GasLand

As I have said before, indignation – as frustrating an emotion as it undoubtedly is – is a good feeling to have when watching a documentary. It means the thing is working. Josh Fox’s directorial debut, the Oscar-nominated GasLand, definitely left me with disbelief and anger in spades, and, in doing so it is an exceedingly effective protest documentary.

The film tells the story of bespectacled thirty-something Fox, a Pennsylvania forest-dweller thanks to his Thoreau-esque “hippy parents”, who is offered $100,000 by a natural-gas company to use his land for drilling. Intrigued and perplexed, he investigates the matter further and discovers that his house is above a shale that is one of the world’s largest natural gas deposits: a “sea of gas”. Further investigation leads him to discover that the process used to extract the water from the ground, known as hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, has an execrable and toxic effect on the water table, people’s drinking water and the environment as a whole. Like the good, educated, middle-class crusader that he is, he decides the only logical next-step is to make a documentary film about the pernicious effects of fracking and natural gas extraction.

Fox at home

Facetiousness aside, the movie he makes is on a worthy subject and it’s an acutely revealing document. It shows how through the work of public enemy number one (or two, depending on your view) Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton (one of the largest gas companies) and lobbyists, Congress passed a bill exempting natural gas and oil companies’ from the Safe Drinking Water Act of the 1970s. Therefore, those companies have been free to pollute people’s water with carcinogens and other deadly chemicals, such as benzene. This mix of gas and the fracking liquid has caused not only tap water – yes, good ole H₂O – to be flammable, but also severe health problems, such as brain damage, in people who live near drill sites.

Not fit for tooth-brushing

Surreal shots of flammable water and ruined landscapes form just a small part of the impressive imagery on show in GasLand. The sheer poetry of the bucolic images of the forest and the plains, combined with Fox’s banjo playing, was impressive: a welcome antidote to the usual Inside Job-style barrage of charts and gaudy graphs. The director’s sub-Terence Davies gravelly voice-over work was occasionally annoying, but did spin a poetic line or two every so often, adding to the homespun and likeable tone of the doc.

Better than the eventual winner, Inside job, this is a brilliant, if 15 minutes over-long, film in a year of great documentaries. With the possibility of fracking hitting European shores soon, it is essential viewing.

Inside Job

Documentaries are always going to provoke extreme opinions. A least with me, anyway. Whether exposing an unacceptable evil like Taxi to the Dark Side or showing an eye-opening, seldom-seen world like The Blue Planet, they will usually provoke debate. And the Oscar-winning Inside Job certainly did that. I just wasn’t sure whether it was always the right sort of talk.

Directed by Charles H. Ferguson and narrated by Matt Damon, the documentary sets out to tell the story behind the western banking crisis of 2007 and the global recession that followed. Through interviews conducted with leading American financial figures, academics and other notables, it gives a first-hand account of first the Icelandic banks collapse and the domino effect that followed. The fall-out and effects are well-known, the causes ­– not so much.

Let’s get some things straight: I have never studied economics, nor do I know very much about economics, banking or even finance. And although I know that hating bankers and Wall Street or The City is very much in vogue at the moment, I tried to approach the movie with an open mind. Even so, despite not have fully comprehended every technical detail, Ferguson’s argument – his whining and irreverent, geek-Paxman questioning style aside – does seem very persuasive. You can certainly not take fault with the clarity of expression. The argument that in the past nations manufactured things to get money rather than making it from nothing (or money itself) is especially true for countries like the U.K.

However, what really prompts incredulity throughout Inside Job is not just the recklessness of banking practice, but also the seeming impunity that everyone implicated in the crash was given after the event. As of yet, there have been no criminal convictions, even though there is evidence of foul play, hookers and coke. Indeed, given the evidence that Ferguson presents, it is as much an academic problem as anything else in the U.S. For the inside job of the title refers to the Harvard and Columbia academics paid to write papers condoning the banks actions and sit on their boards, as much as it does Obama’s shameful re-appoint of leading figures such as Larry Summers.

Where the documentary does fall down somewhat is in the number of people whom are interviewed. Because the no-show of many leading figures is as hurtful to the doc as it is their already-tarnished reputations. Also, as I have said, the interviewer’s style is both annoying and unnecessary, though he is really only saying what we are thinking.

So, despite an occasionally unbearable amount of I-told-you-so self-satisfaction, the documentary is an enlightening and well-crafted one, on a necessary theme. Incidentally, I don’t think it should have won the Oscar (Restrepo should have), but I would recommend it to anyone. You will finish it indignant; and that’s a good thing.