Watermark

Edward Burtynsky’s and Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Watermark is a celebration of human stupidity. 

The film’s explicit theme is the interdependence of man and water. It shapes us and we shape it. As an organism we’re born in water and we can’t survive without it. It’s the essential bond not just between man and nature but between people. Burtynsky’s whole career has centered on the world we found and how we are changing it. 

But the implicit theme is our folly. In the Vegas desert Bellagio’s stages a magnificent exhibition of dancing, orchestrated fountains. With water. Brilliant that they have the imagination and technology to do that. Gob-smacking idiocy that they so wastefully do so. So too the aerial view of a private swimming pool in a backyard, that draws back to reveal a city full of separate homes with separate pools and separate marinas.

Every twelve years 35,000,000 Indians make a pilgrimage to the Ganges, where they wash away their sins by washing their clothes, bathing, and filling their plastic water bottles in the -- may we surmise ‘unclean’ ? -- river. That they survive until the next festival measures out their imperviousness to logic and to care. We cut to the Western equivalent: a massive crowd gathered on the shore for the US Open surfboard competition. So many cultures, so many gods. 

To Burtynsky’s credit he doesn’t explicitly comment on these follies. They speak for themselves. 

Of course water gives us a chance to show our worth. A community of abalone-fishers link their nets and operations to help each other. They confirm their interdependence (unlike the community with as many pools as families). But the fishermen know their plenteous preserve is only for the while before it dies. As will their community. 
     In Greenland scientists plunge down through millennia of ice to draw up analyses of historic climate readings. But having fine scientists doesn’t mean we’re not stupid enough to ignore them. As the filmmakers doubtless know, the Canadian government of Stephen Harper has been systematically throttling its scientists, both physical and social, reducing funds and freedom for their research, suppressing their findings, preventing any possibility of their science countering the government’s ideology. 

Perhaps the film’s signature shot is the massive dam. It embodies man’s ability to build something so much larger than himself, with the arrogance of presuming thereby to conquer nature. The dam shrinks the human workers to ants, but when it serves its purpose it only damages nature further. The American irrigation system accesses nine Lake Hurons of underground water but has already sapped a third of it, irreplaceably. Our greatest strength is our greatest weakness because it keeps us from respecting and serving the nature that preceded but may not survive us.

The film is framed by two sequences of water flowing. The first seems to be a tumultuous avalanche until we zoom in on a huge eruption of water, released from a dam. That will be defined as the violence done nature by our exploitation. The film ends by sailing along a curving clear river, the energy and velocity all being natural and we’re just following its lines, drawing closer until we’re finally immersed in it. But even this optimistic end, this serenity, is shadowed by the fact that on the banks it’s autumn. The colours are radiant but the season says the deep freeze is nigh.

Like Burtynsky’s epic still photographs the film’s images abound with explicit poetry. The Mexican woman’s face is as brown and carved as the parched desert around her, the old once fish-full river now dead and gone. A sickly green dead river with its dry tributaries spreading along the ground paradoxically evokes the Tree of Life. In wishful thinking a reverse action time lapse sequence shows a dried land recovering the life and waters it lost. The reversal makes the effects of time feel bearable, hiding the death in a pretense to resurrection.