a different kind of documentary
Geographies of Solitude (2022) is a film that sticks to your lips. And your eyes and ears. Primarily shot on 16mm film (some of the nighttime footage was shot digitally), it is a synesthetic portrait of a remote, Nova Scotian island and its lone human inhabitant, Zoe Lucas. Lucas is a taciturn and tireless naturalist who records everything she can: the hundreds of wild horses that roam the island, the beetles that inhabit the dead, the flowers and grasses, the seals abob in the waves, the endless plastic washing ashore. Filmmaker Jacquelyn Mills records her recording, less to mirror the scientist’s practice than to accompany it with art, a brilliant succession of images and abstractions just as valuable as Lucas’s spreadsheets and notes.
Good documentaries learn something from what they film. More than a mere work of observation, Geographies of Solitude attempts to incorporate the very island into itself. Instead of graphics, Mills buries celluloid in horse manure and sand, developing film in seaweed and yarrow. The result is a dizziness of fractals and patterns, a microscopic symphony of texture and light. At one point, Mills puts a microphone to a rotting research station, amplifying its internal creakings and knockings. At another, she turns the electric currents of insects into MIDI patterns, and then into music, allowing the island to score itself. Far from technological gimmicks, these enlarge our experience of the island, as well as the possibilities of filmmaking. Filming is not just the transcription of sight but an active, involved deepening of encounter.
Many documentaries today exist in a larger succession of prototypes, docu-content optioned from podcasts or books, hoping to be remade into scripted features and series. Safe and unspecific, they can seem like pitches for further content, further attention. They bypass portraiture with needless plot. Streaming companies want pacey films that narrativize yesterday’s scandals, gawk at the crimes of decades past, and flatter the already famous.
Geographies of Solitude suggests a different practice. I’d implore everyone to see it, but it doesn’t yet have wide distribution. It’s a shame, and indicative of how things are made and watched today, a need for manufactured drama and importance. Geographies of Solitude is consciously singular. Its plot is its very coming into being. Like the best films, it could only have come from one place.
ben tapeworm