Sara Dosa’s latest nature doc Time and Water is the frosty yin to her previous doc’s fiery yang. All of the grand romance & scale of Dosa’s 2022 documentary Fire of Love is on full display in this year’s Sundance-premiered follow up, except the temperature has plummeted to new, icy depths. In Fire of Love, Dosa profiled the love life and scientific research of famed volcanologists Katia and Maurice Kraft, all the way up to their tragic end during an especially violent volcanic eruption. In Time and Water, she instead profiles the life and work of glacier observer Andri Snær Magnason, which allows her to capture the same scale of natural phenomenon while still exploring new territory. The iciness of the subject isn’t entirely literal, either. Magnason’s personal relationship with glaciers is much more mournful than the Krafts’ relationship with volcanoes, as he is most famous for having written the first ever obituary for a dying glacier, not for his passionate love for the living ones. As a result, Time and Water is a chilling ice bath intended to shock its audience into realizing how quickly & permanently we’re losing glaciers to climate change, as communicated through the personal archives & heartbreak of those natural wonders’ volunteer spokesman.
An Icelandic literary luminary, Magnason’s advocacy for glacier preservation is more poetic than scientific. He descends from a lineage of natural explorers with a long history of first-hand scientific observation of Icelandic glaciers’ declining health, but his own professional work on the subject is much more abstract. In somber voiceover, he conveys local folktales about glaciers’ role in creating & shaping his homeland. He defines the mountainous ice blocks as “ice that has come alive,” which I doubt meets the criteria for a scientific designation. Glaciers are “alive” in the sense that they are cyclically melted & rebuilt by Arctic temperatures, though, which technically means that they can also “die.” Magnason first used his literary notoriety to draw attention to glaciers’ terminal health condition in the new climate change paradigm by writing an obituary for the first fallen glacier in 2019, immortalizing in bronze, “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.” Following that logic, this cinematic adaptation of that obituary does not spend much time explaining the capitalistic profit motives that are accelerating climate change year by year, but instead quietly mourns what’s already been lost while hoping to preserve its loving memory for a distant future.
For all of his cultural concerns as an Icelandic literary voice, Magnason’s investment in the future is largely familial. He narrates this eulogy as if it were a family photo slideshow, which Dosa punctuates with the clicks & whirs of a photo slide carousel. Alternating between the 16mm footage of his ancestor’s glacial explorations and his own digicam records of modern Icelandic homelife, Magnason hopes to visually represent the dramatic before & after of how the local natural landscape has changed while vocally apologizing to his future-adult children about the half-dead world that has been left for them to inherit. The focus on his family’s archival photography is thematically linked to the glaciers’ own natural archive, in the way they can trap vocalic ash and other particulates in ice as a record of passing time. Magnason sees that ice melting away as a kind of environmental dementia, which he’s watched creep into his own aging parents & grandparents as the years pile up on tape. It’s unavoidable to point out how tonally glacial that familial history plays out onscreen — both cold in its mournfulness and slow-moving in its monotony. As a time-elapse portrait of Iceland’s recent decades in environmental crisis, however, it lands a dramatic gut punch that leaves the audience doubled over, breathless.
If Dosa wanted to repeat Fire of Love‘s critical & commercial success, she could have hired Björk to cryptically narrate Magnason’s story the same way Miranda July narrated the Krafts’. Dosa did hire Dan Deacon to echo her previous film’s synth-abstracted score (provided by Air), but Deacon is usually restrained & icy in his own way here — only flashy in momentary flourishes of tape-warp sound effects. The overall mood of the piece is substantially more subdued than Dosa’s previous outing, which is entirely appropriate for a profile of a writer who’s most famous for issuing death certificates to glaciers with the official cause of death listed as “extreme summer heat.” As hard as Magnason works to convey how much his homeland’s beauty is in peril, that subdued mood and the Planet Earth-style nature footage of Iceland’s surviving glaciers does ironically function as a kind of travel ad for the nation, which is likely counterproductive if the end goal is to slow the effects of climate change. It says a lot that National Geographic picked up its distribution out of Sundance; if you caught it on a muted television, you might mistake it for a standard doc about how cool & beautiful glaciers are and not a heartbroken eulogy predicting their certain, mass, impending deaths. Magnason’s voice might not be the most exciting element at play here, but it’s what gives the picture meaning beyond its surface-level beauty, and Dosa was right to cede him so much room to speak from the heart.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 