Vapor Trail (Clark)

John Gianvito's new documentary, the first of two films focusing on decommissioned, and hazardous, U.S. military bases—one named Clark, the other Subic—in Pampanga province, Philippines, takes its title (minus parenthetical) from the contrails left behind by airplanes at high altitude. A pre-credits sequence shows several such images, in addition to a rolling stream at sunrise; the driver's-eye interior view of a car, signal clicking, as it prepares to turn (which way unspecified); and faded photographs that depict, we will come to learn, incidents and asides from the Philippine-American War (1899-1913). What connects these disparate objects/mo(ve)ments is a shared sense of impermanence—the feeling that everything we're viewing is fleeting and, likely, soon forgotten.
　　The three Gianvito films I've seen—this, 2007's Profit motive and the whispering wind, and, my personal choice for best of the '00s, 2001's The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein—share a fascination with, and in some way seek to redress the human propensity toward cultural-historical amnesia. I'm sure some would consider this a more recent mindset, one exacerbated by the ever larger and larger number of ADD-distractions that prove detrimental to more reflective and perceptive thought. (This, to me, is its own kind of amnesia: though based, admittedly, more on feeling than fact, I gather we've all of us been creating false histories—dicking each other over whether wielding bones or iProducts—since at least the Upper Paleolithic.)
　　Technology heightens the problem, but it can also, correctly and devotedly harnessed, provide indelible and lasting insight (salvation of a sort). One of my favorite moments in Fernanda Hussein is a simple shot of a television playing an early-'90s Arsenio Hall broadcast: Wearing a "USA"-emblazoned jacket and talking, at first rather humbly, about how difficult it is to be funny in a time of crisis (the movie takes place pre-, during, and post-Iraq War One), the host proceeds to joke about a newspaper article that uses the words "Iraqi intelligence," to him an oxymoron on the level of "good Porky's movie." Speaking for myself, if I was in the room when that was originally airing, I bet I would have laughed, though I like to think it would have been that hollow Pavlovian laughter that comes when something is supposed to be funny and which, hopefully, soon dissipates when the better part of our being reasserts itself (good humor cuts to the soul; bad goads the glands, upstairs and down).
　　If we accept that television, like a movie screen, is a filter on reality, then what Gianvito does here is put a filter on a filter. Suddenly, it's as if we're watching from outside our own consciousness (it helps that Gianvito doesn't use the camera attachment that removes television broadcast scan lines—a further cue to the senses) and the problematic aspects of Hall's jest come to the fore: despondency, racism, ill-information, plain ol' shoddy humor—a desperate pander to the mob. (That Gianvito chooses to show a black man dishing this out—I'm sure Letterman and Carson had more than a few choice bons mots—adds an additionally troubling layer: Quoth Avenue Q's lisping Asian, Christmas Eve, "Evlyone's a ritter bit lacist!") All joking aside, this scene gets me every time because it shows how easy it is for any person to go ignorant, to covet and trust immediate sensations/impressions over all else. Gianvito's movies demand that we contemplate, live with, question—always question (and that includes pushing back against the films themselves).
　　In Vapor Trail (Clark), Gianvito acknowledges the desire and the need for his audience t