Stephen Most’s 2018 documentary WILDER THAN WILD: Fire, Forests and the Future recounts recent California megafires of 2013 and 2017, revealing how fuel build-up and climate change have exposed Western wildlands to large, high-intensity wildfires while greenhouse gases released from these fires contribute to global warming. As the Amazon rainforest continues to burn, understanding and awareness of this film’s research and message is more important than ever before.
Two portraits of the young man I once was, one oil-painted, the other shaped in clay, watch over my study. More than half a century after they were made I portrayed the painter, Pedro Azabache, and the sculptor, Eduardo Calderón, in the opening chapters of Stories Make the World.
My friendships with them began unexpectedly and unforgettably. As a college student I received a grant I hadn’t applied for to go to a country I knew nothing about where languages I did not understand were spoken. I had not even studied anthropology, the field in which I was supposed to do summer research. However, I did know the destination: a pueblo named Moche.
The only book I could find about Moche mentioned a descendant of Mochica Indians who had studied painting in Lima. When I met him, Pedro Azabache led a school of fine arts in Trujillo. Seen in retrospect, my request, uttered in barely coherent Spanish, was absurd. I told him I wanted to live at his home in Moche and write about his life. The maestro replied, “Encantado.”
My friendship with Eduardo Calderón, who taught wood and ceramic sculpture in Azabache’s school of fine arts, also began encantado, with enchantment. Calderón invited me to his adobe-walled home to make the bust that now rests on my cabinet. Soon after I got there, after he had plopped clay on a small round table and after his wife, María, served us a wooden bowl filled with chicha, a corn liquor, Calderón asked, “Do you know that I am a brujo?” I did know that word, having read, in John Gillin’s Moche, A Peruvian Coastal Community, about brujeria, which means both sorcery and its antidote, a way of healing physical and psychological maladies. On the radio a cumbia was playing as Calderón, gliding into a corner of his open-air studio, pulled the head and wings of a pelican skin over his shoulders and started dancing. Soon we were wearing the bird in turn as we danced to the catchy beat.
“Esteban Most” by Pedro Azabache
That summer, one of Azabache’s students who spoke English, José Li Ning, helped me translate the artist’s journals. A sentence I puzzled over, learning the subjunctive, was something Azabache’s father had said to him: “I hope my son knows to make good use of his time.” Those wise words applied, I felt, to me. Li Ning also came to the first mesa, or all-night healing ceremony, I attended. As Calderón presided over a ritual the pre-Incaic Mochica sculpted on pottery a thousand years ago, I realized that I, the unlikely recipient of a grant to do ethnology, was making good use of my time.
After that summer, wanting better to know my Peruvian friends and their world, I returned to the Trujillo region, starting with a two-year stint in the Peace Corps. Calderón invited me to be the godfather of his daughter Josefina, which made us compadres, friends with family bonds. Years later, his granddaughter Rosi Liliana became my second goddaughter.
Decades after that, while writing the reflections on storytelling and the art of the documentary that comprise Stories Make the World, I realized: both Azabache and Calderón were storytellers. Both combined a visual medium with narrative in different forms and with different techniques than are used in documentary making. And we all moved within a current flowing from cave painting ceremonies tens of thousands of years ago and surely from visual and verbal representations of the world made long before those. I had defined myself in terms of the specific medium in which I worked, whether as a playwright, a screenwriter, or an author. Only while writing Stories Make the World did I grasp a larger identity that potentially connects every human being, for we all tell stories; our lives are shaped by them and by the stories others tell.
Wanting to share memories of Azabache and Calderón with my goddaughters and other Peruvian friends, I asked Li Ning to translate the first two chapters of my book. He and his son, a professor of English, did so. Better yet, Li Ning found a magazine that will publish the Spanish version of those chapters. I’m glad my portraits of the men who portrayed me many years ago, whose friendship enriched my life, will be widely seen in their country before long.
See an earlier blog post from Stephen Most here, and learn more about the book Stories Make the World: Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentaryhere. To stream and download films in Stories Make the World, go to www.videoproject.com/Stories.
It’s odd to see the result of years of work contained within a small object, whether it is a book, a DVD, or a phone on which films are streaming. Stories Make the World contains, in a sense, ideas I care about, a variety of subjects that interest me, and many of the films I’ve worked on.
It was odd as well to see a room enclose people from almost every aspect of my life. That happened at the party celebrating the launch of Stories Make the World. If my life were a book, many of its chapters appeared in my living room one Sunday afternoon. Convening beneath balloons were my brother, a cousin, and their wives, my wife, our son and his girlfriend, friends who live on my block, friends whose children grew up with my children, other friends I hadn’t seen in years, and colleagues I have worked with over the years.
That gathering of people I’ve known over a long span of time in disparate situations offered a sense of my life’s unity. But it was an illusion: a snapshot at a moment in time belies the experience of living. As Kierkegaard wrote in his journals, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” Living forwards, it can be impossible to tell what direction one will take and whether pleasure or distress, success or failure will result. That applies to documentary films, almost every one of which is a high-risk project. It applies, of course, to a book from conception to publication and beyond. And it’s true for everyone’s life. The present moment is pregnant with the future. The outcomes and their connection with what came before become evident only in retrospect.
Looking around the room, I saw the youngest member of my family, two-year-old Nina, resting in her mother’s arms. I wondered, who will she be? What will the world be like when she is a woman? Across the room from Nina and her mother Katie stood Douglas Sharon, an explorer in Perú who, when we first met in our early twenties, was discovering ancient cities that Andean jungle had covered. His friendship with the shaman Eduardo Calderón inspired a career change: Douglas became an anthropologist.
I caught the eye of Claire Schoen. When we met, I was a playwright working with a comedic theater company and she was a documentary filmmaker. Living with her, I entered the community of independent media professionals in the Bay Area. Members of that community listened as I read passages from Stories Make the World: Judy Irving who, when I met her, was making Dark Circle, a mind-opening film about the nuclear age, with Chris Beaver and Ruth Landy; Ruth, who produced international media for the World Health Organization after Dark Circle premiered; Justine Shapiro, who apprenticed with Judy and Chris, then went on to make Promises, the Emmy-winning, Academy Award-nominated film about Israeli and Palestinian children; Gina Leibrecht, who has edited two films I’ve worked on: A Land Between Rivers and Wilder than Wild; and the director of those films, Kevin White, who arrived late, bringing a bottle of bubbly.
At that moment in time in that place, which seemed to encompass innumerable stories in my life and theirs, I released into the world a small object that I hope will be fruitful.
See an earlier blog post from Stephen Most here, and learn more about the book Stories Make the World: Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentaryhere. To stream and download films in Stories Make the World, go to www.videoproject.com/Stories.
