High, Wild and Free

Most documentary films these days leave me cold. 'Reality' TV has infected documentary film making to a distressing degree. Those movies that don't suffer from an overdose of fakery still seem to be riddled with CGI and endless interviews with people in white lab coats sitting in suspiciously well-lit 'labs'. I hate all of this crap and I rarely watch modern documentary films any more because of it.

For the most part I find that I have to reach back a few decades at least to find documentaries that don't make me want to throw a brick at the screen. One that I find myself coming back to again and again is 'High Wild and Free,' by Gordon Eastman.

The film is a totally unscripted (as far as I could tell, anyhow) document of a months-long ramble through the Canadian wilderness by Eastman in 1968. He appears to have done most of the camera work himself. There is no plot except a vague effort to get from point A to point B but I never noticed this fact until the 3rd or 4th time watching it. Eastman goes fishing for salmon, builds a canoe and floats down a river, hunts sheep, and generally farts around and has a good time.

It wasn't until I was half-way through my first viewing of the movie before I noticed that there is no original audio. The whole thing looks like it was probably shot on 16mm without any sort of sound. All of the audio is provided in the form of narration by Eastman, in the style of Bruce Brown's 'Endless Summer,' which came out that same year.

In fact, 'High Wild and Free' is very much an outdoorsman's version of 'Endless Summer' in terms of narration, era, and overall style. Both are footloose, unscripted journeys that were obviously undertaken for their own sake with the film-making being an excuse for the trip. This, to me, is what outdoor documentary film-making can be at its best. Go out and have an adventure, try not to get the cameras smashed up too badly, and figure that something good can be edited together from what results.

Nobody does this any more. And yet the results were so great back when people did it. Neither Eastman nor Bruce Brown really knew anything about film-making. What they had was initiative and the guts to go out there and live a good story. I could say the same about Thor Heyerdahl, who made the film, 'Kon-Tiki' about his famous voyage across much of the Pacific ocean in a balsa raft and won an Oscar for it without having any notion of film-making whatsoever.

Live a good story and try to get it on camera. This, to me, seems like the right approach to making a really good outdoor documentary. This was essentially what I did to produce my forthcoming travel/adventure book, 'Eating Aliens,' and I hope that it will be the basis for the documentary films that I hope to make over the next few years.

Meanwhile, I want to strongly suggest that you give 'High Wild and Free' a look. They have it for instant play on Netflix. If you can get past the corny opening song then its an excellent look at a moment in documentary film making that seems to have passed us by.