By Joel Thurtell
French filmmaker Florent Tillon e-mailed the “bad news”: Instead of including our July 2009 motorboat trip up the Rouge River as part of his main feature movie, “Detroit Wild City,” he turned our river excursion into a 12-minute stand-alone video.
This is “bad news”?
Sounds great to me.
Instead of playing a bit part in a big picture, I’m co-star of a short feature, along with Detroit photographer Geoffrey George.
I played the “river pilot.”
Florent was in the bow of my boat as I drove slowly up the Rouge, re-tracing the route taken four years earlier by photographer Patricia Beck and me.
The only difference: In 2005, Pat and I were powered not by an outboard motor. We were paddling a canoe, sometimes against 30 mph gusts.
Our report was published in the Detroit Free Press in October 2005 and won the Water Environment Federation’s 2006 Henry E. Schlenz Medal for public education about the environment.
We turned our adventure into a book, published in 2009 by Wayne State University Press. The book is Up the Rouge! Paddling Detroit’s Hidden River.
Florent’s “Sanctuary” film, to be shown October 8-10 in Detroit’s Burton Theater, is about the irony of our unceasing need for industrial products that cause irreparable harm to the world around us. We may rail at ravages of industrial pollution, but we still use our cars and for that matter, motorboats whose manufacture leads to the very contamination we deplore.
The Rouge River is a perfect example of this irony: For nearly nine miles, we slowly cruised along the ugly side of industrial America — piles of coke, ore and slag from two working steel mills; heaps of salt, gypsum, and four miles of river literally paved with concrete to prevent flooding caused by construction of homes, stores, offices, hotels, factories on terrain naturally prone to flood.
As if somebody touched a switch, just north of Michigan Avenue the concrete disappears. Suddenly, it’s urban forest with cardinals calling and kingfishers sailing overhead.
Welcome to the Henry Ford Estate, a rich man’s sanctuary. It was created by auto magnate Henry Ford and seems quite rural, except we know better. We had just passed the factory sprawl and eternal mess Ford and other industrialists created just downstream.
In his e-mail, Florent wrote:
I have bad and good news…
The bad news is that the Rouge scene will not be in the final editing of the feature film… Because it’s was too much difficult to include this scene without creating confusion about the story of the film… and also because it’s like a mini-movie by itself, with a special rhythm, too much independent from the rest of the film. Anyway ; it’s not in the film for a lot of different reasons.
The good news is that I made a 12 minute short-movie of our experience with you: it’s on the web, as a kind of premier of the feature, a cut-scene, and certainly a future “DVD bonus.”
I’m looking forward to the premier. Hope you’ll be there, too.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
What a nice piece of film making–it truly is eye opening!
The last two minutes almost seem like a different planet.