Welcome to Walden Pond, Fifth Avenue style. Isabella’s parents, Colin Beavan, 43, a writer of historical nonfiction, and Michelle Conlin, 39, a senior writer at Business Week, are four months into a yearlong lifestyle experiment they call No Impact. Its rules are evolving, as Mr. Beavan will tell you, but to date include eating only food (organically) grown within a 250-mile radius of Manhattan; (mostly) no shopping for anything except said food; producing no trash (except compost, see above); using no paper; and, most intriguingly, using no carbon-fueled transportation.
Back in 2002, I saw the excellent spelling bee documentary Spellbound. It featured a structure that is now familiar to me: in the film’s first half, we meet the competitors. In the second half, we watch them compete. It’s effective narrative arc: make us about the characters, then we can watch them succeed and fail. For the dorky elite of the spelling bee world, it made for a pretty riveting film.
Yesterday I watched Word Play, a 2006 film that applies pretty much exactly the same model to the world of competitive crossword puzzles. Though it lacks the emotional thumb screws that competing kids offer (replacing them with crossword-loving celebrities like Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton and the Indigo Girls), the film is another great example of what I’ve come to call “the competition documentary”.
While in Winnipeg last week, I caught part of Ballet Girls on Bravo, yet another film that seems to fit this sub-genre:
Ballet Girls is a behind-the-scenes documentary series that follows nine girls on a quest to land the coveted role of Clara in the Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s Nutcracker. The girls come from across Canada - gap-toothed 10-year-olds and willowy teens with ballerina dreams dancing in their heads. In this “Canadian Idol” of the ballet world, ambitious young dancers compete to share the stage with professionals, taking the first pointed step in their own careers as dancers.
I’m sounding more disparaging than I mean to be–I think it’s an effective and entertaining approach. I wonder the origins of this genre are. Surely they predate Spellbound. Maybe they’re risen in popularity as a kind of legitimate alternative to the hapless dude + ridiculous challenge model of reality television. Any suggestions for other films in this sub-genre?
The legendary Leonard Cohen is, as you probably know, on tour. He comes to Vancouver on April 19. Today the National Film Board blog features a 45-minute documentary on Cohen from 1965. I haven’t watched much of it yet, but it begins with a charming, funny monologue and, a little later on, has some great insights into the secret joys of hotel rooms:
I was more interested to learn about why there are a bunch of feral horses on this tiny island with a permanent human population of five. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
The first horses on Sable Island, off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada were brought to the island during the late 1700s. Many people believe that they arrived on the island from off of the many shipwrecks, however, this romantic notion is false - they were in fact intentionally left on Sable to graze and multiply, and were most likely seized from Acadians during their expulsion from Nova Scotia at the hands of the British. Although often referred to as ponies due to their small size, they have a horse phenotype.
The whole island is a wildlife preserve, so the animals are left in their natural state. You apparently need special permission from the Canadian Coast Guard to visit.
For a few years, I’ve owned “The Ballad of Henry Darger” by Natalie Merchant (off of Motherland). Frankly, it’s kind of an insipid song, but given Ms. Merchant’s fascination with American history, I’ve always assumed that Henry Darger was an actual person.
Henry Darger was a reclusive American writer and artist who worked as a janitor in Chicago, Illinois. He has become famous for his posthumously discovered 15,145-page fantasy manuscript called The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, along with several hundred drawings and watercolor paintings illustrating the story.
That sounds quite remarkable, doesn’t it? Hereare somesites with examples of Darger’s artwork, as well a site for a 2004 documentary about his life. I see that it played at Pacific Cinematheque in 2005–did anybody see it? Here’s a trailer with crappy sound, narrated by Dakota Fanning.
