Sable Island is a spit of land in the Atlantic Ocean which measures around 20 miles by one mile wide and lies approximately 100 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. Perennially windswept, it is home to a phalanx of slightly shaggy wild horses and to artist, activist, and self-taught scientist Zoe Lucas, who moved there most than four decades ago. She originally came to the island to see the horses and ended up never leaving. Screening in DOK Leipzig festival later this week, Jacquelyn Mills’ observational and thoughtful documentary Geographies of Solitude seeks to capture the island that Lucas fell in love with while, perhaps surreptitiously, also creating a portrait of its sole human inhabitant.
“It’s so compelling being in a place where you’re learning things directly rather than reading them in a book,” explains Lucas at one point and Mills seems to take this to heart as a recommendation. Although there are various moments in the film in which Lucas relates what she is doing, or had done, in an informational way, the film stays far from inundating the audience with scientific data even if that is precisely what is being worked on by its protagonist. Instead, Mills watches through her 16mm camera. She watches the waves lapping at the shore in the film’s opening shot, she watches the wind whipping across the beach, parting the spiky littoral grass. She watches as Lucas trudges – dusted in snow – across the island, scanning the horizon with her binoculars.
It is a sensory experience in which Mills attempts to give us the same opportunity as Lucas, to discover Sable for ourselves, although this is always from Mills’ own inquisitive perspective. The grain of the celluloid makes even the least appealing vistas look somehow luminous – an overcast day on a dull, blustery beach glows with life and possibility. Perhaps even more so because we grow accustomed to seeing the island with a tinge of Lucas’ own enduring wonder. Much of the cinematography is exceptionally handsome, though, not least when Mills captures the island’s equine residents (their population has grown from 150 to over 500 in Lucas’ tenure) either plodding through thick fog or framed in silhouette against a beautiful dusky sky.
Mills intersperses this quiet observation with a series of experiments in which she exposes and develops celluloid using a variety of natural processes. These interludes are like abstract odes punctuating the action, shapes and forms shifting and birling across the screen. They’re effectively minute avant-garde shorts, in which what is being seen is identifiable only by the brief on-screen descriptions: “Horsehair, bones and sand; Exposed in starlight; Developed in seaweed,” or “Balloon litter spliced in 16mm film.”
Elsewhere we are able to get to grips with the common labours of Lucas’ devoted existence. She is, evidently, ardent in her attempts to keep the island clean and much of her time is spent collecting up the jetsam that washes ashore. Sometimes this is seen in detail as Mills records Lucas’ labours – from collection to categorisation, allowing for some semblance of analysis regarding where the litter originated – and on occasion, it is communicated via archival photographs featuring, for instance, mounds of piping that appeared on the beach one day. Lucas first came to Sable as a volunteer cook on an ecological expedition and alongside her campaigns against the likes of microplastics, she has since become an authority on biodiversity. She uses this breadth of knowledge to give Mills insight into the island’s rhythms and cycles. One image that proves especially striking is a pile of shining and clean horse skulls, reminders of the many lifeforms that have shared the island with her.
Her life outside of the confines of Sable is given precious little attention aside from a single moment of candid regret in which Lucas wonders about the other elements of life that she has missed out on by dedicating so single-mindedly to the island, but in a similar fashion, she also speaks of the level of wonder she still experiences every day there. Mills certainly becomes attuned to it, and there is a lovely moment late on where she gives voice to the connection they have made in her time there, and it’s difficult not to feel similarly attached to this crescent of land that is “hounded and constantly reshaped by the surrounding seas” but, aided by Lucas’ constant care, still endures.
Director, cinematography, editing, sound: Jacquelyn Mills
Producers: Roaslie Chicoine Perreault, Jacquelyn Mills
Sound design: Andreas Mendritzki, Jacquelyn Mills
Venue: DOK Leipzig (Time to Act!)
In English
103 minutes
