"No
man who owns his own house and lot can be a
communist,” Levitt once said. “He has too much to
do."
-William Levitt , founder of Levittown,
first
American suburb
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About
the Film
Taking a close look at our relationship
with nature, American
Savannah, takes us deep into the
the 'back country'
of the
irrepressible spirit of conquest. Lushly filmed on HD the fims
director's take
us on a journey where on a grand scale, we seem to
by trying to
reproduce an almost impossible 'natural personal space', with
our gardens
and lawns, so green, so trim.
We are taken back in time to the exotic
gardens of Louis
IX, and fast forward to massive sod farms in the desert.
Somewhere in
between, we encounter a revolution of poetry and pesticides, love of
life all
the while seeking perfect containemen tof its "excesses" .
Humor
and irorny, wit and
virual
counterpoint all allow for
an unusual ride, youthful and irreverent, about our greenest obsession,
the
great green lawn
It all began one dark and stormy night.
A burgeoning
filmmaker, Ian Lagarde, was coming home to his place in the lush
suburbs of Montreal.
Suddenly, there before him, was the
surreal
image of a sprinkler, in a well-off neighborhood watering a lawn in the
pouring rain. When he mentionned it to his friends and
acquaintances, they told him it happened all the time and was
completely normal. That is when he had the brilliant idea.
Strange as it may seem he would make a documentary abou teh
green
monster to which we devote so much effort and sacrifice, and a sizeable
divot of common sense.
Ian then asked Jean-François
Méan a long-time friend and collaborator who ahd grown up in
the
suburbs, to join him on the venture. Their goal? To explore
the
cultural and material aspects and historical roots of the western
world's love affair with the lawn.
From
the start, the two partners agreed on the direction the film would
take: there would be no lengthy environmental screeds tracking the
latest ever-depressing news. Rather than the typical
Manichaean
viewpoints, offering typically black and white positions, the film
would be a lush, slightly absurd invitation to take a meditative stroll
alng the fairway. |
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And so they consulted a wide range of thinkers,
observers, and employees whose work focuses on lawns in Canada and the
United States. Discovering the writings of French Canadian
anthropologist and media personality Serge Bouchard proved to
be a
pivotal breakthrough, along with a specialised journal, entitled "The
American Lawn". The filmmakers combed the land we call
America,
in search of the first-hand accounts and all manner of iconic
reflections about the lawn.
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