Is Love Elemental?
EARTH. AIR. FIRE. WATER. These four elements have fascinated us in foundational ways since antiquity, forming the basis of how we see the world and shape our stories. In the ancient world, these elemental divisions led to the most compelling tales. These were the stories about people who flew too close to the fire, built arks to stave off apocalyptic floods, or visited an infernal underworld and survived to tell the tale. They gave rise to narratives that provided moral or theological resonance or were memorable, visceral pieces of amusement.
Modern documentaries are enmeshed in these elemental aspects of storytelling. After the early cinema “actualities” where quotidian behaviours were a novelty—trains entering a station or workers leaving a factory—the non-fiction art form added dazzle, taking viewers to what were considered the extremes of experience where few would travel.
Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), the first popular documentary feature, controversial for many aesthetic and moral reasons, saw much of its power and popular success derive from audiences revelling in the human capacity to survive and even thrive in conditions that many would believe to be inherently deadly.
Today, Nanook provides not only insight into the birth of the modern documentary with all its complications regarding recreation, staging, and directorial manipulation, it also helps define the form, where non-fiction serves as exoticized travelogue, adventure story, and anthropological investigation, all wrapped in a piece of art that lets the audience live vicariously through what’s reflected on the screen.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen a number of exceptional docs that have focused on these elemental extremes through the eyes of people
