Stage, Screen & In Between Blog


It's midafternoon and James Balog does not sound like his usual sharp-minded and eloquent self. He's a little groggy, even a bit tongue-tied.

For good reason. The renowned environmental photographer who calls Boulder home has been on a whirlwind tour with the glacier-shrinking documentary "Chasing Ice," in which he's the protagonist.

Directed by Jeff Orlowski, the film began not as a documentary so much as an internal document. Orlowski admired Balog's work, so he accompanied the environmental photographer and his team of game whippersnappers as they were undertaking the Extreme Ice Survey project back in 2007. If you've been through Denver International Airport, you may have spied the EIS video installation, showing the time-lapse changes in glaciers.

But "Chasing Ice" is not solely a film about a rapidly changing landscape. It is a portrait of an artist bearing witness to those changes with a gift for the melancholy, the dramatic, the chilling, no pun intended.

Since its premiere in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the award for best cinematography, the film has enjoyed a fine film-fest ride.

And on Friday "Chasing Ice" began a one-week run at the newly renovated Chez Artiste. Meanwhile, respected art-book purveyor Rizzoli published Balog's existentially poetic, visually stunning book "Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers."

After a summer of ferocious wildfires in the West, and then the devastation wrought by Superstorm Sandy, the timing of the film's release couldn't be more uncanny.

Balog and Orlowski are each careful to avoid drawing a straight line between climate change and these events. It's the wider pattern of extreme weather events — droughts, floods, record temperatures — that compels them.

It didn't hurt the movie's profile that New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg revived the somewhat muted climate-change conversation when he endorsed President Barack Obama, citing the issue of climate change as his chief reason.

"There's been a gigantic change in the conversation since Hurricane Sandy," said Balog by phone from Chicago. "One day I did 22 interviews and every single one of them asked about [Sandy]." Balog was on the phone from Chicago, preparing to leave for London to promote the film.

"People are talking about climate change in a different way than they used to," director Orlowski agreed. He was fielding a call as he left an L.A. hotel headed to a flight to San Francisco for his portion of the publicity tour.

Best-cinematography win

It has been almost a year to the day since Orlowski learned that "Chasing Ice" was accepted to the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it took home the award for best cinematography. An earlier version of the film had been turned down in 2009.

It took awhile for "Chasing Ice" to become the often stunning, doggedly challenging, occasionally aggravating film it is.

To get there, the filmmakers enlisted the talents of editor Davis Coombe of Denver's video-film production company Milkhaus. Earlier this year Coombe shared an Oscar for producing Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's documentary short "Saving Face."

Also on board, Boulder-based producer Paula DuPré Pesmen and Jerry Aronson. Pesmen produced the Oscar-winning doc "The Cove," directed by Louie Psihoyos. And Aronson, a retired C.U. Boulder film instructor who was nominated for an Oscar in 1977 for his documentary short "The Divided Trail: A Native American Odyssey."

Orlowski, who is not yet 30, joked, "I'm the only one of the team who doesn't have 'Academy Award' attached to my name."

Many of the film's most jaw-dropping images come directly from Balog's still photography.

Orlowski has made a documentary replete with its own beautiful moments. A boat skims the still surface of water near icebergs; a camera records the crumbling of an ice shelf in Greenland that was the length of five football fields, the height of the Empire State Building.

It's calving at its most extreme and humbling.

Still "Chasing Ice" is fundamentally the portrait of an artist as a driven man.

Long before Balog began documenting glaciers, he had been something of a doubter. Although he's quick to point out that "the skeptic thing has been a bit overstated for rhetorical purposes by others."

What isn't overstated was his desire for evidence, says Balog, who earned a masters degree at The University of Colorado Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research.

Too much of the scientific argument about global warming seemed to him based on computer modeling, he says. "And I'm something of a Luddite, even though so much of my work relies on technology.

"I also had a reflexive assumption that humans were not capable of changing the basic physics and chemistry of the planet. It just didn't seem plausible."

Then in the late 1990s, the science became more persuasive. By sticking rods deep into ice sheets, scientists could measure changes in the ice that "represented changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere." The story of that ice contained the history of Earth's changing air. It was a tale the visual artist in him wanted to tell.

"In theory a glacier is a changable landscape feature because it's made out of frozen water. But as a practical matter, you think these things are more or less there. They could change over 50 or a hundred years, but the idea they could change over a year or maybe two years, that was truly stunning," he says.

What people draw from "Chasing Ice," he believes, is a weird combination of amazement in seeing these epic things happening right before their eyes — along with an accompanying sadness and fear.

For more than two decades, Balog has been trying to speak "to that tension between fascination and beauty and the overwhelming horror of the thing on the other side,' he says."That's exactly what's going on with the ice.

"All of this sounds so calculated and thought out, but I've been doing this for seven years, and this has been an evolutionary process to get to this point. I could not have started out saying, 'Well I'm going to show a combination of the beauty and the horror of retreating glaciers and climate change.' I'm not that smart."

Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567, or