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Recipes for Disaster

by John Webster
Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2008
DVD, 63 mins., color
Closed Captioned
Sale: $390
Distributor's website: http://icarusfilms.com/new2008/reci.html.

The Axe in the Attic

by Ed Pincus and Lucia Small
The Cinema Guild, NY, NY, 2007
DVD, 110 mins., color
Sale: $95
Distributor's website: http://www.theaxeintheattic.com.

Umbrella

by Du Haibin
Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2007
DVD, 93 mins., color
Sale: $440
Distributor's website: http://icarusfilms.com/new2008/reci.html .

Reviewed by Enzo Ferrara
Ecoistituto del Piemonte "Pasquale Cavaliere" Torino, Italy

ferrara.ien.it@katamail.com

Although their respective attention concentrates on supposedly separated issues - like the human impact factor, environmental catastrophes, and rising consumerism industry in developing countries - the questions raised by this set of documentaries are strictly intertwined. The viewpoint can move from Denmark to Southern USA or China, but the focus remains onto the same arguments: the mainstream directions of economics and the responsibility of governments and people for their behaviour, collectively as a society and individually as citizens in daily life. The environmental endangerment related with greenhouse gases and climate change remains on the background, while the perspective remains on the social impacts at various levels of the global economic system.

Recipes for Disaster is a Finnish documentary that tackles the question of the exceeding anthropogenic amounts of CO 2 continuously sent in the atmosphere. Usually, people blame the corporations and industries for what is going wrong with the planet - remarks the author - but what about the global mistakes that we daily pursue in a collective commitment to wrong attitudes? "We are addicted to oil - explains John Webster filming himself - and it's going to lead us to destruction".

The film develops along six sections whose major concern is for denial attitudes ( It's not my problem, Psychological denial, Rationalising bad behaviour, Persistence in error, Hang on what you have, and Innocently happy ). "It is like rowing the branch on which you sit and still be happy - the author explains - While the warning lights of environment and economics are flashing, we and our governments respond by committing ourselves to even more consuming".

Webster and his family decided to experiment a one-year period of oil detox, living without any fossil-fuel derived tool, like cars or airplanes, and avoiding everything packaged in plastics like take-away food, make-up, shampoo, toothpaste, toys etc. "An oil celibacy" - they comment deciding to record the transformation of their habits and evaluate the results in terms of reduced CO 2 emissions.

The film confronts us with the depth of the current oil addiction revealing acute withdrawal symptoms. We know that extra-consuming is not doing us any improvement, rather it's going to destroy everything we hold dear, but we can't stop. It appears as if we just can't break free. These are the recipes for disaster - Webster concludes - the seemingly innocent daily failures of common people, which step by step lead to destruction.

And destruction can happen. The Axe in the Attic presents a 60-day road trip from New England to Texas in the aftermath of Katrina, the hurricane that stroke New Orleans in 2005. The charge was among the hardest ever for the USA in terms of human lives (at least 1,836 casualties) and economics damages (81,2 billions dollars). The film illustrates also the catastrophic failure of protection agencies against flood. Doubts are raised about the true will of the government to protect the poorest citizens of New Orleans. The title itself refers to the wise self-consistent attitude of keeping a hatchet in the attic to smash the ceiling and reach, in case of flood, a safer position onto the roof.

The two filmmakers, Lucia Smal and Ed Pincus, captured along the way stories from people displaced by the disaster. They simply pointed the camera and filmed scenes of wreckage, confusion, and also hysteria. As the journey approaches the hurricane zone, the mood darkens. A surreal atmosphere of calm prevails as days are spent managing endless government and insurance paperwork. The evacuees witness loss, dignity, perseverance, but also humour, although they feel themselves like exiles in their own country. Above all, they seek meaning in what has been happening to them since Katrina. Thus, the breakdown of trust between the government and its citizens dramatically emerges, along with the evidence of scarce social resiliency of modern America. The influence of race and class to the destiny of the evacuees is questioned, as well as the ethics of documentary filmmaking itself.

The last work, Umbrella , shows the nowadays results of the program of economic reforms initiated in China in 1978, aimed to finance the modernization of the nation. Farming is still the basis for the Chinese to live, but now those sweeping transformations have become plainly visible in a country increasingly divided between the rural and urban regions. Those farmers traditionally engaged in cultivate land continuously migrate towards the cities where the global economy seems to flourish before spreading in the whole world, like the low-price ubiquitous Chinese umbrella.

Using a purely observational style, with no narration or commentary - one can just observe labour routine or watch written sentences, maxims, and exhortations - Umbrella is divided into five parts each one corresponding to a social group. The first scene shows the workaday life of young employees in a factory in the Guangdong Province (Umbrella Factory) a monotonous, endlessly and rapidly repeated routine for which they are paid a meager piece rate. In another part of China, the Yiwu - Zhejiang province, a successful farmer has become an entrepreneur, running an umbrella manufacturing business at a massive shopping mall (Wholesale Market) where the same umbrellas are sold at much higher prices by wholesale merchants, who are among the modern Chinese most effective social climbers.

The film then shifts to Shanghai and follows students and graduates struggling to find employment in a hyper-competitive market (Higher Education) or undergoing ideological regimentation at a garrison of the People's Liberation Army (The Army). Once again, the recruits come from farms in the countryside, looking for another life. The final scene documents the population in a village of the Henan province mostly consisting of the old and infirm, as young generations seek their fortunes elsewhere. Those elder farmers struggle specifically to recover a premature harvest of drought-impacted wheat, and in general to survive amidst the combined forces of globalization and the new Chinese economy (Farmers).

Taken together, these documentaries offer a comprehensive historical and societal portrait of our times - a rather depressing one, unfortunately. Although dissimilar, all capture another view of the hardly sustainable trends of the modernity. We can clearly feel the fickleness and superficial prosperity of several situations along with the rising economic tide, but what emerges as a major obstacle to invert the tendency is the difficulty to be engaged in a real change of perspectives. "Even in a sinking boat - we are told by John Webster - passengers wait for the very last choice before leaving". It is the same for social behaviours and economics: people tend to favour the conventional conduct, no matter if in the long period it is the loosing choice. Everywhere in the world, whatever the situation, people can overcome almost any trouble, but first they must overcome themselves and their societal separations.