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THE CHANCES OF THE WORLD CHANGING
Contributed by Sara Schieron
Saturday, 13 May 2006
THE CHANCES OF THE WORLD CHANGING is an intelligently shot documentary
about the work of Richard Ogust, an affluent Manhattan writer who, one
fateful day, found an endangered turtle in a Chinese restaurant, saved
her from her fate, housed her, and named her the Empress. Over the
next five years, the film tells us, "Michael built his empire." At
first, inhabiting his Manhattan Penthouse, this diverse "assurance
colony" of endangered turtles (numbering over one thousand) is
inhospitably forced out of apartments, cities and states for
innumerable reasons. Richly scored and carefully edited, the film
follows a pace that is as poetic as it is reliably lifelike. The film
moves as does the turtles, it tensely crawls, and that is both
fascinating and beloved.
Animated by deliberate camera work, tons of slow and anticipated focus changing, we see in the first frames of the film that the world changes as we stand still. And promptly the world changes again, when, after a series of careful focus pulling in a natural backdrop, the camera pans to show Manhattan in the distance. The personality of Ogust, the director/narrator Eric Daniel Metzgar tells us, had been covered by CNN, NBC, CBS and ABC and was the kind of story New Yorkers love because it proves that everything is happening in some way in the city. What the film proves, however, is what Ogust preserves in this Penthouse is in contrast (and conflict) with what is happening in the world outside. What is happening in this penthouse is the loving safeguarding of creatures that without this care sit precariously on a slippery slope towards extinction. The outside world, in some ways, seems to be willing to accept this loss, and as death is a natural part of existence, this fact isn't so hard to understand.
Showing footage of both the Asian Turtle trade and Ogust's struggles against the forces that threaten his empire, THE CHANCES OF THE WORLD CHANGING stands in the fringes of many battles, focusing (if I can say that) on one battle, still quite aware of the others on the outskirts. On the one hand the film is something of an epic about a doomed and massive project to save creatures that (frighteningly) could fit in a soup bowl. On the other hand, the film tersely points a finger at the future and the point of conservation. Using narration as counterpoint to image, we are shown Ogust at battle with the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, as Metzgar explains, "this proves what we had come to understand in the past months. Conservation today is the never ending battle of compromise between procedure and passion, fought with words, dollars and cell phones."
Clearly, the overwhelming conundrum is if anyone should let the turtles (or any creature, for that matter) "Go Gentle into that Good Night", but whether death is the war or death is the battle, is uncertain. The space separating the work of resistance and the work of acceptance is very fragile and in so being, it's frightening. Without being silly or exploitative, the camera does its fair share of seeing the universe of the turtles that fuel Ogust's passion and devastation. Sympathetically, the creatures are depicted in their plastic pens, eating, sleeping, at one point, crawling up the side (possibly to escape?) but like Sisyphus, only sliding down the walls. Unwittingly transformed into visual metaphors the turtles embody their own existence and demise, as does Ogust, as does every living body. And sweetly, the film shows the world changing in its own tense and bittersweet crawl: pushing through resistance, and acceptance, choosing life as an opportunity to finish more than one good fight.
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