The Emerald Forest, the jewel of John Boorman
On this Monday evening, Arte invites you to rediscover this eco-friendly masterpiece by John Boorman (Deliverance, Excalibur…). Do not miss !
It’s a funny film that we can watch again in a few hours on television. A funny, unloved film in the career of John Boorman which nevertheless has a handful of masterpieces (Delivery, Excalibur, The point of no return). But this one is stuck. Strangely. The Emerald Forest tells the story of an American engineer who left to build a dam in South America and who settles with his family in the Amazon. One day, his son disappears. Ten years later Tommy reappears, but, raised by a tribe, he has become totally Indian…
All of Boorman is encapsulated in this eco-fable: the utopia, the dream, the magic, the initiatory story. This is what John Boorman has been brewing since Deliverance and what he perfectly synthesizes in this lyrical film which moves between the vines of mythology and adventure. We criticized the finale as being a little too dialectical, the ecological excesses, but what we didn’t want to see, deep down, is that what fascinates this immense Rousseauist filmmaker is precisely nature. As he told us in Cannes:
“I love big cities, but only for a few days at a time. Very quickly, I miss the landscape. I was raised by the water. The river, the flow, the movement, are essential for me. My films deal with man’s relationship with nature, because I am convinced that it is very dangerous to pretend to be able to cut this connection without damage. I have lived in a house in Ireland for 45 years, also located on the edge. of a river and surrounded by trees that I planted by the thousands myself and that I saw grow. Sometimes I like my trees better than my neighbors. The older I get, the more I feel like I live on their scale. A friend, who shares the same passion as me, said to me for my birthday: ’80 years isn’t old when you’re a tree.’“
This is the message of The Emerald Forest. It is there, in this jungle filmed like Arthur’s legendary forest, on the borders of reality and imagination, that man must recharge his batteries so that the best of himself emerges. But beyond that, it is Boorman’s attentive and moving camera, his frenetic compositions and the captivating use of sounds and noises that give a stunning grace to this radical and precious film.
John Boorman: “Deliverance was a turning point”
In 2017, while he was honored with a retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française, John Boorman commented on his film in First. Here is what he told us about The Emerald Forest :
“I can’t separate the filming of the film from the film itself, the experience from the result. I wrote the filming in a book, Money Into Light. The book is actually better than the film. Before making the film, I lived in a tribe, the Chingu, who were only discovered by Westerners in 1947. All the members of the tribe who were over 40 could remember the time where they thought they were alone in the world. They lived in the Stone Age. It was extraordinary. Our world emphasizes individuality. It’s alienating. Members of a tribe are not individualistic, by definition. They are part of a tribe. It’s a good way to live. I learned a lot with them, about our world. I believe that deep down we are tribal beings. It’s our nature. But we no longer have tribes. We have families, we go to see football matches. The notion of tribe is vaporized almost everywhere. We express this through war, it is a deep need (“a deep need for warfare”) which resurfaces from time to time. The tribal effect is there all the time, but it is not understood, not recognized. This is the story my films tell. Find this lost desire. Experiencing a film in a cinema, not in front of the TV, restores this tribal feeling in the audience. Netflix is alienating: it makes the cinema experience individual and not tribal.”
John Boorman: “The camera stops, and you die”
