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Overlooked & Underrated Docs & Features
(click on broll or dschwartz for all his posts)
Triumph of the Wall: Life as a Work in Progress
Bill Stone’s, “The Triumph of the Wall” is an exquisitely beautiful, highly thought-provoking documentary film built on and around the base of a documentary filmmaker—Stone—filming the construction of a thousand foot dry stone wall on an enormous estate in rural Quebec.
The project was to take eight weeks. The filmmaker filmed for eight years, and I must confess I’m not clear if the builder, Chris Overing, finished the project in those eight years, but that doesn’t matter.
Although the film’s physical focus is on the wall and the practice of dry stone building, the emotional, psychological, and philosophical focus is on the relationship between Overing and Stone—and the wall, of course. Stone’s narration is a personal journal, the impact of the craft of dry stone wall building and his seemingly endless documentary filmmaking on his life and mind. At the film’s moving conclusion we see that the story is about him, his learning, his transformation.
Throughout the film we see Stone’s masterful cinematography.