Kitchell on Another Hot Topic with Environmental Movement Doc

Mark Kitchell’s Oscar-nominated Berkeley in the Sixties (1990) masterfully reclaimed a crucial period in history from revisionist neo-cons. His current project, an ambitious summation of the environmental movement, should encounter substantially less resistance from the Right. Perhaps that’s asking too much, given the die-hard "global warming is a hoax" crowd’s ability to use mainstream pundits (George Will, among others) to blow their smoke. The greater impediment to Kitchell’s doc, frankly, is the surge in films about climate change. "When I started out the field was pretty wide open," he ruefully notes.

That was six years ago, but Kitchell took a three-year hiatus to raise three daughters and make a commissioned film (Integral Yoga) for the California Institute of Integral Studies. The original impetus for his history of environmentalism was a lengthy stint in Los Angeles; he finally decided to abandon "the promise of working on bad television for low pay," he says with a chuckle.

The film has five acts: the conservation movement of the 1960s; the ’70s focus on pollution (sparked by Love Canal); radical environmentalism, Greenpeace and the campaign to save the whales; the international effort from 1988-92 to halt the destruction of the Amazon, with the attendant furor over biodiversity and the extinction crisis; and global climate change. If that sounds like a lot of ground to cover in 90 or a hundred minutes, you’re right. "I may say, ‘The hell with it. Go to three hours.’ But I could get Berkeley in the Sixties into two hours and I think I can get this into two," Kitchell declares from his offices in the Thoreau Center for Sustainability in the Presidio.

Kitchell sees a shift over five decades of environmental awareness and activism from specific causes to a vague, nebulous condition that doesn’t inspire outrage or marches. "Now the issues are so big, how are you supposed to address them? You can’t go out and protest against global warning. Global warming is the issue that ate the movement. It’s so big and so important that everything else pales in comparison, and the movement found that hard to deal with."

Of the 30 interviews he plans to tape, Kitchell has 15 in the can, Of course, as with his first major film, archival footage is a central element. "Berkeley in the Sixties was so concentrated, it was built on three local TV stations and a dozen or more filmmakers," Kitchell recalls. "Here an archival search is an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude larger." Kitchell plans to draw on the Sierra Club library, nature photographer/conservationist Eliot Porter’s magnificent work (exemplified by his 1963 book, The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado) and the extensive ’70s EPA still-photo project Documerica.

The challenge for environmental documentaries set on inciting people to action, from An Inconvenient Truth to Franny Amstrong’s The Age of Stupid (screening in the upcoming 52nd SFIFF), is to provoke urgency but not hopelessness. "The dance of hope and despair, that’s my shorthand for it," Kitchell says wryly. "We’ll do some version of the dance. I’m trying not to be hectoring. That’s one of the reasons that I wanted to do a history, because it would be a frame that would allow the audience to step back a little. A little cooler, a little more distance, [so] the audience would find [it] more appealing."

By this point, you might be wondering why we’ve withheld the name of the film. "For years I’ve been searching for a title and just calling it ‘The Environmental History Project,’" Kitchell says. "On the spur of the moment for a grant proposal, I latched onto ‘A Fierce Green Fire.’ The problem is there is Steve Dunsky and Steven Most’s film called Green Fire about [conservationist and writer] Aldo Leopold. It’s a messy situation," Kitchell says with a laugh. "They were there first and it’s their guy, but I may not let that stop me."

Kitchell and editors Veronica Selver (who cut Berkeley in the Sixties) and Jon Beckhardt plan to have a rough cut by June.They’re aiming to finish the film by Earth Day (in April) of 2010, but recognize that’s optimistic. "We would have to have such good luck with funding, so chances are it’ll slip," Ketchell concedes.

Notes from the Underground
Smush Media’s Gerlayn Pezanoski and Jennifer Steinman each corralled audience awards at SXSW, Pezanoski’s Mine for Documentary Feature and Steinman’s Motherland in the Emerging Visions category. Mine clips will screen along with excerpts from new work by other local filmmakers at the next SFFS Film Arts Forum April 6. … The American Cinematheque’s 11th annual Film Noir Festival, co-programmed by Noir City heavy Eddie Muller, unspools April 2-19 at the Egyptian Theatre in L.A. … Heddy Honigmann’s 2006 masterwork, Forever, hits DVD shelves Apr. 21. Bonus features include the 30-minute onstage interview critic John Anderson conducted with the director the night she received the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award at the 2007 S.F. International Film Festival.