Riv­er

Flow­ing like an auda­cious blend of spec­tac­u­lar cin­e­matog­ra­phy, clas­si­cal music and poet­ic nar­ra­tion, Jen­nifer Peedom and Joseph Nizeti’s Riv­er aims to restore our rev­er­ence for the beau­ty and fragili­ty of our planet’s arteries.

As with God­frey Reggio’s 1982 time-lapse odyssey, Koy­aanisqat­si, what lies in the grey area between non­fic­tion and audio­vi­su­al abstrac­tion is cinema’s artis­tic abil­i­ty to por­tray the hor­rors of indus­tri­al and racial cap­i­tal­ism. In Riv­er, the waters soon turn murky as con­text is large­ly omit­ted in favour of exquis­ite yet repet­i­tive aer­i­al imagery depict­ing aston­ish­ing nat­ur­al land­scapes, tidal cur­rents, and ele­men­tal forces.

There’s an ill-fit­ting, if not alien­at­ing qual­i­ty to Peedom and Nizeti’s choice of pair­ing footage of het­eroge­nous Indige­nous peo­ples with the music of Bach and Vival­di – the son­ic embod­i­ment of west­ern high cul­ture. It points towards a his­tor­i­cal fix­a­tion that the West­ern world has with ​“prim­i­tivism” – one that fos­ters a utopi­an long­ing for a pre-indus­tri­al way of life through a return to nature.

Tan­gi­bly dis­tant and osten­si­bly objec­ti­fied, these peo­ples’ rit­u­als and tra­di­tions become as abstract as the film’s air­borne cin­e­matog­ra­phy. In his nar­ra­tion, Willem Dafoe asks us to pon­der, ​“As we have learned to har­ness the pow­er of rivers, have we for­got­ten to revere them?”, to which I raise, ​“As we have learned to con­demn colo­nial vio­lence, have we for­got­ten to respect those most affect­ed by it?”

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