Why the National Parks Project is about much more than capturing stunning landscapes.
The other night, I watched films made possible by the Canadian government under the auspices of the National Parks Project. There’s something key not just about the subject matter of these films, but also about the bureaucratic mechanism that delivered them so beautifully into my home.
From May to October 2010, 13 groups, each comprised of one filmmaker and three musicians, were sent to a national park in each province and territory and asked to write about their experiences there. The more recognizable musicians included Graham Van Pelt, Kathleen Edwards, Sam Roberts, Rollie Pemberton (of Cadence Weapon), Melissa Auf der Maur (formerly of Hole), Matt Mays, and Sarah Harmer. These musicians are, or were once, “big enough” to understand the fleeting nature of the cool capital in which artists primarily truck.
The project was produced by new-media companies FilmCAN NPP Films and Primitive Entertainment, in partnership with Parks Canada, which is currently celebrating its centennial and so enjoying some degree of reprieve from what might otherwise have been a merciless funding cutback. It’s the kind of project often decried as an unaffordable luxury in this age of austerity and gravy-train derailment, a deliberate intersection of the public purse with art’s mission of self-discovery and protectionist documentation. It also alludes to a time when artists were employed by government in the name of the public good, as one half of a tacit social contract that goes beyond the cartography of individuals in isolation.
Aesthetically, the National Parks Project’s various films and accompanying music make the unfiltered vastness of the parks viscerally anarchic. Interestingly, they often take the heady milieu of metaphysics, human communication, and ethics as their subtext. Their images are of animals and bones, of unrecognized peoples, and of a cycle left uninterrupted. In one haunting example, a child runs through the pitch blackness of Prince Albert National Park in Saskatchewan as filmmaker Stéphane Lafleur reveals the quasi-mystical, vaguely threatening secrets of a deep forest in the dead of night. Suddenly, there's a stark cut to vestiges of our urban, and suburban, settings – a truck, a building, a bulletin board – shot with the same deep solemnity. This sequence transports us home with some measure of the park’s spiritual peripheries intact. When the sun rises at the end of the film, we're treated to a shared, and inexpressible, epiphany. It's a breathtaking piece of work.
FilmCAN proclaims that The National Parks Project "aims to explore the ways in which the wilderness shapes our cultural imagination," but, immediately after that, says that "The core of the project is the parks themselves – places that most Canadians never visit." This seems like a telling contradiction. The admission seems to be that the wilderness does not, in fact, shape our cultural imagination, but that it ought to. In that regard, the films should succeed in coaxing a few vacationers to consider alternatives to the tropical McTourism on offer this time of year.
But in this, the project’s scope seems trim. There are facets to the undertaking that are well worth, and perhaps even more valuable than, its declared thesis. Embedded in the very subsidization of this collaborative project is a manifesto that fills the gap left by the music industry’s collapsing revenue streams. Like a New Deal with a distinctly rural Canadian bent, the National Parks Project is putting the figurative shovel in the hands of our battered artists and asking them to get to work on our nebulous national character.
Bry Webb (of the now-defunct road warriors The Constantines) was one of the singers who created, along with Jim Guthrie and Sarah Harmer, original compositions for Scott Smith’s film about Gwaii Haanas National Park Preserve and Haida Heritage Site. Webb is a perfect candidate for the kind of aesthetic the project makes so appealing to internet-surfing urban Canadians. In his song "Rivers of Gold," for instance, one thought floats to the surface: "Isn't it fine / when your time / ain't bought and sold." In an interview with Toronto Film Scene, Smith reached the same conclusion: “I spent about a week thinking about what to ‘bring’ to [the project], and went in a great big circle, before realizing that what they were asking me to do was essentially a gift. Simply reflect your experience in the park – make a poem about the park.” That our artists should find themselves stunned by the “gift” of such an expedition, to find their time of eminent worth, is a pity. What a strange notion it has become in 2011 to partner with one’s government to make art.
The “B” word – bureaucracy – has come to represent something shameful. We elect officials precisely because of their lack of faith in government, on the strength of their promises to shrink and neuter it. But perhaps in the roots of the parks service itself (the first national parks service in the world, its website proclaims), we can find the pride we once felt in the collective undertaking, in government with vision, in democracy as not only a messy means to an end, but also as a place where a populace can gather and discuss matters as critical as nature and our place in it.
There are two sacred spheres explored in this project, one intentional and one not: the parks themselves, which Parks Canada rightly enshrines; and the artist’s trek to these wild spaces to explore on our behalf. The selected artists are travelling not only to spaces, but to anachronistic notions of art’s forgotten utility. In doing so, they once more take on the endangered mantle of the artist as ambassador for a people into the great unknown.
The National Parks Project does not give itself enough credit. It is not a glorified tourism campaign – it is an increasingly rare endeavor, made possible through public monies, exploring the contours and depths of our democratic soul.
Original Article
Source: the Mark
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