Full Variety Review
By ROBERT
KOEHLER
Monumental - David Brower's
Fight for Wild America
A Loteria Films
presentation. Produced, directed by Kelly Duane.
With:
David Brower, Martin Litton, Stewart Udall, Jerry Mander, Floyd
Dominy, Kevin Starr, Rod Nash, Ken Brower, Barbara Brower, John
Dyer, Michael McCloskey, Michael Cohen, Roderick Nash, Phillip
Berry.
Stylish and substantial
enough to prompt
even a couch potato to action, Kelly Duane's "Monumental:
David Brower's Fight for Wild America" delivers a stirring
and visually dense account of the life and times of Brower, the
key post-WWII American environmental activist and a driving force
behind the Sierra Club. The ample display here of 16mm film shot
by the late Brower in the Western wilderness virtually makes
him a co-director alongside Duane, whose feeling for her subject
will make this an essential festfest entry and an evergreen public
TV programmer.
Fabulously styled graphics
(care of Los Angeles-based design firm Syrup) provide basic details,
including that Brower became the Sierra Club's first execexec
director 60 years after John Muir founded the group in 1892,
and that his footage used in pic was shot between 1930 and 1970,
while his vocal commentary was recorded between 1970 and 1978.
Far from its current
position as a leading environmentalist lobbying force, the club
began as a loose group of hikers especially attracted to the
rock-climbing challenges in Yosemite Valley. A trek up the awesomely
craggy Shiprock in New Mexico is recalled by Brower pal John
Dyer as one of those things young guys do for a thrill.
On his pleasant hikes,
Brower found a fine photographic teacher in Ansel Adams, who
encouraged him to fiddle with a small movie camera and record
his Sierra idylls. During WWII, Brower's mountaineering skills
became useful to the Army in Italy, where he participated in
some daring raids. But after the war, the activist in Brower
was awakened by a relentless march west by developers and the
Army Corps of Engineers, whose government-sponsored projects
first made a personal impact on Brower when a road was built
through Yosemite's unspoiled eastern side.
"Monumental"
is attuned to the details that reveal the man. For example, Brower
wasn't opposed to all roads, just paved ones; by entering Yosemite
via dirt roads, he thought, you earned your way into paradise.
Busy with a family of
four but alarmed by a nation paving itself over, Brower became
the Sierra Club's toppertopper in 1952. Shrewdly, he produced
informative films and guided river trips to show the beauty of
a remote Utah wilderness area threatened by a proposed dam. Today,
that area is the Dinosaur National Monument.
The radicalization of
Yank ecologists, and certainly Brower, may be traced to the 1956
building of the Glen Canyon Dam along the Colorado River, which
the Army Corps determined would serve as a giant water source
for growth in the West. Brower's footage of the canyon lensed
just months before dam was erected is pic's most haunting section
-- a view of natural beauty now totally submerged underneath
a man-made lake.
Wilderness footage makes
pic richly cinematic, but it's not merely inserted. A crack team
of gifted editors (experimental cineaste Nathaniel Dorsky, Anne
Flatte and Tony Saxe) and a wondrous soundtrack of various bands
playing dreamy rock give Brower's and friend Martin Litton's
lensing a blissful lift.
The '60s are shown to
have been Brower's crowning time -- he effectively saved much
of the Grand Canyon, no less, from dams, and personally steered
Lady BirdBird Johnson into a populist brand of environmentalism
that made his cause downright patriotic. Pic provides only a
short look at Brower's post-Sierra Club years, when he founded
the Earth Island Institute and kept to a much tougher line of
ecology activism.
While "Monumental"
makes an irrefutable case that Brower was one of the '60s giant
figures, Duane recognizes that his strong personality rubbed
many folks the wrong way, including his closest Sierra Club allies.
In the end, the memories
of Litton, former Interior secretary Stewart Udall, children
Ken and Barbara and old enemies like Floyd Dominy give this portrait
a human dimension.
Camera (Alpha Cine color/B&W, DV), Duane, Martin Litton,
David Brower; editors, Nathaniel Dorsky, Anne Flatte, Tony Saxe;
music, the Beachwood Sparks, Fruit Bats, the American Analog
Set, FCS North, Hayden , Kingsbury Manx, Scientific American,
American Music Club; graphic design, Syrup Design. Reviewed at
Wilshire screening room, Los Angeles, June 3, 2004. (In Los Angeles
Film Festival; also in Wine Country Film Festival.) Running time:
77 MIN.
More
Reviews and quotes:
"No individual
contributed more to the effort to protect wilderness in America
than David Brower, and no film captures the contours and passion
of that transforming effort better than Monumental. Duane's film
has a freshness and originality that sets it apart from the historical
documentaries that have come to dominate the genre." --
J. Stine, Smithsonian Institution
" Calling David
Brower an important environmental activist is like calling Hamlet
an important member of the Danish royal court. Brower invented
modern American environmental activism. This film tells you how
and why."
--John Nielsen, NPR
"In addition to
its unique documentary resources, the movie should be an invaluable
historical primer for anyone who aspires to influence government
policy, not to mention the government officials obliged to evaluate
that influence."
-- Gary Arnold, Washington Times
"It's great to
see those 16-millimeter views of Sierrans at play among Western
wonders and striking to see those sights in a grainy format instead
of lurid Imax detail. There's Yosemite, the rugged Marin coast,
the Nipomo Dunes. There's the young Brower and friends, basketball
shoes on their feet, making the first ascent of New Mexico's
Shiprock in 1939. The filmmaker's enthusiasm for that insider
footage is understandable --imagine the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr.'s home movies of the civil rights movement. . ."
--Chris Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
If Kelly Duane dabbles
in hyperbole for this portrait of the Sierra Club's influential
former president, the producer-director also constructs an engrossing
study in the power, and the perils, of charismatic single-mindedness.
A zealous outdoorsman, David Brower transformed the Sierra Club
from a friendly gang of mountaineers into a formidable force
for the preservation of America's wild spaces. Duane's research
is exhaustive and informative, but the film's real pleasures
are Brower's own Sierra Club movies of majestic mountains, canyons
and forests. As seen through his lens, these spaces are even
more commanding than the activist himself. --LA Weekly
Stylish and substantial
enough to prompt even a couch potato to action, Kelly Duane's
"Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America"
delivers a stirring and visually dense account of the life and
times of Brower, the key post-WWII American environmental activist
and a driving force behind the Sierra Club. . . . Wilderness
footage makes Monumental richly cinematic, but it's not merely
inserted. A crack team of gifted editors (experimental cineaste
Nathaniel Dorsky, Anne Flatte and Tony Saxe) and a wondrous soundtrack
of various bands playing dreamy rock give Brower's and friend
Martin Litton's lensing a blissful lift. Robert Koehler,
Variety
"Though framed
by the incendiary personality of environmental activist Brower,
Monumental is as unconventional a portrait film as its subject.
Filmmaker Kelly Duane touches on some personal highlights including
his brief tenure at the Sierra Club but what resonates most is
the footage he shot of America's most spectacular natural wonders.
Brower's passion infuses every frame and proves the old adage
about a picture being worth a thousand words, no matter how fiery."
--Movie City News
"This is the definitive
film on David Brower."
--Jon Else, Filmmaker, Cadillac Desert
A magnificent achievement,
Monumental tells the story of David Brower's charismatic leadership
of the Sierra Club. Thirty years of priceless wild lands footage
from Brower's home movies make this a "must see" for
anyone who cares about the earth and the history of the environmental
movement.
--Larry Fahn, President of the Sierra Club
"I got a sneak
peak of this documentary and it is incredible. This film combines
David Brower's own footage with Brower audio clips and interviews
with key players in the environmental movement . . . don't miss
it!"
-- Chris McNamara, Writer & Professional Climber
THE
WILDNESS WITHIN US
