Gerard Smyth's documentary is the on-the-ground film the people of Christchurch deserve.
When a City Falls
Does Gerard Smyth ever sleep? Checking my notes, I see cameraman duties on his magnificent chronicle of the Christchurch earthquakes, When a City Falls, were shared between him and Jacob Bryant, his director of photography, so in fact Smyth may have caught the odd wink from time to time over the past year. But the film, which somehow manages to feel like one Cantabrian’s personal testimony and an entire city’s collective act of witness, left me with the sense that any time anything of note was happening in Christchurch from September 4, 2010, onward, Smyth was there, camera on shoulder.
We hear, rather than see, the very moment the first quake struck. Smyth – or one of his small production crew, and I wish I knew who, because this is the kind of film where you want to credit people for their good work – has secured the tape of a 111 police call that was in progress at the time, and got permission to use it. He leaves the screen black, sinking us deep in the dark of an early Canterbury morning: business as usual for the police, the caller a little distressed but not too severely, and then that deep roar, overlaid with the sound of things breaking. “Oh my gosh,” says the caller. “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.”
There’s stronger language in the film – a sign suggesting quake tourists not park on someone’s land comes to mind – but the struggling-for-words quality of that repeated “Oh my gosh” captures something essential about the event. Smyth proceeds to show us the aftermath through a richly textured kaleidoscope of interviews, avoiding editorial comment, but talking to so many people that a vivid sense comes through of a community responding to a massive event. None of the interviewees are named, which you might think would register as odd; in fact, it took me two-thirds of the film to notice, and then it struck me as well judged. It allows the discussions to feel at once more intimate – people speak to us without needing introduction, as if to friends or family – and more representative.
We watch the city pull itself out of the rubble and celebrate the miraculous zero death toll. We hear from parents whose baby would have died had they left her in her soon-to-be-rubble-crushed cot for the night. Despite the scale of the disaster – remember when you didn’t know what the word “liquefaction” meant? – the relative buoyancy of these scenes is piercing. Then aftershocks make their way into the story. One hits in the middle of an interview, an unexpectedly transgressive moment, as though the quakes were coming at us right through the screen. And then February 22 arrives.
As good as the early parts of the film are, this is where it becomes obvious Smyth has created a social document of major lasting worth. How he kept his focus I can’t imagine, but he’s out there in the city streets within minutes, shooting footage. (A few drops of water on the lens only add to the sense of immediacy.) He covers the day and the next couple of weeks in depth, and follows the proliferating consequences to people’s lives throughout the year.
The film largely avoids earthquake politics. A few editing decisions flirt with the sardonic – we go straight from the accidental demolition of the wrong bit of a building to our one glimpse of John Key, in town for some inner-city glad-handing – but we don’t see Gerry Brownlee, there’s very little discussion of zoning and insurance is mentioned only in passing.
Smyth is not analysing how our political system did and didn’t rise to the challenge of these quakes: this is the story of the people of Christchurch, living through their hardest year. And it’s the film they deserve. At once a celebration of endurance and a lament of loss, it will still be being watched 50 years from now.
WHEN A CITY FALLS, directed by Gerard Smyth. Click here for cinemas and times.
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