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Interview with Documentarian Christopher Beaver by Don Schwartz
Documentary filmmaker Christopher Beaver. photo: courtesy C. Beaver
Documentary filmmaker Christopher Beaver grew up in Paradise, a small town in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. There were no traffic lights, not even a four-way stop. In the eighth grade, his school provided double shifts due to budgetary problems. Paradise is primarily a retirement community.
Beaver worked part of each school day in his family's business which provided concrete to contractors. Opening up the office, alone, at 8:00 am, taking care of a variety of responsibilities instilled a strong work ethic for life. Being thrown into a foreign environment with unknown tasks prepared him for his filmic destiny. But there was an equally strong influence on the young boy's development—the land.
Beaver's childhood exposure to films was severely limited. Nobody in his world made movies—not even home movies. Paradise had a movie theater which operated occasionally. There was no TV or radio station. He did see films with his mother in "The Valley," in Chico. His exposure widened when Chico State College started showing foreign films—as did one of the commercial theaters. They enjoyed British films, up to and including "A Hard Day's Night". But it was Fellini's "La Dolce Vida" that got to Beaver, at the tender age of 14, although it did not occur to him that he could ever have anything to do with film. He only knew he loved it.
Beaver attended Harvard University in Massachusetts, where he received his B.A. in Government/Political Science. There were a few filmmaking courses, but he wasn't able to get into them, although he did take a course entitled "The History of Short Film." And, of course, he saw "movies galore" in Boston.
Sitting down with Beaver in my Larkspur apartment I asked the obvious and inevitable question, "So, what brought you into the world of filmmaking?"
"It was the Viet Nam era," he told me, "I was getting out of college, and at that point I decided I was going to be a draft resister. I was told it took about a year for the government to catch up to resisters and whatever they do with them—go to jail, whatever."
Beaver often shoots small format and with a one man crew. photo: courtesy C. Beaver
"So I sat there and thought, 'What do I really want to do with my life?' The only thing I really wanted to do was make movies. I thought I would try to go to film school, and I would be arrested in a year, and if film school works out, then I would go to jail, come out, and I'll be able to make movies. And if film school doesn't work out, I'll go to jail, I'll come out, and do something else."
Destiny took over. He had a blind date at Harvard who arranged for him to have an interview with legendary film critic Pauline Kael—someone he'd always wanted to meet—and they spoke for three hours. That was how and where he discovered his passion for documentary filmmaking. When he broached the topic of film schools, Kael suggested Stanford University. Indeed, he was accepted into their documentary film program, with a tuition fellowship.
"Documentaries are so improvisational. It's like playing jazz as opposed to symphony."
After recieving his M.A. in Communications Specializing in Film and Broadcasting, Beaver became filmmaking partners with Judy Irving. They created a non-profit organization called the Independent Documentary Group and maintained it for 25 years. One of its first projects was a feature called "Dark Circle" about nuclear weapons, nuclear power, and the links between them.
"That film continues to have a life to this very day," Beaver told me, "it was completed in 1982, and revised in 1989, and they're still showing it in schools and around the world. It remains prophetic. When they're talking about the Fukushima disaster, when you see this film, you feel like you're seeing what went on at those reactors. I have a friend in Portland, and her daughter saw the film a month and a-half ago, and was flabbergasted. She was upset and called her father, and asked, 'how come they never taught this in school?'"
"We did a screening at Lawrence Livermore Lab which has a lot of plutonium, right here in the Bay Area, and showed it to their staff. And the film's central statement about nuclear reactors at power plants making the stuff for nuclear weapons, there wasn't one scientist who said anything to the contrary."
"One scientist asked, 'Where did you get the footage?' But we nailed it, we got it right. A lot of people, including anti-nuclear activists, said we were wrong, and we should take it out of the film. That's a testament to where documentary films can take you in your learning, having to say things that not everybody's going to agree with, and you just have to kinda figure out your own truth, and are you right or not? So that was a key moment for me. If we said I went to undergraduate college, to graduate school, this was my doctoral moment, at Lawrence Livermore Labs, showing my film."
The core group with the Independent Documentary Group who worked on "Dark Circle" includes present-day filmmakers Deborah Hoffman, Judy Irving, Ruth Landy, Michael Levin, and Judith Lit. Ten years ago Judy Irving and Beaver went their own ways. They'd already been working on separate projects before then. He's been on his own since.
Beaver is also a filmmaking teacher. After Stanford he taught Cinematography One and Two at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. He co-taught Digital TV and the World at the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism.
"The [Berkeley] class is some of the most fun I've ever had in my life. In one semester, the lead instructor, Todd Carrel, and I take print journalists who'd never handled cameras, and teach them how to do video journalism. We work with what we think of as diaspora communities. So it could be people living in the Bay Area who come from Hong Kong or Cambodia originally. Then at the end of the semester we take the students overseas for a six-week field exercise, a practicum, and they work as video journalists in those same countries."
Environmental values are core to Beaver and inspire much of his work. In 2006—with an update and expansion in 2011—Beaver wrote and directed one of the most unusual environmental documentaries I've seen, "Tales of the San Joaquin–A River Restored", the reverse form of documentaries exposing our destruction of our ecosphere.
Beaver is currently teaching Intermediate Narrative Film at University of California, Santa Cruz, and is under consideration for continued work with Digital TV and the World.
Editor's Note: Beaver's "Between Dreams and History" (1999) is about Shimon Attie a fascinating performance artist who projects old photos of buildings, like in Berlin, onto their current buildings. Following is Don Schwartz's interview with Beaver starting there.
CineSource: How did the Shimon Attie project come about?
There are two films that are key for me. One of them is 'Between Dreams and History'. Shimon creates installations, public art that is up for a period of time and then goes away. He does, for example, projections on a wall. The project I decided to follow was Shimon’s installation on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. But the work that first caught my imagination was he'd gone to Berlin, and on the flight over he thought about what would he do for his art there, and he started thinking where were all his Jewish relatives. They were gone, and he thought 'what's left?'
So Shimon went into newspaper and historical archives, and found photographs of buildings, businesses, homes that had been owned by Jews, and photos of Jews just on the street. He took these, turned them into slides, and projected them onto the buildings where the original photographs had been made, lining up everything perfectly—the doorway with the doorway, so, here was the doorway as it is in contemporary Berlin, and here would be a Jewish merchant, for example, standing in the doorway where that person is gone. This, to me, was brilliant.
Somewhere along the way I developed an affection for history, the kind of history that underlies everything, the hidden history. It could be the hidden atomic history, the history of the Jews in Berlin, in Germany. This just triggered my imagination, and I thought Attie's work was brilliant, something different.
It is a different way of showing history, dealing with history, and I thought I had to meet this guy, and I didn't know whether he was an activist primarily, a frustrated filmmaker, or what? Because he was showing slide shows of his work, he would do these projections, and then take a slide, a picture of the projection in place, and they're beautiful. And then he would exhibit these.
This was what the art was, away from Berlin, when he would show it to other people. I thought I really had to meet this guy. There was a film that had been made, a German film about him that played at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and I went one evening, and Shimon was there.
I rushed up to him and gave him a couple films that I'd made, and told him I just admired his work a ton. Two days later he called and said, 'Let's have coffee.' We got together and he said he's starting a project in New York, would you like to make a movie about it?
Usually when that happens, at that point you ask, 'well, is there any money, and the answer is usually no'. But I thought I had a couple of funders who'd funded me in the past who might be interested in public art in New York City. And this art was going to be involved with words, poetry, people's memories. And I thought one of the funders is a poet, and the project would appeal to her.
So I scraped together a little money, and made the film. I included a retrospective of his early work which was done primarily in Germany. I felt the documentary I'd seen hadn't really shown his work. You could see the film and literally not know what his work looked like. The German film had all kinds of documentary sounds and newsreels of Hitler laid over it. And I just felt that wasn't what Shimon’s artwork was.
I took this as a chance to present some of the artwork on its own terms. At a certain point, I realized that Shimon Attie was an idealized portrait of the artist that I'd like to be. Because it seems to me he does things for pure art. The idea comes, and then it's figuring out where the money will come from. What will I do, how will we do it? I just like this idea that ideas are paramount. It's not, 'I've got a good idea that we can get some money for,' or 'somebody wants me to do something.' So, this film is also an idealized portrait of me as an artist."
So it was your idea to make the movie, so you were also living your ideal.
I was living an ideal. Yeah. And I try to do that. It doesn't always seem to me I do it. But this one was a very, very pure effort. I worked with a cinematographer, Skip Blumberg, who was part of the early pioneers shooting independent video in the United States, when it was reel-to-reel, half inch, black and white video tape. There's a whole generation of people that I'd met, starting in the 80s, and found them very inspiring, too. They erased the fourth wall. When you watched their videos it was as if you were there. You were with them.
I remembered one thing Skip Blumberg shot. The Democratic convention where Jimmy Carter was nominated, and Rosalynn Carter comes walking into the hall, and Skip's outside, trying to get into the building. You see her walk up to the camera, and the camera leans in very close, as if it were a person, and Skip says, 'So, how are things going?' She says, 'I think things are going well.' Then Skip asks, 'By the way, can you get me into the hall?' It was just like, 'What?! This is not the Stanford style of documentaries. This is kind of like more playful.'
That was the sense that I got from Skip who is one of the most original, no, the most original thinker in terms of film and video that I've ever encountered. An original thinker. Chip Lord is another video artist in that generation whose work continually inspires me. He was one of the people who created Cadillac Ranch, all those Cadillacs buried in the desert near Amarillo.
So with Skip, a really good friend who lives walking distance from Shimon’s installation, we tried to recapture that spontaneity, that real off-the-cuff feeling that these video makers were able to accomplish, and filtered through a more formal Stanford sensibility.
What brought about the 'San Joaquin' project?
"In a way, even though I'm doing documentaries, it's going back into this landscape that I grew up with, a landscape that I'd seen in certain fiction films. I tend to go in the direction of issue films. The San Joaquin film is about the potential restoration of the San Joaquin River. The film helped restore the river. And I've just become fascinated by that landscape, and the people seem very familiar. When I was growing up, working in the family business, I worked in California’s Central Valley. Some of my concrete is in the overpasses on Interstate 5. Some of my parent's concrete is in the canal that's mentioned in the San Joaquin film. A hundred and fifty mile long canal from the Sacramento delta all the way down to Fresno.
It's kind of like these films are my 'Hud' and my 'Last Picture Show'. They're films about the people—the landscape is kind of what got me down there, the issues are what involved me—but they're about people that I grew up with. I feel very comfortable down there. And so my current project—it has many titles—right now it's called 'Tulare: The Lake That Vanished.'
Tulare Lake was in the southern California central valley, midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Until the year 1900, it was the largest lake west of the Mississippi—bigger than Tahoe, bigger than Crater Lake. It was the largest lake, a natural reservoir. It was dried up by agricultural development and land reclamation in the central valley. I just became fascinated by what used to be there.
I've always been fascinated by lost places, the pyramids, Angora Wot, Machu Pichu—disappeared civilizations, going all the way back to when I was 11 years old. And so Tulare was a hidden landscape. Very few people know about this lake, and it was huge. Occasionally parts of it come back when the farmland is flooded. But basically it's now farmland owned primarily by a few wealthy families. Names that hardly anybody would recognize, but, to me, are immediate. So, it's hidden history, and this film is being told through half a dozen different people.
We have a high-level agricultural consultant who takes me around, shows me what the region looks like to him. We have a biologist. What does it look like to him? For instance, to the agricultural consultant any fresh water that goes to the ocean is wasted. It hasn't done anything. Fresh water should be used for crops only. But the naturalist sees that less than 5% of the landscape remains.
Another person is a writer. Her family's been in the valley for five generations. She had a great, great grandfather who had a steamship on this lake. There's a native American basket weaver, and sees a totally other landscape. There's an archeologist. As we're walking on the ancient shoreline of the lake, the archaeologist says, 'Oh, I think we have something.' He leans down and picks up an arrowhead that he estimates is 13,000 years old. So, all these layers. It's they’re like the layers of earth. An ancient seabed becomes the top of a mountain range.
Ultimately, the political, environmental issue down there could be that instead of building new dams, or a canal or a giant tunnel to convey water around the Delta, you could restore at least part of the lake, something that could please a lot of different people. So, that's the political side.
The philosophical side is the more you can work with nature, the better chance we have of surviving. And for me the interest is the character of these people I'm meeting with, what they have to say, that's the true fascination for me. What a privilege to hang out with these people, to see native peoples gathering natural materials for a basket. And they all coexist around the lakebed. So, the focus is the lake, but it's all the different ways that we see it.
I started working with John Nutt as the editor of the Tulare Lake film. After years of my own work on the project, John was able to pull the film together in the space of two weeks. He’s a great editor, quick and technically amazing, who brings a cinematic sense to every film he edits. It’s not just a good cause film. Hopefully the finished film will be equally fascinating as what I would call, a really good movie.
We now have a rough-cut that runs about seventy minutes but we are out of money. And out of credit cards. So I’m back in fundraising mode. After years of work, however, the end is in sight. And that counts for a lot. If naïve enthusiasm gets you started, knowing that it’s possible to finish what you set out to do, completes the journey.
* * *
And so it goes. If there was ever a concrete example of Heisenberg's Uncertain Principle—something to the effect that the act of observing a system changes that system—it is Beaver's San Joaquin film which includes quietly dramatic images of flowing water returning to a decades-old dry riverbed. These images were catalyzed, in part, by his previous coverage of the lost river. I wouldn't be surprised to see something similar happen in response to the Tulare Lake project's completion.Posted on Sep 26, 2011 - 03:42 AM