Gateway Cinephiles

2007 (Canada)
Director: Yung Chang
Viewed: July 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze dangles delicately in the documentary space between an unvarnished portrait of life and a nimble examination of social issues. Deceptively modest in its approach and laced with swift, unexpected stabs of pathos, Yangtze is most essentially a glimpse of a land in flux. Chang is plainly fascinated with the ways that epic changes to landscapes and societies sweep some people along, raise others to heady heights, and drown still others without a glimmer of pity. Yangtze is primarily the tale of “Cindy” Shui Yu, a sixteen-year-old Chinese peasant (though she looks younger) who takes a job on a kitschy river cruise in order to help her family claw its way out of poverty. Chang, however, frequently wanders away to gaze at the brown expanse of the Yangtze River, to peek in on the struggles of Cindy’s parents, or to listen placidly to others only tangentially related to the story. In this way, Yangtze moves with plodding resolve from the personal to the universal and back again, its intentions naked but always accented with remarkable insight and empathy.

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2007 (USA)
Director: Werner Herzog
Viewed: July 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print

The Discovery Channel and its lesser edutainment progeny are a bit like eccentric Victorian naturalists, disseminating wonders and grotesqueries for an ecological spectacle that would made Barnum proud. This, perhaps more than the Bowdlerization or Disneyfication of Nature, is one of the more unfortunate legacies of the nature documentary. Art has receded in favor of the accumulation of curious factoids and gruesome oddities for their own collectible sake. Thank God, then, for Werner Herzog. The German director has spent decades carefully building his cynical credibility. As a result, he can approach the natural world with the same awestruck notes as any Discovery feature, even as he pushes beyond the banal limits of such fare in the pursuit of something more probing and, well, visionary.

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