So says global photographer-cum-activist James Balog, who has spent the past five-plus years of his career documenting – and subsequently lecturing about – the clear and present danger presented by global warming on our planet.
Back in 2007, Balog embarked upon a multi-year mission known as the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS). The goal: To document the day-to-day impact climate change is having by setting up real-time camera posts in high-risk areas spread across the glacial regions of Iceland, Greenland, Alaska, Switzerland, and beyond.
Chasing Ice chronicles Balog’s journey from brash rebel to weary traveler, incorporating oodles of scientific data along the way, almost all of which supports the need for change. The film is beautifully shot, wrought with panoramic views of the great northwest in all its majesty. On top of which, Chasing Ice delves almost metaphorically into the personal price Balog has paid for his vigilance – sacrificing his own body and spirit in order to ensure the work is completed and preserved.
In a cinematic sense, it’s important to keep in mind that Chasing Ice is slowly leading up to something … something very big, in fact. Something so substantial that it may cause even the most fervent of skeptics to step back and consider the need for action on a global scale.
For, as Balog very bluntly points out toward the end of the film, “You can’t divorce civilization from nature. We totally depend on it.” It’s a timely message, to be sure. One that deserves to be both seen and heard. Thanks to James Balog and his Extreme Ice Survey team, moviegoers now have an opportunity to do both.
(Chasing Ice arrives via limited release in Toronto and New York this Friday, with a staggered rollout for most major cities to follow. For a full list of theaters and dates, click here.)
“Nothing came easy for him. Nothing deterred him – not the many editors and publishers who rejected his books and stories; not the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago, which rejected not one but two of the theses he wrote for his M.A. degree (awarding it to him only after he was famous); not the Guggenheim Foundation, which rejected his first application for a fellowship; not the doubting relatives and friends from home like his Uncle Alex, who said he couldn’t read The Sirens of Titan, after Kurt had dedicated the book to him, or his Aunt Ella Stewart, who would not stock his books in the bookstore she owned in Louisville, Kentucky, because she found them degenerate; not his Cape Cod neighbors who didn’t read his books and expressed no interest in what he did for a living; not the school boards that banned his books (and in one case burned them in a furnace) without ever reading them; not the academic critics who spurned and dismissed him; not the backbiting reviewers who tried to drag him down after he became famous; not the bureaucrats he battled for the rights of writers throughout the world; not the right-wing Christian religious groups that condemned this man who described Jesus Christ as ‘the greatest and most humane of human beings.’ Anyone who imagines a writer’s life has ever been easy – even one who eventually achieves fame and fortune – will be disabused of that fantasy after reading [Kurt’s] letters. And they will be inspired.”
“In many films there is a great confusion – especially in my particular genre of work – there’s a great confusion between the words ‘mystery’ and ‘suspense’. And the two things are absolutely miles apart. Mystery is an intellectual process, like in a whodunit. But suspense is essentially an emotional process. Therefore, you can only get the suspense element going by giving the audience information. I daresay you have many a film that have mysterious goings-on. You don’t know what’s going on … why the man’s doing this or why that. And you’re about a third of the way through the film before you realize what it’s all about. And to me that’s completely wasted footage because there’s no emotion to it. It’s like a whodunit. And I’ve only made one whodunit, many many years ago. Because in the course of it, before you arrive at that five-second revelation, there’s no emotion for an audience. If you’re reading a book [like that], you’re terribly tempted to turn to the last page all the time. But that’s merely an emotion of curiosity. So mystery has no particular appeal to me, merely because it is a fact of mystifying the audience.”
It was just past four in the afternoon when Eli decided to wander back and move a load of wash into the dryer. The communal laundry room had been strategicallly placed behind Eli’s parents’ house so that seasonal tenants in the rear cottage could have access. As Eli wound the bend, he noticed a strange man in denim jeans leaning up against the cottage. This man stood 5’9 with dust-brown hair and drooping jowls. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt over denim jeans.
Eli looked up at a glass jalousie jutting out above the stranger’s head. Then he looked back down again, establishing direct eye contact with the stranger as a means of discouraging sudden movement. Eli crouched down slowly. He placed his laundry basket on the ground. He stood back up, placing both hands shoulder-wide in mock surrender.
“You mind if I ask what it is that you’re doing?” Eli said.
The stranger put an index finger to his lips. Shhhh. He dropped that finger to his waist, where he burrowed it inside a pocket. Seconds later, the stranger pulled a jet-black ski mask from his jeans. He wrung that mask out like a soiled rag.
“I’m coverin’ up,” the stranger said. He motioned with his hand toward the cottage door.
Eli noticed several bursts of steam rising slowly from a shower vent. That vent was clearly missing two of its main slats.
Eli swung down low to grab the laundry basket. He held it firm to shield his chest. He angled step by step toward the stranger, minimizing any exit points along the way. The stranger stutterstepped before leaping up and over a chain-link fence that ran along the edge of the property. Touching down inside a neighbor’s yard, the stranger leveled out and broke full-stride. He went pounding across a checkered maze of lawnchairs and linens, until he disappeared around the back side of a house.
***
Billy Lee was one of five tenants who had been living in the rear cottage that summer. The other four were all females – Billy’s older sister and a few of her close friends. There was only one tenant at home during the incident, a short brunette named Vicki who had just stepped out of the shower when a pair of police officers arrived at the front door. The officers conducted a routine inspection of the premises, which revealed an additional glass slat had gone missing from the cottage door. That particular slat – or louver, as it is more formally called – ran roughly parallel to the door knob … a knob which Vicki noted she had found suspiciously unlocked, despite having locked it when she had returned an hour before.
The officers informed Vicki that the perp’s M.O. was consistent with a series of similar incidents that had occurred in the vicinity that summer. Two of those incidents had escalated into sexual assaults. This was unfortunate, albeit not so surprising. Cape May County had recently reported a 14% spike in violent crime, with local clearance rates lagging 9% behind where they had stood a year prior. Aggravated assaults were up 16%; sexual assaults were up 11%. Robbery was up to the extent that – by year’s end – there would be more than a million dollars worth of stolen merchandise still left unaccounted for throughout the area. On top of which, a series of highly-publicized incidents had suddenly thrust the City of Wildwood into the limelight.
Back in December of ’92, a suspicious offseason fire swept across Midway Pier, resulting in an estimated $2.5 million worth of damages – a devastating blow, leading skeptics to wonder how a blaze of that magnitude could have erupted during the stone-dead hush of winter. A few months later, a small contingent of L.A. Bloods traveled east to Wildwood, where they carried out a premeditated hit on an unarmed father of three outside a birthday party on West Schellenger Avenue. One of those assailants – a juvenile – was arrested almost immediately, with two more being apprehended outside the Atlantic City Bus Terminal a few days later, and a fourth being extradited from Los Angeles in the weeks that followed.
But the real shocker came on July 20th of 1993, when a team of special agents raided the Sea Wolf Hotel in North Wildwood, seeking to execute an arrest warrant for Matarawy Mohammad Said Saleh, one of 11 federal suspects later convicted in a conspiracy to simultaneously bomb not only the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, but also the United Nations and the Federal Building in New York City. When the FBI confronted Mr. Saleh, he momentarily seized an 11-year old boy and attempted to flee on foot. Saleh was subsequently tackled from behind, and the boy was separated from Saleh unharmed.
***
Throughout the first two weeks in August, the rear cottage on East 10th Street remained on lockdown – bolts fastened, curtains drawn. There was nary a spot of natural light to be found, and even less in the way of laid-back conversation. Nevertheless, Billy and I rushed back there every evening after work, where we’d remain on patrol straight until the break of day. Eventually, the fear passed, and life went back to normal down on 10th Street. Meanwhile, Billy and I had grown so fond of spending nights drinking around his kitchen table that we just went right on doing so.
One night in late August, Billy’s sister and her roommates were all drinking in the living room, waiting for a fourth roommate named Garden to finish getting ready, so they could head out to the bars. Garden was in her bedroom now, fresh out of the shower in a towel. Just before Garden went to get dressed, she noticed something odd in the reflection of her mirror. The bedroom window was ajar, allowing central air to escape into the night. Both of Garden’s bedroom curtains had been pushed aside, as well. Garden put her curler down. She wandered fast onto the window. She forced the wooden panel shut, grabbed the curtains with both hands. Then she froze and squinted hard into the darkness. A silhouette stood staring back behind the glass.
“The common story is one plus one equals two. We get it. But all the real, genuine stories are really about one and one equaling three. That’s what I’m interested in. We live in a rational world where we’re absolutely certain that one and one equals two, and it does. But the things that matter most to us – some people call it love, some people call it god, some people call it reason – are that other thing, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And that’s the three. Great stories are everywhere. There are millions of them. Abraham Lincoln wins the civil war, and then he decides he’s got enough time to go to the theater. That’s a good story. When Thomas Jefferson said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,’ he owned a hundred human beings, and never saw the hypocrisy – never saw the contradiction – and, more importantly, never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. That’s a good story. The stories I like to tell are always interesting because the good guys have really serious flaws, and the villains are very compelling. My interest is always in complicating things. Jean-Luc Godard said, ‘The cinema is truth 24 times a second.’ Maybe. It’s lying 24 times a second too. All the time. All story is manipulation. Is there acceptable manipulation? You bet. People say, ‘Oh, boy, I was so moved to tears by your film,’ as if that’s a good thing. I manipulated that. That’s part of storytelling. I didn’t do it disgenuinely. I did it sincerely. I am moved by that too. That’s manipulation. Truth is – we hope – a byproduct of the best of our stories. And yet, there are many many different kinds of truths. And an emotional truth is something that you need to build. I made a film about baseball once, and it seemed to me there was a dilemma among the racists of what to do about Jackie Robinson. If you were a Brooklyn Dodgers fan, and you were a racist, what do you do when he arrives? You can quit baseball, altogether. You can change teams. Or, you can … change. And I think the kind of narrative that I subscribe to trusts in the possibility that people can change.”
So says Fortunato Rubino, late principal of a popular intermediate school in Brooklyn that has won 26 national chess championships (and counting) over the past 15 years.
Impressive, no? Perhaps even more so once you consider 70-75% of the families that send their kids to 318 live at or below the poverty line … the overwhelming majority of those students also hailing from minority households.
Yet, none of that seems to matter at 318 – a place where up is down, black is white, and the guiding principle is based upon providing underprivileged kids with the same opportunities “whether they can afford those opportunities or not.”
Chief among those opportunities: the chance to excel at a game of depth and skill like chess. Chess is to Intermediate School 318 as football is to Permian High. Yet, unlike football in Odessa, Texas, the intermediate chess program at Intermediate School 318 is in constant danger of extinction. Economic constraints have forced strict budget cuts at the school every year since 2007, and – given the high-cost, low-yield reality of chess programs in general, there are ongoing discussions about whether or not to cut the program.
Most of the students highlighted in Brooklyn Castle are members of 318’s 2009-2010 chess team. Among them: a handful of returning champions, a 12-year old national master, a class president with White House aspirations, and a recent graduate named Rochelle who has an opportunity to become the youngest African-American female master in history.
Believe me when I tell you these kids will break your beating heart. Their story is remarkable, their perseverance is astounding, and their camaraderie …. well, let’s just say the camaraderie these kids share may very well be the most inspiring thing you’re likely to see all year. By the end of this film, audiences will find themselves wishing they could do something – anything, really – half as passionately as these young kids play chess.
Do yourself a favor: Go see this movie. Brooklyn Castle is one of the top 10 films of the year – a rare gem that is just as important as it is entertaining. Highly recommended.
(Brooklyn Castle opens in limited release in New York and Los Angeles today, with a staggered release scheduled for several other major cities throughout the next few months. For a full list of dates and theaters, click here.)
