.” The film includes contributions from writers including Auster (whose ideas about destiny were influenced by an electrically charged incident in his youth), as well as subjects in Cuba, Mexico and France. We also see and hear guitarist Fred Frith as he participates in a neuroscientific experiment to demonstrate the electrical storms that go on within our skulls. (Dave Bidini, Martin Tielli and Selina Martin provide the score for the rest of the film.)
Random in its creation yet dramatic in its effect, lightning challenges our modes of interpreting the world. It’s easy to understand why many interview subjects in Act of God perceive their experiences as exactly that: a manifestation of divine will. “Lightning really does bring up the tension in the relationship between meaning and chance that we all spend some time thinking about,” says Baichwal, who did a M.A. in philosophy and theology at McGill before becoming a filmmaker. “It’s the quintessential example of how that relationship comes to be.”
De Pencier notes that lightning forces questions about faith to the fore. While Act of God is not meant to be “a religious film,” he says it’s impossible to discount the significance that lightning has in every culture and creed. “Even for the atheists or the agnostics in the film, it fundamentally becomes a religious question — this does touch on the divine. And I think the fact that lightning comes from the sky just makes the metaphor richer.”
Likewise, the subject proved to be an especially rich one. But the challenge of creating something coherent out of Act of God’s many strands and themes was plenty daunting. “All of our films have had a much more structured template to work with,” says Baichwal. “Here there was an idea, and a pretty vague one at that! How do you make a movie about something as ephemeral as lightning? And how do you make one about the metaphysics of it rather than the physical aspects?”
The result only took shape after many months of editing. Says Baichwal, “We found the stories that resonated the most were the ones that delved into these questions in a really honest way, though all in different ways. That’s how we ended up with the seven stories in the film, after sifting through many more.”
The quest for sufficiently stunning lightning footage was similarly arduous. As is increasingly the case for documentary films, YouTube was the source of a few highlights. “That’s stuff you can only get that way,” says de Pencier. “People happen to be filming during a lightning storm and then it happens right in front of them. There’s also some archival footage, which was mostly disappointing because it tends to be so generic. The rest we shot ourselves at great pains.”
Explains Baichwal: “We carried the camera around with us for two years.” They ended up shooting much of the film’s most spectacular imagery during summer storms at Lake of the Woods and Georgian Bay.
As all of Act of God’s on-camera subjects learned one way or another, lightning behaves by its own rules. Or as Baichwal put it with a detectable note of fatigue, “You can’t order a storm to happen.”