Film may be a half step behind music as a rapidly traded digital commodity, but the medium is well on its way toward an irreversible evolution. As film stock gets replaced by zeros and ones, the classic experience of a night at the cinema recedes into the past. What remains is a web−based market for instantly accessible art, but only a fragmented online community with which to share it — we're oversaturated with content but can no longer tap into the common film−going experience we once had.
With an unexpected step in the other direction, Sam Green and Dave Cerf offer up "Utopia in Four Movements," a "live documentary" shadowing the rise and fall of faith in humanity's collective future. The film is full of fever dreams of progress and promise that never quite caught on but can proffer wisdom even as they disappear. As the film plays, the co−directors gently guide their audience through these visions of a better tomorrow, with Cerf in the shadows manipulating sound, Green taking the stage with honest and unadorned narration and the Quavers giving a live musical performance to shape the film's score.
If this all leans a bit toward performance art, it does so in a manner that draws the best from the medium. There's honesty without pretension, clarity rather than obscurity and that essential element of humanity that's often lacking in the coldness of a traditional film.
The actual content of "Utopia" ranges from the world's largest shopping mall in Dongguan, China to the creation of Esperanto as a "universal" language, but Green remains a fascinated observer throughout, never lapsing into either didacticism or polemics. This isn't the disembodied voice of an overanxious political radical. Instead, it's a flesh−and−blood man, and one whose enthusiasm can't help but wash over his audience.
This quality of passive, interested observation characterizes the work as a whole. In a sense, it's feature−length portraiture, telling stories rather than espousing platforms and speaking to the heart, not the head. It's all too rare that a documentary can claim such an approach along with provocative intellectual content, but here it is a feat made to look easy.
The film is effective precisely because — not in spite — of Green's reticence to offer up a prepackaged solution or mandate for human behavior. Pressed hard enough, would he have some idea, some prescription for our society? Probably. But he's too honest a storyteller for that, and too willing to admit his own smallness in the scope of an idea so grand as utopia.
Right alongside that honesty comes a careworn, unpolished beauty that slips directly into his filmmaking style. The portraits of its varied cast are positively gorgeous — simple frames of close−ups, often wreathed in natural light, make for non−elaborate but memorable shots. They offer clues into the meaning submerged beneath the far−flung ideas on display.
Beneath the layers, it is a picture about human connection, about groups of people and the ideological bonds that keep them tied to one another. And that, on the face of it, is exactly what makes Green's live, poignant and self−effacing narration a necessity, not a luxury. Along with the stirrings of the live musical accompaniment, it creates a warm, tactile atmosphere, rich with feeling and personality — it gives us something human.
"Utopia" recognizes our flaws, including fleeting ideologies, and dying movements with heartfelt sentiment, more so than it mourns them. What we're left with is a snapshot of fervor in plain color, a sort of far−off respect for those baptized with idealism — a reverence for the budding hope and faith they show not only in their own selves but in the potential of humanity at large.
Green wisely elects not to wallow in sorrow or wanton longing for an idealized version of the way things were. He doesn't belabor the often harrowing nature of the times in which we live. Instead, he recognizes it, moves around it and begins exploring, delving into the present as a bridge to the future, and above all, just wondering aloud.
At first, the meaning in each movement may seem as fleeting as the utopia it describes. But, if you burrow deeply enough and search long enough, something will indeed take shape — far off in the distance.
"Utopia in Four Movements" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2010 and is currently touring across the country and internationally. It screened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston on Saturday, Feb. 26.
