Jennifer Baichwal with producer/cinematographer (and husband) Nick de Pencier

Credit: Mark Wilson

Thunder Struck

Jennifer Baichwal meditates on our relationship with lightning strikes

Everyone’s got a lightning story—just ask Jennifer Baichwal. She has, after all, been collecting them: the five children in Mexico who were struck by lightning and killed; the former military man who was legally dead for nearly half an hour then  decided to change his life and become a hospice volunteer; the American literary figure who survived a close call with lightning as a teenager and now often meditates on the theme of coincidence in his work.

These are all stories told in Act of God, Baichwal’s directorial follow-up to the much-acclaimed Manufactured Landscapes—and just a fraction of the ones the former Victoria resident has heard. Baichwal says all kinds of other lightning tales have come out of the woodwork since Act of God debuted as the opening film at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival back in April.

“The published odds are 1 in 600,000, so you think it’s fairly rare, but everybody who we told about this film had some story, either themselves or someone they knew, who has had close encounters with lightning,” she says. “If there’s anything universal about the reaction, it was humility in the face of this overwhelming force and the recognition of how tiny we are in some ways, which I think is a good lesson for humans to learn.”

While this may have been a universal reaction to a lightning experience, Baichwal quickly learned that it was also paired with a wide range of others: anger, affirming or destroying belief in a higher power, or shrugging it off as nothing more than coincidence.

“No matter where you stand on that continuum between extreme randomness on one hand and extreme determinism on the other, it feels to me like it’s integral to human nature to question these things, so everybody had a different response,” she says. “We don’t just say, ‘We can’t answer this, therefore let’s not think about it,’ which would be quite a sensible thing to do. We just worry it and think it through. Even people who don’t want to attribute unwarranted meaning, like Paul Auster and James O’Reilly in the film, they still can’t stop thinking about it. Auster, all his body of work is basically about coincidence and metaphysical detective stories.”

The intention of the film, says Baichwal, is to create a piece of storytelling that would get viewers talking about these ideas.

“Like all of our films, it’s about an unanswerable question,” she says. “The specificity of lightning is perfect for the metaphor of being singled out by randomness, but that in itself is a paradox, because how can you be singled out by randomness? So it did work as this arena to examine that question. I think if we’d just had that question on its own, it would have been ponderous and pretentious and it would float up into the air.”

The film takes a linear approach, telling each individual story sequentially as opposed to cutting them up and slowly revealing their pieces to create a big climactic ending.

“I started out trying to do that, thinking, ‘It’s got to be formally clever.’ Then at month seven or eight, I realised the very thesis we were pointing to in the film, which is that perhaps the most basic meaning we bring to experiences we can’t understand is narrative—we tell stories about these things,” she says. “Each of the experiences are their own stories, they have their own arc narratively and the form I was trying for was undermining the narrative arc of each of these stories instead of just letting them be what they were.”

Also featured in Act of God is what Baichwal calls an “associative element” in the form of a sequence about improvisational musician Fred Frith—an element that some critics have felt was a little too associative.

“We put electrodes on his brain to measure the electrical impulses in his brain when he’s improvising music,” she says. “I think some people might have wanted a more concrete relationship between that and the other stories, but for us it was just to put together the ideas that the universe is electric, we are electric, our brains work electrically and improvisation in some ways is like living in the space between meaning and randomness—and the idea of your neurons firing, a brain storm is like a lightning storm, in a way.”

Following up the stellar success of 2006’s Manufactured Landscapes—which won a Genie, the Best Canadian Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance—may be tricky, but Baichwal says she and husband/co-producer/director of photography Nick de Pencier were more focussed on making the film than on its potential reception.

“We started thinking, ‘Are people going to expect something different of us?’ but when you look at all of our films, this one will be part of that body of work as much as Manufactured Landscapes will be and I wasn’t thinking about that too much when we were making it,” she says. “I was more thinking about the universe of this particular film. They’re all their own universes and they all have their own massive problems and difficulties—and they all feel like struggles that are interesting.”

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Act of God
June 7-13
Cinecenta, UVic
cinecenta.com
mercuryfilms.ca