IT BEGINS WITH SPEED, the red flash of taillights in the night, the illuminated city bright against the dark. Over the images we hear a voice, resonant in its drawl as the images move to decimated mountains, poisoned streams, and rushing city crowds. The landscapes are swallowed by machines, the people lost to their digital devices as the voice offers a poem about a nightmare where all is sacrificed for an abstract “Objective.” On-screen we are seeing that nightmare, and it looks very much like our daily lives.
The speaker is Wendell Berry, the poet, farmer, and prophet who has been among America’s most sustained voices for the created world and the people and places that are among its members. Many of those who have read Berry say he changed their lives, but even though he has published more than 50 books and won literary accolades, including a National Humanities Medal given to him by President Obama, Berry is not particularly well known in many circles. It was that widespread lack of familiarity with Berry and the urgent goodness of his vision that prompted filmmaker Laura Dunn to create her latest film, Look and See.
Dunn’s earlier film The Unforeseen was a documentary about development around Austin, Texas, and the destruction that came with it. The film has a segment with Berry reading a poem as images pass by, very much like the opening of Look and See. After screenings of the film, many viewers asked who was reading the poem. Dunn decided to make a film about Berry, a person whose writings had deeply changed her own life. This would offer several logistical and creative challenges.
“I wanted to do a portrait of Wendell Berry,” Dunn told Sojourners in a phone conversation. “And yet he didn’t want the camera on him, and he doesn’t want the attention on him. He talks about how we make idols of people and they’re not real.” Instead, Berry told Dunn, “I am my place, and the people are my place, and the people around me are who I am.”
This, then, would be her way of offering a portrait of Wendell Berry: Not to look at him, but to look with him at the landscape and people of his place, Henry County, Ky. In fact, between the film’s premiere at SXSW (the South by Southwest festival) in 2016 and its showing at Sundance this year, there was a re-edit and retitling from The Seer to Look and See—a change made at Berry’s request.
“What does he see?” was the guiding question of the film, Dunn says. “We tried to do an ethnographic portrait of Henry County ... not project some agenda onto the place, but just try to learn and see, and listen to the place itself.”
Listening to the land and its people
The film remains a portrait of Berry, including stills of Berry over the course of his writing and farming life, accompanied by audio from the interviews Dunn conducted with him. But it also includes interviews with the small-to-medium-scale farmers who surround him. As we hear Berry and the other farmers who work this Kentucky land, we learn to recognize their love for the place and its way of life. We also learn to see the struggle of these farmers and the desperate lengths they go to remain.
Dunn talks about one of the young farmers she interviewed for the film, a man who grew up on a dairy farm: “His parents didn’t want him to farm because they didn’t see a lot of economic opportunity in it,” Dunn says, “but for him it’s just a passion and he’s trying to figure it out.” The young man is working side jobs, doing whatever he can to stay on the land. The story of farmers like this has been relatively untold. “I [wanted to show] the reality of the middle farmer, not the huge agribusiness farmer or the Ivy League-educated person who decides to come back to the land, buys 100 acres, and starts an organic CSA. Those are important people and an important part of Berry’s story. But a lot of the farmers are the middle-sized to smaller generational family farmers who are being completely squeezed out by the global economic pattern.”
Against that pattern, Berry points us to an economy of gifts. That vision is one rooted in Berry’s Christianity, a theme that comes in at the edges of the film. “[Berry] talks a lot about listening and waiting. Listening to the birds and the water ... it is a different way to live than asserting your own voice,” Dunn says. “It’s the opposite of the kind of imperialist or industrialist worldview.” She compares it to Facebook and Instagram, this attempt to present ourselves to the world rather than to see the world or let ourselves be seen in our imperfections and vulnerabilities. “There’s a humbling,” she says, “a humility that is necessary.”
This sense of humble listening affected the aesthetics of the documentary. Dunn says that Berry offers “an aesthetic that allows for imperfection to be a part of the story.” She tried to follow this in how shots were framed for the film. Dunn said that she “wanted the aesthetics of a worldview that celebrates the natural patterns, that recognizes us as finite beings against a larger creation.” Filming in beautiful rural settings could offer a cinematographer the temptation of creating manicured images of green pastures and happy cows, like the images in our supermarkets that cover over the truth of industrial agriculture. Instead, Dunn said, “I didn’t want a perfectly framed shot every time. You know that kind of killed the life of it; that’s not really how we see.”
While farming remains a central theme in the film, it also offers one vision of a life well lived, of a home economy that has found its place on earth. Central to this is Wendell Berry’s wife, Tanya, who appears in the film and, with their daughter Mary, becomes as much a subject of the film as Wendell himself. Dunn says, “I joke to people that I want to retitle the film and call it a portrait of Tanya Berry ... for me as a mom and a homemaker, Tanya is a real mentor.” Dunn adds, “She imbues the domestic realm with so much artistry and artfulness, and purpose and meaning. But seeing that life in a kind of holistic way is not the way we’ve been raised. And so, she sets an example for me that is very inspiring.”
When Dunn is asked how her time spent with the Berrys affected her own life, she says that the lived vision Wendell and Tanya represent offers a challenge to the way we all live, and to her personally. “It challenges you to really be more present in your own life,” Dunn says, “and to slow down and do what is important in your own life.”
Looking alongside Berry, through the eyes of this beautiful film, does the same. The viewer leaves challenged and changed, called to live more deeply as a creature, embracing what Berry calls “the given life in the given world.”
Ragan Sutterfield is an Episcopal priest in his native Arkansas. He writes regularly at thewaywepractice.com.
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!