Among the many documentaries at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival is an 86 minute feature that takes on one of the most important issues before our cities: suburban sprawl. The distractingly named Radiant City was jointly written and directed by feature director Gary Burns (Kitchen Party, A Problem With Fear), and CBC radio talking head Jim Brown, both of Calgary --Canada's largest city by area, and a place that knows something about sprawl.
"We took all the specific references to Calgary out of the film in the editing," says co-writer-director Mr. Burns in an interview after the VIFF screenings, clearly wanting to generalize the film's argument about endless instant developments, "we even digitally altered a license plate, so you couldn't see it was Alberta."
Consequently, the critique of suburbia here is generic, maybe too much so, with the film-makers rounding up a squad of talking heads, planting them beside freeways, in schoolyards, and alongside real estate billboards that could be anywhere, then letting them rip.
Among Radiant City's opinionizers are American urban journalist William Howard Kunstler, Calgary architecture school head Marc Boutin, even the terminally over-exposed Toronto philosopher of everything, Mark Kingwell.
But this suburban show-and-tell is stolen by two grade school kids, sardonic yet wise commentators on the phenomenon that shape their lives -- the big box houses, new schools under construction, parental overprogramming of their lives, not to mention the finer points of paint ball etiquette.
One statistic brings home what it is to be a suburban kid (and chauffeuring parent) these days -- half of us walked to school in the 1950s, while only 10 per cent do so now.
Interspersed between the kids and the expert interviews are animated little commercials with lots more juicy factoids about North American suburbia: the average house was 800 square feet in 1950, 1,500 by 1970, and a staggering 2,266 by the year 2000; the average driver spends the equivalent of 55 working days a year commuting by car (four times as long as the average annual holiday); traffic injury and death rates are three times higher in suburbia as downtown; people who live in city centres are 6.3 pounds lighter, on average, than their suburban cousins; and so on.
The best feature of Radiant City is cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin's fresh visual documentation of the textures and streetscapes of brand new neighbourhoods, and his images are the film's most eloquent critique of sprawl. Using rich autumnal light recalling Sven Nykvist's lens work for Ingmar Bergman, crane shots of new subdivision signs make them look like Broadway sets, and telephoto views of clumsy new houses reveal them as variations on military barracks.
Mr. McLaughlin's camera skills and the dab hand at interviewing possessed by CBC radio journalist Mr. Brown combine to spark some hilarious clips, especially Mr. Kunstler's riff on the pointless over-use of chain link fencing. Mr. Kunstler is the author of The Long Emergency, the latest in his long string of books criticizing American energy waste and linked suburban sprawl, putting it bluntly in the film: "This way of living is coming off the menu."
The film is short on analysis -- finding the invisible forces that create and extend sprawl such as our extravagant public subsidies for suburban infrastructure and transportation, for one.
For another, there is the skewing of property taxes onto businesses, artificially lightening the load for ever more bungalows, while also displacing jobs to ever more remote (and hence low tax and low rent) municipalities, the deadly recipe that is firing sprawl around Vancouver, and leading to the Campbell government's current mania for bridge-building and freeway construction.
