Film

THE VERY IDEA of bringing environmentalist David Brower "back to Earth" might seem strange. Throughout a lifetime of activism that married art and anger to power unstoppable political movements, the man who saved the West's most incredible wild landscapes never strayed from topic Earth. Yet San Francisco filmmaker Kelly Duane's challenge in making Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America wasn't launching the Brower legend – it's already been in orbit for a while – but bringing it down to the planet.

Duane finessed that reversal in a subversively easygoing documentary that's now playing festivals all over the world and movie theaters all over election-crazed America. With a soundtrack that smells like Sub Pop Records and edits that take time to enjoy Super 8 backwoods footage gathered by Brower himself, Duane's movie is low-tech, poetic, and ventilated with fresh perspective. As a political documentary, Monumental does the impossible: it breathes. In confidently allowing the film to rest on the decades-old images of locations that have lost their virginity (Yosemite) or been lost altogether (Glen Canyon), Duane turns the art of documentary biography from fact gathering to the rebuilding of a state of mind.

The ode to this particular environmental giant began on a landscape Brower couldn't save, far from the northern California Duane grew up hiking through, off the coast of Washington state, where she surfed. Duane would sight her position in the ocean by looking out at two mountains that told the story of two futures. On one mountain, she'd see tree lines, with birds circling. The other mountain was clear-cut and completely barren. Duane concentrates that long view of the horizon into a film that seems to reflect the picture coming straight from Brower's own eyes. She splices it with the necessary historical facts, gleaned from official heads who talk with fascination and sometimes splenetic engagement about the activist they loved to love or hate.

Duane's film about one of activism's greatest uphill climbers faced its own battles. She only got access to the 200 reels of footage Brower had shot by promising to log it for UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library, which now owns it. In the process of making the film, she ended a relationship, moved back to the Bay Area, and lost a large amount of the interview footage she'd shot when it was stolen from her car. PowerBar inventor Brian Maxwell – who was also backing a sculptural monument to Brower's legacy – funded Monumental but died of a heart attack shortly before its premiere at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in April.

Duane had learned her lesson about filmmaking and heartbreak before she even began this project, though, when making a previous film (2001's See How They Run), about San Francisco mayoral politics. She realized that the process of making any film – even "light" fare – was torture and decided the next time she put herself through that much hassle, the work would have to matter. Three years later, I'm happy to report that it does. (Susan Gerhard)