Chasing Ice

James Balog and Jeff Orlowski team up in what turned out to be a fantastic effort in documenting vast amounts of photographic evidence of the effects of recent global temperature increases on glaciers in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland.

The footage is magnificent and the film is scored very well. James Balog's personal challenges in undertaking the project are also documented, and present an interesting angle to this style of documentary.

By presenting the footage in as non-partisan manner as possible, Chasing Ice avoids tarnishing its message with politics.

Chasing Ice This documentary meets art feature and Sundance select for Excellence in Cinematography is visually breathtaking! This had been on my watch-list for months & thankfully the Environmental Protection Agency (Great organisation which deserves more recognition for their excellent reports, which were the backbone for my thesis on environmental issues last year!) Organised a special one-off free screening in the Irish Film Institute last night and the first of a partnership series hopefully. It was great to see a full-house with an applause at the end.

The documentary follows National Geographic photographer and Extreme Ice Survey founder James Balog and his passionate team across Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and the Arctic as they installs custom-made time-lapse cameras to document never before seen glaciation at an extreme. The resulting photography is both frightening and breathtakingly beautiful.

The issues that many people seem to have with this film are that it doesn't engage in a political argument and that it doesn't provide a solution to the problem. Balog stated that this isn't a political problem, it's a universal problem. The point is he's delivering a message with his photography and he's letting the photographs do the talking, not tarnishing the message with politics. & the aim of this film is to spread awareness not to provide a solution.

This is an eye-opener and a visual reference as to how much climate change is immediately effecting our plant. At one point we witness footage of the largest ever recorded glacier calving, an iceberg larger than the island of Manhattan calves from a glacier in about 75 minutes. Politicians and energy corporation executives should be made sit a mandatory viewing of this. Seize any opportunity you get to go see this on the big screen.

You can now apply to host a screening on the Chasing Ice website!

I enjoyed seeing Chasing Ice on the opening night of Austin's SXSW Film Festival, but I was also a bit disappointed by it. The film only partly delivers on its great promise, because it can't quite figure out whether it's a national geographic-style nature documentary, a personal adventure story or an environmental advocacy film. In the end, it tries to do all of these things and doesn't quite do any of them as well as it could. Chasing Ice is at its best when it documents Extreme Ice Survey's (EIS) beautiful photography of the melting glaciers perhaps better than anyone has done before. While the photography delivers an emotional punch it can't really speak for itself. The scientific evidence requires a lot more explanation than they provide. The film starts out with clips of talking heads criticizing climate change, but they never fully answer the criticism and never fully defend the case that climate change is man-made, dangerous, and in need of an immediate global action to remedy. Nor do they provide any particular direction for what the viewer can do either personally or politically to address the problem.

Instead they spend way too much telling their own story. They delve into the technical difficulties of mounting cameras to photograph distant glaciers over a period of years, the complexities of hiking to these locations, the personal danger and discomfort they had to endure, and most peculiarly the physical problems that lead photographer James Balog experienced with his knee problems and surgeries. All these personal stories are interesting to a point, but distract from scientific case that they need to make. This should be a scientific and environmental story not a personal narrative. The powerful case that the beautiful photography makes is undermined, by poorly conceived film narrative. The average viewer needs a lot better understanding of what the melting of the glaciers means and what sort of affect this will have on their daily life in the near future. A better narrative device might have been to show the melting ice of the glaciers and then film the rising sea level in other parts of the world. Some reports have suggested that the Maldives Islands might soon be underwater. Showing where the water from the melting glaciers is ending up could have proved to be a much more powerful narrative device. I wish they had done a better job at telling an important scientific story with deep political and moral significance for the planet.

During the Q&A after the film, Balog argued that this isn't a political problem, that it is a universal problem. It may be a universal problem, but its solution requires collective political action that is based on science not emotion. They are naive if they are unwilling to engage the powerful political debate that is preventing progress on this issue.

National Geographic photographer James Balog wanted to test his skepticism about climate change. With his Extreme Ice Survey, he was able to photograph undeniable changes in some glaciers. In this documentary, Balog deploys a series of time-lapse cameras to capture a long term visual record of the world's changing glaciers. The lengths to which this is accomplished is mind boggling.

It's a compelling watch and an important work. But it's the shocking final result that will amaze you. The visual of these glaciers actually melting right before your eyes will shake you to your core as it did to me.

James Balog has one goal in mind throughout this entire documentary: to photographically demonstrate the rapid melting of our earth's glaciers. He doesn't throw statistics at us (okay, maybe one or two), and he doesn't bring politics into it, all he does is undeniably prove that the vast majority of the world's glaciers are disappearing right before our eyes.

What this documentary does is capture his journey to photograph these glaciers. It shows his struggles, his failures, and his successes. Yes, he may come off as a bit of a hero, but what he's doing truly is heroic and simply cannot be missed. The photography throughout this film is spectacular--absolutely gorgeous. In fact, he photographed an article on this topic for National Geographic, and if you've seen their photographs, you know the level of quality we're talking about here.

At the same time, however, there's kind of this sense of impending doom amidst all the beauty. It essentially shows all the damage humanity has done, in the past ten or so years alone, and I can only hope it's not too late to fix at least some of what we've caused. If this documentary can't get you to see the world and it's people differently, then I don't think much else can, his results are simply that stunning.