Polar Bears of Hudson Bay

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/opinion/polar-bears-hudson-bay.html

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Polar bears sleep a lot. That sight can leave an observer feeling disappointed, even insulted — it’s like watching a superhero clean his nails while you’re wishing he’d fly or pick up a car.

Keep watching, though, and you begin to notice interesting things about the sleeping bear’s world: the hard, cold snow blown across ice or the sun turning into a vertical streak through sheets of sleet; the odd, sticky sensation of frost slowly growing over your beard.

As a cinematographer, I’ve spent a lot of time observing the behaviors of the polar bears and humans who inhabit Churchill, Manitoba, a small town on the remote coast of Hudson’s Bay. I first arrived in Churchill as a teenager on my first gig and returned 25 years later, in 2015, to shoot a TV series on the bears of Churchill.

When filming any wildlife, my first instinct is to create pristine images devoid of humanity. This is the ideal for nature films — a wild, charismatic animal free of the tethers and trappings of modernity. But these days, that ideal rarely matches reality — and it was nearly impossible to find in Churchill. Scattered among the polar bears on the outskirts of town are the ruins of Cold War projects, shipwrecks, plane wrecks and the abandoned material dreams of residents.

Though I was initially frustrated, I began to shoot two versions of each shot — one a realistic portrayal of the bears’ habitat incorporating humanity and the other a cropped, pristine image suitable for prime time. Increasingly, I was drawn to the former: the juxtaposition of the bears, majestic symbols of the north, and the human artifacts and environments they haunted.

As we shot over several months, contradictory emotions and ideas would present themselves. I loved being so close to the bears but worried that this contact might damage them. I hoped that the old, starving bear would survive, until I realized he had begun hunting a mother’s cub. I worried about the future of the bears but was struck that they might instead become the sole occupants of this depressed town I’d come to love. I wondered how accurate natural history films could really be and whether they were even capable of conveying the conflicts I was experiencing.

Months after we wrapped, a massive climate-change-linked flood devastated Churchill’s only land link to the south, dealing the town a crushing blow. With consequent job loss and soaring food costs, the prospects for Churchill’s human residents are bleak. Down the line, the fate of its polar bear residents may not look much better — and they have few second choices.

The producer of the film I was working on graciously granted me access to the footage I’d shot and I began work on this experiment — a different kind of nature film that pulls from the documentary, dramatic and experimental genres to create a hybrid style of film. The film’s sound is entirely designed, working from my memory of the experience. I’ve combined images of different bears and times, and through occasional gross manipulation of the footage created this vision of that very special place named Churchill.

It’s my attempt to place you next to me in the cold and wind there and experience the same questions and moments of wonder that I felt.