Postcard of a Forest Fire is an 18 minute poetic essay film by Matt Feldman, constructed from his grainy, black and white footage of Colorado forests, devastated by wildfire. Occasional inter-titles tell a story, a first-person narrative about feeling compelled to drive back and forth from city to dying forest, trying to make sense of the destruction, and the larger fate of our world. The haunting soundtrack is built from diegetic sounds, such as insects, fire, or the sound of the traffic, but amplified and processed and mixed with instruments, until it sounds as if these images of burnt trees and ruined ecosystems are echoing uncontrollably in the narrator’s mind.
We see a hillside covered with standing snags: the central trunks of dead pines, on top of a denuded hillside, where every plant seems to have perished in the fire. These hilltops might as well have been clear-cut by a timber company, since they are left without a single living tree. At times, these shots of bare branches which have lost their bark, or hills covered with charred stumps, have a kind of grand, ghastly beauty. The vastness of the destruction is awe-inspiring, at the same time that it fills us with fear and despair.
There are several driving sequences that are sped up with time-lapse, as the protagonist flees back and forth, from city to forest. The sped-up footage emphasizes his uneasy relationship with both locations. He is only too aware that this activity, driving, is the very thing that is causing the catastrophe. (Along with our habit of suppressing periodic natural forest fires.) The titles tell us that he closes his eyes and “finds himself in Commerce City,” where the oil refineries are. Somehow, by instinct, his car draws him here, as if seeking the petroleum breast. We see scraggly weeds, in front of the pumps, and barbed-wire fences. Here, surely, lies the heart of our rush towards self-destruction.
The complex relationship between the carbon-consuming, habitat-destroying human civilization and the dwindling, collapsing ecosystems is depicted as a kind of auto-genocide, in which people attack nature, thereby assuring their own destruction and, in the long view, nature’s inevitable return to balance. The perplexed protagonist feels caught in the cross-fire, unsure where best to seek shelter from the carnage. He knows that his response, to keep driving back and forth, is only adding fuel to the fire, but he can’t seem to stop himself. It’s the current human condition in a nutshell.
We see a vintage postcard of the forest, and, in voice-over, we hear what’s written on the back, an enraptured account of a visit to a thriving paradise, with abundant wildlife, birds, shrubs, and trees. Later, the narrator tries to set the postcard on fire (it keeps going out), an attempt to grapple with the fate of the forest by literally “mistaking the map for the territory” which ends up revealing why this is such a grave epistemological error. Making a film about your feelings about a forest fire may help you to understand yourself better; it won’t do anything to help the forest.
Postcard of a Forest Fire makes it points through images and sounds, rather than through polemics and statistics. It looks at the climate crisis on an existential level, the level where it cripples our spirits, rather than intellectually or politically. It is a search for meaning in a world where the loss of vibrant, thriving ecosystems engenders a loss of meaning in our souls.
The film ends where it began, the lifeless landscape of Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes, representing the ultimate fate of collapsed ecosystems, where nothing is left alive. We are left, as the titles tell us, “in the periphery, blinded by dust.” Too overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what is happening to know how to cope. If the film’s viewer, or the reader of this article, is left too bummed out about this, I recommend a good book on permaculture, such as Gaeia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway, which includes a few inspiring examples of how intelligent permaculture design has restored areas of barren desert, turning them into thriving, living ecosystems once again.
The narrator writes that the sand from the dunes ends up “in the trunk of your car,” insisting on the film’s theme of how implicated we are in the catastrophe. Everything depends on everything else. “I leave without answers,” we read in the final title. The film isn’t telling us what to think or do about the situation; Feldman is simply reporting on what the dilemma feels like. Like a postcard, the film provides a snapshot of one moment in an ongoing disaster. We need these reports from the trenches, if only to understand how unhinged we’ve become, suffering the loss of world, barely able to comprehend the magnitude of the calamity.
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