How to Blow Up a Pipeline: ​‘You just try to live in a way that min­imis­es your reprehensibility’

The dar­ing How to Blow Up a Pipeline ensconces the prin­ci­ples of eth­i­cal ecoter­ror­ism as detailed in the 2021 non-fic­tion book of the same name by Andreas Malm with­in a Hol­ly­wood-style heist thriller, com­bin­ing a rad­i­cal polit­i­cal out­look with blood-pump­ing enter­tain­ment val­ue. So who bet­ter than the team behind this provoca­tive pow­der keg – director/​producer/​writer Daniel Gold­haber, star/​producer/​writer Ariela Bar­er, producer/​writer Jor­dan Sjol, and edi­tor Daniel Gar­ber – to dis­cuss the mul­ti­far­i­ous ins-and-outs of activist cin­e­ma, what­ev­er that term might mean.

LWLies: To get every­one on the same page – how would you start to define activist cin­e­ma, a term that’s so porous and loaded?

Daniel Gold­haber: Mar­vel. What Marvel’s doing right now.

Please. We’ve only got so much time here.

Daniel Gar­ber: It’s a huge, neb­u­lous term.

Gold­haber: By and large, cin­e­ma is one of the pri­ma­ry dri­vers of pop­u­lar cul­ture. Mak­ing activist cin­e­ma means mak­ing cin­e­ma with an eye towards push­ing the cul­ture in a par­tic­u­lar, polit­i­cal direc­tion. Activist cin­e­ma is dif­fer­ent than ​‘being an activist,’ I’d say, but it’s still about using the ways by which cin­e­ma man­u­fac­tures cul­ture to ini­ti­ate a shift in per­cep­tion of or con­ver­sa­tion around an idea. Maybe you want to intro­duce unfa­mil­iar modes of sto­ry­telling or rep­re­sen­ta­tion to pro­voke that dia­logue. Some­times, it might even pro­voke action, but then you start to get into some fine-lined stuff with the dif­fer­ence between activist cin­e­ma and pro­pa­gan­da. I think there’s a spec­trum there, but gen­er­al­ly, when peo­ple talk about activist cin­e­ma, they’re talk­ing about every­thing right up to the point of call­ing for spe­cif­ic action or overt pro­mo­tion of spe­cif­ic ideas.

One vec­tor by which we assess activist cin­e­ma seems to be less con­cerned with the con­tent con­tained with­in a film than the cir­cum­stances of its mak­ing, the prac­tices out­side the text. Do you see these as hold­ing equal import?

Gold­haber: You can’t real­ly sep­a­rate the two. The mate­r­i­al cir­cum­stances that go into pro­duc­tion, that is the film, same way you might judge a paint­ing based on know­ing about the medi­um, the artist. Every once in a while, a movie that appears to be invest­ed in activism turns out to have orig­i­nat­ed in non­ac­tivist places, but it comes down to the say­ing about how every film is also a doc­u­men­tary of its own mak­ing. The inten­tion­al­i­ty of pro­duc­tion ulti­mate­ly shapes the fin­ished piece in one way or anoth­er. Espe­cial­ly because build­ing a film pro­duc­tion is such a care­ful bal­anc­ing act informed by pol­i­tics and ethics and morals, that you can’t help rep­re­sent­ing your own pol­i­tics as a film­mak­ing team. There’s an align­ment between the two, that’s just the nature of the beast.

If that’s the case, can true or even just effec­tive activist cin­e­ma only come through inde­pen­dent chan­nels? Work­ing with larg­er cor­po­rate insti­tu­tions — that’s usu­al­ly the source of what activism rails against, no?

Jor­dan Sjol: Think­ing from an insti­tu­tion­al per­spec­tive, no mat­ter where you are, you’re always going to be caught up in some coun­ter­vail­ing force to what we’d think of as the activist goal. So blow­ing that off and say­ing it can exist here and can’t exist there, I don’t know. You can find ways to work with­in plen­ty of con­texts that are per­haps slight­ly sub­ver­sive of the insti­tu­tion they’re inside.

Gar­ber: You’ve got plen­ty of polit­i­cal Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ers from the clas­si­cal era who worked against and with­in the stu­dio sys­tem. Those forces are always going to exist, and indi­vid­u­als find their own way to push back.

Gold­haber: Tak­ing the use case of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, the pur­pose behind the movie was to make a work of pop­u­lar cin­e­ma that also dis­sem­i­nates an idea that has been gen­er­al­ly taboo to dis­cuss in pub­lic, and to do that in a broad way for a broad audi­ence. The activist notion is that if you smash the taboo, some­thing can come of that which might be inter­est­ing. If you’re mak­ing a movie in the pop cin­e­ma vein, you’ve got to engage in the struc­tures that pro­duce and dis­sem­i­nate pop­u­lar things. Maybe you’ll pre­mière at a fes­ti­val spon­sored by the Roy­al Bank of Cana­da, or some oth­er enti­ty with mon­ey in fos­sil fuel extraction.

Your film in par­tic­u­lar espous­es some pret­ty deeply held prin­ci­ples, but oper­at­ing in the real world, it’s all a mat­ter of degrees and nego­ti­a­tions. Is it just a mat­ter of find­ing a hap­py medi­um between ide­al­ism and pragmatism?

Sjol: In this way, I think it’s per­fect­ly par­al­lel to being alive in this moment. You’re always going to be com­plic­it in soci­etal struc­tures you have strong objec­tions to, so you’re always find­ing your own place on a moral gra­di­ent. You just try to live in a way that min­imis­es your reprehensibility.

Buy­ing an apple, using a lap­top – these things have an
unavoid­able moral valence.

Gold­haber: Well, not unavoid­able. It’s just some­thing most of us choose not to avoid.

Unthink­able, for me. I like apples.

Gold­haber: You could avoid all this, but then you wouldn’t be able to par­tic­i­pate in the cre­ation and spread of cul­ture. That’s the big thing, for us. To plug into the mass con­scious­ness takes a moral com­pro­mise right from the get-go. Anoth­er exam­ple that comes to me is peo­ple crit­i­cis­ing Twit­ter, on Twit­ter. I see this all the time, and it’s the same thing. By doing this, you’re feed­ing into and legit­imis­ing the plat­form you’d like to reform, but how else would you engage in the ref­or­ma­tion of Twitter?

Do these prin­ci­ples func­tion dif­fer­ent­ly under fic­tion films ver­sus doc­u­men­tary? Do the logis­tics of activism change when you’re fol­low­ing some­one else’s efforts, as Lau­ra Poitras does with Nan Goldin?

Gar­ber: I have two kind of con­tra­dic­to­ry answers to that. The first is that I do think there’s a dis­tinc­tion there, in that doc­u­men­taries do make a claim to a cer­tain rela­tion­ship to real­i­ty that fic­tion films don’t, and that can be mean­ing­ful in how you engage with the world. In mak­ing a fic­tion film, you’re build­ing a tem­po­rary vil­lage of pro­duc­tion, and that’s arti­fi­cial. Even if you claim to have some rela­tion­ship to real life, you’ve got a struc­ture around you insu­lat­ing you from the entropy of every­day life, what’s occur­ring in the rest of the world. This is unlike a doc­u­men­tary, in which Laura’s out in the field, poten­tial­ly putting her­self in harm’s way.

On the oth­er hand, as an edi­tor of both docs and nar­ra­tive films, I think there’s some sig­nif­i­cant over­lap. In doc­u­men­tary, you’re still mak­ing deci­sions about how to con­struct and bal­ance a sto­ry, which ulti­mate­ly is a dras­tic over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of what’s occur­ring in the world. That trans­for­ma­tion of raw footage into a fin­ished film, that’s a deci­sion to cre­ate a work of semi-fic­tion by omission.

With doc­u­men­tary espe­cial­ly, you get into the ques­tion of how visu­al vocab­u­lary fig­ures into all this. There are so many issue doc­u­men­taries work­ing from this same cook­ie-cut­ter tem­plate; does sub­ver­sive mes­sag­ing require an accord­ing­ly sub­ver­sive style?

Sjol: Part of why cin­e­ma feels like such a potent tool is that it does get to a lev­el of deep sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence, the way we sense and per­ceive the world. We all know how effec­tive cin­e­ma can be as pro­pa­gan­da, build­ing a sense of nation­al belong­ing, because it goes below per­cep­tion. Style, hav­ing a style that con­sid­ers the impact of image on per­cep­tion, is one of the many approach­es fold­ed into all the theory.

Ariela Bar­er: What we cared about espe­cial­ly with Pipeline was being unpre­ten­tious in com­mu­ni­cat­ing our ideas. It’s so easy to iso­late peo­ple and let these ideas become heady, but a sec­tion of your audi­ence – the peo­ple who need to engage with this the most – will lose inter­est if you’re annoy­ing about it. At a cer­tain point, you have to put the ego aside and say, ​‘I don’t need to be the smartest per­son in the room if I want every­one to get in this room with me.’ You want to get your con­cept out into the world.

Gold­haber: And that notion about pre­ten­sion cuts both ways. It’s about not mak­ing some­thing alien­at­ing or over­ly eso­teric for audi­ences, but also about the oppo­site ten­den­cy, not mak­ing some­thing con­de­scend­ing. Audi­ences resent being treat­ed like babies, plus that con­tributes to an over­all degra­da­tion of cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage. There was this per­cep­tion for so long that peo­ple were nat­u­ral­ly averse to doc­u­men­tary as dry and infor­ma­tion­al, but then once they were made more wide­ly avail­able by stream­ing, we saw that wait, no, peo­ple can’t get enough of this shit. They respond to good docs with good film­mak­ing, as long as they give them­selves the chance.

About genre, which ties into this: genre is a way to organ­ise sto­ries into cat­e­gories we’re famil­iar with, and so when we see sto­ries in these rhythms, there’s a com­mu­nal under­stand­ing. In main­stream film, we per­pet­u­al­ly see movies about rad­i­cal­ism that engage with con­ven­tion­al gen­res in an uncrit­i­cal way, and that’s tak­en as a dilu­tion of the activist mes­sage. But the thing is, if genre rep­re­sents a com­mu­nal base of knowl­edge, embed­ding that activist mes­sage in such a pub­lic point of access is radical.

One great exam­ple of this is anoth­er film from Lau­ra Poitras, her Edward Snow­den movie Cit­i­zen­four. The film unabashed­ly embraces the spy genre, and uses those cul­tur­al mark­ers to com­mu­ni­cate the mes­sage – and in 2014, this was still a dif­fi­cult mes­sage to broad­cast – that gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance has made spies of all of us. A talk­ing-head­type movie, one with­out roots in genre, wouldn’t have hit in the same way.