Surviving P
Surviving Progress,
dirs. Mathieu Roy and
Harold Crooks (2011)
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point of view 83
| fall 2011
Illuminating Issues
Progress
When Ronald Reagan was shilling for General
Electric in the Fifties, he used to proclaim to TV
audiences, “Progress is our most important product.”
A new documentary asks, “Was he wrong?”
M
athieu Roy and Harold Crooks’s new
documentary Surviving Progress opens
with an arresting series of images: a pair
of chimpanzees puzzling over the correct placement
of two wooden blocks in a white-walled laboratory.
One of the chimps is having difficulty getting an
L-shaped block to stand on its end; as the sequence
goes on, his consternation scans as palpably human. The quick
cut immediately thereafter to a shot of astronauts
floating outside a space station high above the Earth
would be disorienting if it also wasn’t so clearly an
allusion to the interspecies leap at the beginning of
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A ballsy shout-out,
perhaps, but it’s appropriate. Like Stanley Kubrick’s
epochal masterpiece, Surviving Progress is a film
about a world in thrall to—and perhaps at the mercy
of—the byproducts of human ingenuity.
B y A d a m N ay m a n
While Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (and
many others) may have gotten to these ideas first,
Canadian author Ronald Wright’s 2004 text A Short
History of Progress is generally regarded as one of
the seminal contemporary works about the obvious pros and complicated cons of social and technological advancement. Framing his discussion
around French post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin’s
1897 painting Where Do We Come From? What Are
We Doing? Where Are We Going?, Wright attempts
to answer vast, searching questions with precise,
detailed analysis. The book traces a line through
the agricultural upheavals of the Stone Age and the
sophisticated (and doomed) societies of the Romans
and Mayans to our own unprecedentedly intricate
and precarious post-industrial period.
Wright’s ideas about the erosion of our “natural
capital” and the overconsumption of resources that
shall ultimately prove to be finite are relatively
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Surviving Progress,
dirs. Mathieu Roy and
Harold Crook (2011)
familiar. His true rhetorical coup is his concept of a “progress trap,” which he defines
as an innovation that, in solving one problem, creates an entirely new one. Appearing
onscreen in Surviving Progress, Wright uses
the example of early human hunters to delineate the difference between figuring out how
to more efficiently kill a single woolly mammoth and devising a means of driving them
over a cliff en masse. The latter, in his opinion,
is a “progress trap”—a great leap forward
that’s actually a big step backwards. In one of
his interview segments in Surviving Progress,
he lays his rhetorical cards on the table:
“We’re now reaching a point,” he says, “at
which technological progress and the increase
in our population and our economy threaten
the very existence of humanity.”
This is a troubling sentiment, of course,
but in spite of the severity of its conclusions,
A Short History of Progress proved surprisingly popular in book form and as part of
the Massey Lectures series for which it was
commissioned. To promote the book, Wright
toured the country, talking about the material
with live audiences and also over the radio
on CBC’s Ideas programme. “I remember listening to the radio one evening in August of
2004,” says Daniel Louis, the Genie award–
winning film producer best known for cofounding Cinémaginaire in 1988 with Denise
Robert. “I was hooked in. I sat in my car in the
garage for 20 minutes after I’d gotten home.
And the whole time I was thinking: Could we
make a movie out of this?”
The answer was yes, but it took nearly
six years for Louis and Robert and a long list
of collaborators to figure out exactly what
the finished product would look like. At first,
Robert offered the project to her husband,
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Denys Arcand, but he turned it down; the
same thing happened when they approached
François Girard. But the director of The Red
Violin offered a suggestion of somebody he
thought would be perfect for such a sprawling and ambitious project: Mathieu Roy, a
young filmmaker who had directed the elegant profile piece François Girard’s ThreeAct Journey (2005) and worked as Martin
Scorsese’s assistant on The Aviator (2004).
“François arranged a meeting with Daniel
Louis, and he agreed to hire me as the director,” says Roy. “I think that they were both
charmed by the fact that I was young, passionate—and pointed out that it was my generation who would have to deal with these
overwhelming issues anyway.”
After reading Wright’s book, Roy realized
that the lack of a clear narrative was going to
be the biggest challenge. Where a comparable
Massey Lectures text like Margaret Atwood’s
Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
(itself being made as a film by Jennifer
Baichwal) has a number of obvious thematic
through lines and motifs and a relatable colloquial authorial voice, A Short History of
Progress is more obviously academic, and
with a daunting historical and geographical
scope. “I had a fascinating ride trying to figure
out the format that the film would take,” says
Roy. “I remember saying once to Daniel that
the film was going to be a symphony of civilization! Baraka, Manufactured Landscapes
and Gambling, Gods and LSD were films
that were pretty much on my mind. I wanted
to succeed in making a film about the overwhelming idea of Progress without a word or
with very few. But that wouldn’t fly for long!”
Roy also describes a version of the film
that would have been a kind of docu-fiction,
revolving around a character played by an
actor who would have been a catalyst for
philosophical inquiry—an idea he now dismisses as “too gimmicky.” Surviving Progress
retains a certain visionary element, expressed
through brilliantly executed time-lapse photography sequences. A God’s-eye image of
a city skyline swirling with orange-tinted
traffic matches up poetically with Wright’s
comparison of urban sprawl to an unchecked
forest fire. But the film also utilizes other,
more conventional documentary tactics:
archival footage, location shooting (in Brazil
and China) and talking-head interviews with
Wright and a host of other interested parties,
including Atwood, Jane Goodall and an array
of cognitive psychologists, animal researchers, population scientists and other experts
who engage with the author’s theories from a
variety of different vantage points. The result
is a film that’s simultaneously fluid and transporting, as in Roy’s original conception, but
also meticulous and methodical in a way that
transcends simple sensory overload.
This ultimate sense of balance may have
something to do with the fact that the film
has been made with the input of a number of
different parties. Around the same time Roy
was hired, the National Film Board became
involved in a developmental capacity (NFB
Ontario Centre producers Silva Basmajian
and Gerry Flahive later became full-fledged
co-producers in February of 2008), and, in 2007,
Betsy Carson and Mark Achbar joined the
project as co-producers. (Martin Scorsese’s
name also appears on the credits, although he
worked mostly in an advisory capacity.)
For Achbar, Surviving Progress represented an opportunity to develop some of the
ideas that had underwritten The Corporation
(2003) from a slightly different angle—not to
mention a chance to use that film’s critical
and commercial success as a way to help seed
other filmmakers’ work. “The Corporation
looked at a pervasive societal phenomenon
and tried to make it seem as strange as it actually is,” says Achbar. “Similarly, Surviving
Progress challenges popular conceptions of
what constitutes progress. Each of the 10 feature documentaries I was able to support with
the envelope funds The Corporation generated reflect an aspect of my own concerns and
interests; otherwise, I would not have become
involved. Other budget and financing criteria
were imposed by Telefilm, but the premise
of my envelope was that Telefilm had no say
on the creative side. Of course, I had to have
confidence that the teams I backed could pull
off what they proposed.”
It helped that there was a personal connection: Achbar’s wife, Siobhan Flanagan, was
already working on Surviving Progress as a
script consultant. From there, Achbar invited
his Corporation co-narration writer Harold
Crooks onto the project to work with Roy on
the script and as a co-director. (Roy retains
the official title of “director”.) Crooks, a seasoned documentary screenwriter whose work
includes the wry, perceptive Pax Americana
and the Weaponization of Space (2009) and
George Ungar’s The Champagne Safari (1995),
says the biggest incentive was the chance to
work with a group of countrymen with whom
he might not have otherwise crossed paths.
“For an Anglo of my generation to be working
with Cinémaginaire, a film company at the
heart of popular Québécois culture, was an
unimaginable opportunity,” he says. “And, as
it turns out, a deeply gratifying experience.
Planet Cinémaginaire and Planet Achbar
inhabit different film universes but they share
one very important thing in common. Both
have infinite respect for ‘M. et Mme. Tout Le
Monde.’ They are natural-born populists in
the best sense of the word.”
The question of “populism” is worth bringing up with regard to Surviving Progress. Its
six-year gestation process places it at the tail
end of a cycle of “downer docs” released in
the wake of An Inconvenient Truth. At this
point, even the sort of discerning, politically
sensitive audience that attends art-houses
and documentary festivals may have gotten
their fill of movies soberly proclaiming that
we’re going to Hell in a handbasket. A book
like A Short History of Progress can be sobering because at this point, serious readers
are a self-selecting audience; when it comes
to filmgoing, however, even the most intelligent among us will often opt for escapism,
and not only in the realm of mainstream,
special-effects blockbusters. The makers of
“Planet Cinémaginaire
and Planet Achbar
inhabit different film
universes but they share
one very important thing
in common. Both have
infinite respect for ‘M. et
Mme. Tout Le Monde.’
They are natural-born
populists in the best sense
of the word”
­—Harold Crooks
documentaries are no less susceptible to the
demands of the market than the people churning out multiplex fare, and it’s arguable that
there’s more at stake when they’re forced to
compromise.
Achbar believes that it’s possible to balance the imperatives of accessibility and ideological clarity—tricky though it may be. “My
goal with media is to get people to think, to
care, to act. With any film I’m involved in I
do what I can to help make the film clear and
emotionally and intellectually engaging, and
to inject humour where it might be appropriate. With this film, that meant streamlining
and making accessible the intellectual content, heightening emotional moments, reducing imagery that distanced viewers, lessening
repetition and, in one instance, using sound
effects comically.” He’s referring to some
strenuously wacky carny-midway music
underneath images of frantic stock traders—
a less austere version of Antonioni’s cutting
burlesque of high finance in L’Eclisse (1962).
Not exactly subtle. Yet coming shortly after
footage of Ronald Reagan bloating about the
joys of “turning the bull loose” at the New
York Stock Exchange, a little caustic levity
feels earned.
The shots at Republican cowboys may be
de rigeur, but the focus on economic issues is
completely valid. Surviving Progress started
shooting on the eve of the 2008 credit crisis,
and the filmmakers would have been blind—
not to mention dishonest—if they hadn’t
integrated that fresh sense of panic into the
material. C-SPAN clips of congressmen dressing down bank executives fold neatly into
selections from sword-and-sandal epics about
Roman decadence; shots of eroded Mayan
temples blend seamlessly into shots tracking
over pockets of tacky McMansions.
“We felt like we had to keep readjusting,”
says Robert. “It was important to stay upto-date.” Crooks agrees and emphasizes the
effort to keep things rooted in a present tense.
“It was decided early on that the film couldn’t
be a history lesson,” he says. “Instead it would
seek to identify Wright’s two major recurring
civilizational threats—living off the capital
rather than the interest of nature and the selfdestructive ecological and human effects of
ruling elites at the top of the social pyramid—
in the present interlocked global reality.”
By the time the film reached the editing
room in the fall of 2009, it had assumed some
kind of shape, even if Achbar recalls being a
little nervous down the home stretch. “I’m a
newbie to this executive-producer business
and I tended to be skeptical longer and focus
on problematic details,” he says. “It was only
after the bumps were ironed out that I was
able to more fully engage with the big picture
and contribute effectively on that level. LouisMartin Paradis, the editor, calmly and deftly
navigated the often-conflicting vectors of five
executive producers, three producers and two
directors, with the patience of a saint.”
Despite Achbar’s mention of conflicting
vectors, Roy and Crooks sound positively
united on the question of whether some kind
of pessimism-fatigue could hamper Surviving
Progress’s reception. Both filmmakers insist
that these considerations are beside the point
and were far from their minds as they were
shaping the material. “I have read that important societal ideas actually really only take
off and spread after they’ve become familiar,”
says Crooks. “Hopefully this will be the case
with Surviving Progress as it finds its audiences. What we believe to be unique about
our film is not so much the emphasis on the
eco-collapse narrative but our probing of our
genes, our brains and our dangerously hierarchical behaviour for clues to possible ways
out of Wright’s progress traps.”
“From the wider filmmaking perspective,” adds Roy, “it’s always better to proceed without thinking in those terms!” He’s
talking about the self-fulfilling prophecy
whereby films labelled “difficult” or “challenging”—even in an admiring way by critics
or programmers—are subsequently avoided
by suspicious filmgoers. The picture painted
by Surviving Progress may seem dark, but
there are glimmers of illumination (including
a bookending sequence with the chimps that
literally and figuratively suggests the possibility of balance). And while Roy surely isn’t
naive about the commercial prospects of a film
that demands engagement in lieu of escapism, there’s a touch of optimism in his words.
“Look at what happened with [the success]
of The Corporation. People saw some truth
there. We’re hoping people will be hungry for
the kind of truth we’re suggesting with our
film as well.” POV
Adam Nayman writes on film for Cinema
Scope, Montage, POV, Cineaste and The Grid.
fall 2011
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