How do you make a piece of art out of something most people think is about as interesting as watching paint dry? The movie “Chasing Ice,” is about watching nature work, in this case watching ice melt at time scales the human mind is not programmed to experience nor understand. Therefore, most of us do not think very hard about this subject.
James Balog, “Chasing Ice’s” organizer, auteur and subject, is not your average film star. To begin with, he is not movie-quality handsome. He does not actually act and his leading lady (and wife) has only a bit part in his movie, although a telling one. But Balog has passion for his subject: the warming of the world, which will change life as we know it, and which, by the way, is melting ice sheets and glaciers right now virtually everywhere they currently exist.
At the outset of the film, we learn that this National Geographic photographer and PhD science program dropout began his career by photographing animals, rainforests and other subjects that outdoor and nature oriented magazines love to publish. Balog’s photographic niche is that he combines novel portraits of natural beauty with technically assisted perspectives that are usually presented from dizzying heights and depths where ordinary mortals would not dream of going.
Balog was on assignment for National Geographic in 2006 to photograph Iceland’s rapidly retreating Sondheim Glacier when his editor suggested that the story, techniques and photographic results were good enough not just for a cover story, but for a much larger project. And that changed Balog’s life.
He bade his wife and two young daughters goodbye for long periods of time while he conceived, designed, built and deployed 15 solar powered time-lapse cameras in Iceland, Greenland, Alaska and Montana for a project he called Extreme Ice Survey (EIS, pronounced “ice”). At this point, if you were a hard-bitten movie critic, you could be excused for wondering whether this project was going to be too cute by half.
Although most of us understand that time lapse photography is somewhere between a still life portrait and a special effects movie, the story of “Chasing Ice” acquires additional figurative depth when our hero recruits a couple of earnest, unprepared young assistants to help him deploy 15 cameras with this technology in remote places featuring the most extreme temperature, wind and weather conditions at the edge of ice flows, moving glaciers and mountain cliffs. Balog expects these cameras, once bolted in place, to operate on solar powered batteries connected to a newly designed computer chip that programs shutters to open and close regularly over six month periods of deployment. When, returning after the first year, arduously climbing the icy slopes with his assistants to check his last camera, he finds his 15th white screen, it begins to sink in: he has raised a small ton of money from likely and unlikely suspects, and has not been able to capture a single frame. Nada, zilch, 15 goose eggs.
Our hero bows his head and begins to sob. Cut to his wife who remains ardently sympathetic, which you might expect; everyone who has ever met him gets that this is a driven man—pursued by what demons you can only imagine . Then cut to his 15-year old daughter, who is really worried about her father and could be excused for silently questioning his sanity, much as she might love him. Of course, she wants him to succeed, but perhaps more because she needs to pretend her family will return to normal life rather than caring about the project itself.
I am not going to tell you the rest of the story. That is the point. You must see this movie’s creative solution to the problem of how to portray paint drying both to understand what Balog has achieved and to appreciate how profoundly we continue to misunderstand the world around us. Otherwise we would all be a driven as crazy as Balog, who has been to the future where no one else has gone and returned to tell us about it.
But it is worth considering why the story works—at least for me. It is the story, stupid, I remind myself. The story does not turn on the details of the science of climate change, which not even Nobel prize winners have been able to convince us is really going to affect us, at least in our lifetimes. The story is not underpinned by politics, which makes you realize how profoundly misconstrued Al Gore’s descent into the midst of climate change debate was when he premiered “An Inconvenient Truth” seven years ago, which produced a furious counter-reaction among political opponents and climate deniers, stopping the debate in its tracks for more than half a decade. And finally, the story is not presented as a standard Hollywood trope, as in “The Day After Tomorrow,” which hokily visualized a giant tsunami engulfing Manhattan and became a laughingstock among critics. Although “The Day After Tomorrow” grossed $186 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and $680 million worldwide including DVD sales, its action drama story line entertained us without asking any of us to seriously consider what kind of world we are making or leaving for our children.
No, Balog and his team have combined the simple art of documentary story telling and grafted on to its serious story line a set of emotionally engaging characters: a family, whose protagonist might not be like you and me—but his daughters could be your children and your spouse could be as steadfast and loyal as his. And his assistants: 20-something kids with no apparent skills other than their wide-eyed credulity and sense that something is afoot with a talented monomaniac—who sincerely insist with their voices cracking that they are not going to descend another centimeter down that ice crevasse where an enormously powerful waterfall is cascading underneath them to shoot another frame—your gut registers their unaffected fear. And then you begin to believe and admire their mentor because they are all as right and real as rain—the hard rain, that is, that’s gonna fall, I am afraid. I am afraid.
You need to see this movie and make a promise to yourself that you will do something—anything!—in the New Year to make a difference in the debate over what kind of world we are creating for our children.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute based in Rockland, Maine.