Feel the electricity (from CBC)

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Feel the electricity

Act of God is filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal's exploration of lightning strikes

Last Updated: Tuesday, April 28, 2009 | 4:01 PM ET Comments10Recommend19

By Susan Noakes, CBC News

Filmmaker Jennifer Baichwald's new documentary Act of God examines the phenomenon of being struck by lighting. (Alex Hermant/Mongrel Media)
A month ago, Jennifer Baichwal secured the opening spot at the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto with Act of God, her enigmatic meditation on being struck by lightning.
The project was three years in the making. After a couple of years of research, Baichwal sent her cinematographer husband, Nick de Pencier, out into the storm to get hypnotic shots of gathering thunderheads, then collected stories from all over the world about people whose lives have been changed by lightning.

'When you think about it, the lightning bolt coming out of the sky is kind of the perfect metaphor for the paradox of being singled out by randomness.'

—Jennifer Baichwal

The Toronto-based director formed Mercury Films with de Pencier more than 10 years ago. In documentaries like Let It Come Down: The Life of Paul Bowles, The True Meaning of Pictures and Manufactured Landscapes (her acclaimed work about photographer Edward Burtynsky), Baichwal has frequently focused on artists and the nature of the creative process. She has also made a series of short documentaries about Canadian artists, including Michael Ondaatje, Judith Thompson and Michael Snow. Baichwal’s other preoccupations are philosophical and spiritual, as seen in films such as The Holier It Gets, about her trek to the source of the Ganges River in India. Act of God pulls the artistic and metaphysical strands together.
The film opens with a reflection by Canadian playwright James O’Reilly, who wrote a play called Act of God, about surviving a lightning strike 28 years ago. “I can't accept that it happened for a reason, nor can I really accept that there is no reason. The only way to carry on is to be humble, and a little bit in awe of these things you can't really understand,” he says.
Another prominent voice in the documentary is American novelist Paul Auster, who witnessed a friend being killed by lightning when he was 14. Like O’Reilly, Auster waited years to write about it. Baichwal also tracked down a storm chaser in France, a group of Mexican mothers whose children were killed by lightning during a religious festival, and an African religion centred around a lightning god called Shango. The most enigmatic part of the film is an experiment that tested the brain signals of improvisational guitarist Fred Frith.
Baichwal is a multiple award winner at Hot Docs, and her international prestige has grown substantially since Manufactured Landscapes. Act of God is a little less startling, but it’s also a more personal film. Baichwal spoke to CBCNews.ca about the process of making her new documentary.

Q: What fascinated you about lightning?
A: When you think about it, the lightning bolt coming out of the sky is kind of the perfect metaphor for the paradox of being singled out by randomness. People use it that way. They say, “It was like being struck by lightning, it was a bolt out of the blue.” Because of that as a natural event, the fact that it embodies this tension between meaning and chance and meaning and randomness, that was really the spark of the idea.
Of course, James O’Reilly’s monologue about being struck by lightning, Act of God, and Paul Auster’s story were huge catalysts in the beginning, because both of them resist attributing unwarranted meaning to this event, but keep circling around it.