Director, "Gasland 2" at Cornell University
Friday night in the Statler Auditorium on the campus of Cornell University, the director Josh Fox brought the crowd to its feet even before the movie started. Josh Fox is the force behind "Gasland" and "Gasland 2" - both films that tell a story about recent developments in shale gas extraction - and much more..
The style of the film is cinema verite where a handheld camera juggles around too much - but this technique also lends a bit of an edge to the proceedings - especially when his camera is taken into a hearing room on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. where we see Josh Fox being arrested for filming a public forum.
His documentary artform is put to work making a case against fracking even though this point of view gets skewed at the beginning by recapping the horror story of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf from a couple of years ago. There are many layers of information in the present film, and it covers a lot of the same ground that the first "Gasland" explored. What was different for me this time was a follow-up discussion held in the Auditorium with many of the folks who had been interviewed in the new film.
People who attended this screening were able to ask questions of some of the experts including Robert Howarth who is a Professor at Cornell. Howarth drew our attention to the amount of methane being poured into our atmosphere, and he touted a new plan to hook up our power grid to other energy sources, not natural gas. Hopefully the activists in the audience will begin to promote the new plan to change over to renewable energy sources ( wind, water, bio fuels, etc ) and move the New York State government towards a positive action for our environment.
