Gasland

There is a fast-growing market in the USA for documentary features? There must be, because they are being turned out by an ever-expanding army of well-funded and/or profit-seeking film-makers. Assuming that very few of them will get commercial distribution, and that TV channels likely to screen them will pay pittances for the right to do so, could it be that many documentaries are a cinematic equivalent of vanity books? Convenient tax write-offs for finely-motivated backers or cash-laundering outfits? Or simply, as with 3D animated comedies, unwise investments in an overloaded bandwagon?

Gasland is a one-man show that cannot be scorned. It won a top award at Sundance 2010 (its production having been supported by Robert Redford's organisation), premiered on HBO, and was a nominee for the 2011 Oscar. Writer-director Josh Fox was his own producer, narrator and cinematographer, and he opens the movie by noting that the whole project began in his back yard when a natural gas company wanted to lease his land.

Fox's artfully amateur project accuses American power companies of inflicting a plague of natural-gas drilling sites, and creating unnatural disasters for the country's water supplies and environment. Their "fracking" (derived from hydraulic fracturing) involves the injection of complex chemicals into wells to tap shale rock. The exploitation rights are purchased for a few thousand dollars per acre, and clearly result in very profitable ventures that are pock-marking much of the country with eyesores and diseases, including national parklands.

Gasland begins with a wistful desire to interview Dick Cheney, the former Halliburton chief executive and US Vice-President. The two names are liberals' favourite betes noirs, so it wasn't too surprising to discover that Fox's previous, debut feature was a critically slammed amalgamation of a fictional Memorial Day bloodfest and real Abu Ghraib torture camp footage. Cheney was, and still is, a prime neo-con bogeyman, and his role in spurring the collapse of US prestige globally and democratic rights everywhere during the Bush-baby presidencies may well pre-occupy film school graduates for generations. In this example, Halliburton, the oil services giant (among other sins), is again linked to Cheney, the man who spearheaded the Energy Bill that freed Halliburton et al from government supervisions and legal liabilities.

Fox covers his own legal ass well, with captions identifying the names and locations of the ordinary US citizens whose tap-water can be ignited, whose health and livelihoods have been damaged, and whose willingness to tolerate official and corporate lies is bitterly exhausted. Reading his own script without histrionics, Fox cuts between shots of his amateur camera-work, car-rides and many interviewees, accompanying himself much of the time with aptly rustic bluegrass banjo music.

If he hadn't made Memorial Day, and previously been a member of a soap-opera-makers' cooperative, I'd have accepted his interviewees as they were described (including a convenient EPA "whistle-blower"). After The Blair Witch Project, other mockumentaries such as Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here and Banksy's graffiti promo, and recent stream of promotional and celebrity biopics, it's impossible to take a documentary at its face value.

The genre has become tarnished, as an entertainment first, a personal statement second, and very latterly as a dossier of filmed facts. In the end, though, it's impossible to dismiss Fox's reportage. Corporate America stinks, and so will a fracked world. In its effort to reduce its dependency on Middle East oil, the USA developed an uncontrolled technological monster. Cheney did his job; Congress closed its eyes and everyone opened their wallets.