A comparative analysis between ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ (Sauper, 2004) and ‘Värmland Stories’ (Collaborative, 2011).
To introduce ‘Värmland Stories’ it is a good idea to first talk about (and compare with Darwin’s Nightmare) a short film I made over the duration of the course. The film entitled ‘Turning Points’ was a one-minute documentary about a Swedish Girl who rode BMX. Although ‘Turning Points’ is only one minute long and ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ runs for one hundred and seven, similarities can be found between the two seemingly different films.
Both films use the personal lives of people to deliver a story, with ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ numerous people are interviewed and their stories are told to get a wide view of the effect of one particular problem (the introduction of Nile Perch to Lake Victoria). ‘Turning Points’, however, only focuses on one specific person and the point of the film is not to highlight a major economic problem but just to tell a small part of a seemingly normal persons story. Although the aims and ends of the two films seem different both use similar devices or techniques to get there. Interviews are integral to both films. For the first forty seconds of ‘Turning Points’ we have a continuous interview shot of ‘Emmy’ the character, talking about a situation involving her brother. It is a head and shoulder shot of ‘Emmy’ sitting on a couch in a dimly lit room, she takes up a third of the frame positioned slightly right of the centre, and there is the bottom of a painting visible by the left of her head. She talks about her mother, revealing subtlety some feelings about her – “and she’s just always right” – the point is not about her mother but about finding out that her brother had been injured. The fact that she is hugging a red pillow in this shot also shows vulnerability, possibly due to the nature of the talk or her nervousness in front of the camera. The fact that the pillow is in shot seems to suggest that we are looking at ‘Emmy’ in her own environment which is also true of the interviews conducted in ‘Darwin’s Nightmare – twelve minutes in we have a scene in which Sauper is filming ‘Dimond’ who owns a fish filleting factory, the interview is conducted in his office. Another similarity between these two specific scenes is that you hear the filmmaker from behind the camera in both cases. This seems to add a personal feel to each movie, showing that each filmmaker has an interest in what they are doing. At thirteen minutes into ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ just after we have a black screen with text telling us of the Nile Perch ‘experiment’ it cuts back to Dimond saying how the Nile Perch have helped and from behind the camera Sauper speaks. At nineteen seconds into ‘Turning Points’ when Emmy says that her mother has never said sorry about anything we here the filmmaker from behind the camera as he adjusts the height of the shot.
In the second part of ‘Turning Points’ we move away from the interview shot to a section of cuts of the character riding BMX in a skate park. The multiple shots of jumps and falls into a foam pit seem to show a need in the character for a cushioned environment even though she talks about how she needs a sport where she “only has herself to blame”. This revealing conversation is a part of the interviews conducted in ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ as is the shots where the interview continues over the top of footage of the characters doing their jobs or on the streets. At minute twenty-seven of ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ we meet a character called ‘Jonathan’ who is the only painter in town. He describes his paintings and how he used to sleep on the streets as we see shots of kids on the streets. This acts as a visual confirmation of what Jonathan is saying, whereas in ‘Turning Points’ it is used as a contradiction to highlight insecurities.
‘Turning Points’ was one of a number of short documentaries that were edited together into a longer film called ‘Värmland Stories’. The similarities between this bigger project and ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ are much more observable than with ‘Turning Points’ on its own. For a start both ‘Värmland Stories’ and ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ seem to have the same structure. ‘Värmland Stories’ is made up of twenty plus short documentaries placed together to form a wide look at one place. Not all the documentaries have direct links to each other but all offer a bigger insight into Värmland as a place and what it is to make documentaries. Similarly ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ is a collection of stories from people and places surrounding Lake Victoria giving us an better view at the effect the Nile Perch has had on many different communities and people, as well as asking questions about the illegal arms trade and the connection this has to the fish.
Throughout the two films there are changes in stories and both use two different tools to make the distinction between ‘chapters’. Although these ‘chapters’ are different to one another every part of each film flows as one story. In ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’, Sauper used black screens with text often to introduce the characters we were watching but also to set a mood or give information about what we will be watching next. A few examples are at forty minutes in, “Two million white people eat Victoria fish every day”, sixty-three minutes in, “A few million Africans eat… what the big planes would not carry”, and at ninety minutes in when talking about the Congo, Angola etc, “…the bloodiest conflicts in history since WWII”. All of these screens are used to augment what is being seen on screen or what is about to be seen. In ‘Värmland Stories’ a very different approach is used. Instead of having screens with information, throughout the film were hear a narrator who is never seen. The quality of the sound mixed with the fact that when we hear the voice we are often watching footage from a moving vehicle be it a plane, bus or view from a car window. The voice, much like the text in ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ is a reoccurring theme throughout the film and acts to break up and inform the audience of specific traits the documentary films and filmmakers have. A few examples are at three minutes and twenty seconds, “…one of these principles is curiosity…”, at eighteen minutes, “…turning the unfamiliar into the familiar…” and just before the thirty minute mark, “…not that concerned with technical perfection…”.
The films start and end in a very similar way. With ‘Värmland Stories’ we hear the buzz of a plane as a shot looking out the window of a plane fades onto screen. The wing is seen extending into a dusk sky as it slowly turns into night all the while the flashing light on the end of the wing lights up the screen in controlled beats. Around twenty seconds into this sequence a melancholic tune is heard played by a guitar, which takes us through the credits and the title and into the first short documentary. With ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ the credits come in first, red and white on a black screen and then a sad tune played by a string instrument partnered with the noise from an air traffic control office. As a shot of the sea comes on screen we see the shadow of a plane and singing joins in with the strings as the shot pans up until the shadow moves out of frame and the plane casting it moves in. The shot is taken from another plane, we then cut to a shot taken from underneath a plane, looking down onto the passing landscape where the huge shadow of the plane sweeps over the ground like the grim reaper. The plane is low in the sky as if coming in to land and so in both films we start with the feeling of arriving by plane with a musical accompaniment. The shadows of the planes in ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ also mirror the end of ‘Värmland Stories’. At minute forty-seven from a black screen we hear – like at the beginning of the documentary – the buzz of plane engines. After a few seconds the image appears taking up the left hand side of the screen and leaving the right side black. We see the shadow of the wing as the plane moves down the runway before the narration kicks in and the plane starts climbing, leaving the ground behind. As it pulls up the full shadow of the plane comes into view along with the landscape spreading to the horizon, which is when the title appears on the right of the screen before all goes black. In the same way we have a plane taking off at the end of ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’. Instead of being shot from within the plane it is tracked down the runway from atop a hill a few kilometers away from the plane. There is a woman watching and smiling as the plane takes off, looking from the plane to the camera. The camera pans, following the plane down the runway and then stops letting the plane take off and exit the frame. Both films start and end with this device of arriving and although use the departure of a plane as an end sequence they have different feels. Because in ‘Värmland Stories’ the shot is from within the plane we are leaving with it and so an end is more definitive but with ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ we watch the plane leave from a distance leaving us behind with the sense that the story we just travelled through is not yet over.
