Serpent River

by Pam Cook

Occasionally, in shots of young children playing on blackened lake-side sand, miners toiling underground in dark and dangerous conditions, or in the voice-overs detailing how in drilling for uranium the crushed radioactive rock is blown by the wind into rivers to be carried far and wide, we glimpse the documentary Serpent River might have been. For Sandra Lahire, however, the bare facts are not discomfiting enough in themselves. In this dense, paranoid film poem the aptly named torrent is transformed through dazzling colour effects and evocative use of sound into the poisoned bearer of death and destruction.

The luckless inhabitants of Serpent River and Elliot Lake in North Ontario, the location of a huge uranium mining operation owned by Rio Tinto Zinc, have had their lives radically changed by the presence of the forbidding plant on their once green and pleasant surroundings. Miner Diane Guillemette describes how employment was brought to the economically depressed area. Her decision to take on work in a male-dominated field is shown to be double-edged, her delight in equality mitigated by the deadly side-effects of high levels of radiation on the land and on the human body. The film depicts a cold, desolate landscape reminiscent of science fiction projections of post-nuclear holocaust, a dire warning that the future is already with us. It is haunted by the image of a body whose skeleton glows red and black as though skin and clothes had melted away. A burnt-out terrain with blackened, stunted trees is accompanied by a voice-over telling how children suffer burns when they swim in the sulphurous lake.

At times, the imagery is positively gothic, as when a huge black bird takes flight, echoed later when its harsh cry is heard on the soundtrack. At others, a dark irony prevails: children play in the grounds of the Uranium Capital Nursery School; a roadside hoarding proclaims “After Death, the Judgment”; a jaunty Country & Western ballad mockingly celebrates the quick money to be made from the deadly uranium rock; and a sermon preached to the cancer-ridden congregation of the New Life Assembly promises that God will provide. The overriding impression, however, is of the filmmaker’s own fascination with the eery beauty of the doom-laden images she creates, many of which seem to be repeated as much for their aesthetic lure as for their impact as memento mori. While this may to some extent undermine the film’s ostensible message that the devastation of natural resources by greedy capitalist enterprises must be stopped, it adds another, disturbing layer of meaning, a Romantic intimation that nature and life itself is always overshadowed by death. This fatalistic sense that it is already too late, that the human death drive is in the ascendancy, lends Serpent River an intensely obsessional air which makes it all the more compelling.

This text appeared in the Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol 57, no 679, August 1990.