Eco-warrior Chris Clark, the protagonist of Edoardo Morabito’s feature doc The Outpost, screening in the Changing Face of Europe programme and which world-premiered at Venice Critics Week 2023 Venice, was the kind of maverick you expect to find in a Werner Herzog movie or an epic 19th Century novel.
The Scotsman somehow ended up in the Amazon jungle where he created an idealistic new community, an “outpost of progress.” This was designed to run along egalitarian lines and to respect nature. The money, though, began to run out. One idea Clark had for keeping the community going was to bring rock band Pink Floyd to the Amazon to perform a charity concert.
Morabito remembers just how he first came across Clark. The director had recently won a prize at the Torino Film Festival for his film The Ghosts of San Berillo and was looking for a new project. “I asked the producer of Dugong Films, almost jokingly, “do we have stories in Brazil?’ He had a friend who often travelled to Brazil and had told him some stories, including Chris’s. I immediately fell in love with the idea, and the producer sent me two newspaper articles, one from Italy and one from National Geographic about Chris, and based [the new film] on those articles,” Morabito confirms.
At the time the Italian and Brazilian ministries were also looking to promote film collaborations. Morabito hadn’t yet met Clark but pitched a story about him and secured enough money to visit the Amazon and encounter his subject for the first time.
“We became instant friends. We shared the fact that we were ‘out-of-era idealists, as we used to say, we shared the same discomfort with the contemporary world, and above all we listened to the same music,” the Italian filmmaker recalls. He acknowledges that Clark was like a figure from one of those Joseph Conrad novels about Europeans adrift in South America. “Conrad underlies everything, even the title, borrowed from his short story An Outpost of Progress.”
The idea of getting David Gilmour, his estranged bandmate Roger Waters and the rest of Pink Floyd to come to the Amazon jungle may have seemed far-fetched, but Clark had often defied expectations about what he could achieve.
“Chris was an old-time hero, an idealist but far from naïve, with a strong practicality in what he did. I must emphasise the fact that Chris eventually succeeded in creating a 360,000-hectare forest reserve. The Pink Floyd concert somewhat obscures this element,” Morabito states.
Besides, the director adds, there is nothing wrong with dreaming. “Dreaming creates thinking, and we must have the ability to return to imagining a future. And this is Chris’s legacy: in this dark age, when ideals have disappeared from our imagination, we must return to believing, living and dying for an ideal.”
Morabito started following Chris in 2016. He had been shooting alone for a few weeks in his village in the Amazon. When Chris came to Europe after a year because of his father’s death, the director filmed him for another week, this time with DOP Irma Vecchio.
Then, as they were trying to set up the project, Chris died unexpectedly in the summer of 2020.
“We had become very close friends, and that paralysed me for a long time. But I couldn’t let go of his story, and one night when this thought didn’t let me sleep, I looked back at the footage, which in the meantime had become my personal archive on Chris,” Morabito reflects on his subject’s passing.
The director realised that he needed to re-think his approach to the documentary.
“I had a film but I had to write it all over again, and with me in it. My voice-over would allow for a narrative with what little material I had and would set the stage for our relationship during this journey, both physical and imaginative, in which Chris’s dream overlapped with mine in a play of mirrors and desires capable of shaping the key idea of the film: living for an idea, mine or someone else’s it matters little.”
Morabito’s commentary provides the context for the film – and also makes it more personal. “I wrote it as I edited, and edited as I wrote, in a dialectical relationship with the material. It is the artisan aspect of documentary,”
Music features prominently in the doc. The Pink Floyd concert never happened and the band’s work doesn’t feature in the film. Nonetheless, the director collaborated with Italian outfit Masmas who helped him “evoke that sonic and imaginative universe of Pink Floyd but without copying them, that is, creating original music that seemed to come out of a Pink Floyd bootleg.” Italian composer Vincenzo Gangi composed some of the other music.
Was Morabito apprehensive when he ventured into the Amazon jungle? He replies it would have been strange if he hadn’t been. “I think having a balanced relationship with nature involves fearing it; it serves to give us the proper measure of our smallness to it. The Amazon and the river were fantastic, epic, but also threatening. There is no pure and serene nature. It was the most incredible trip of my life, like going back to the origin of time. And yes, when you see primeval nature without men, you are a little afraid.”
Scenes shot in London, where Clark ventures to raise funds, provide a striking contrast to those set in the jungle. The eco-evangelist struggles to convince wealthy would-be backers to give the outpost the money it needs to continue. “When Chris goes to London to look for someone to support his project, he finds nothing but scepticism and distrust. The people he meets pay him lip service to their commitment, but ultimately do so in order to dismiss him as soon as possible. In their behaviour the whole Western soul, bent on safeguarding exclusively a selfish way of life, is evident. But then again, they, too, are children of the world to which they belong…”
Morabito still regards Clark as an inspirational figure.
“He found one of the last remaining unspoiled places on the face of the earth, and the romantic idea of wanting to preserve it forever became his obsession ever since. Then, at some point, I arrived just in time to be the last spectator of his fantastic adventures,” Morabito pays tribute to his old friend and expresses his happiness that he was able to chronicle some of Clark’s work on film.
The Outpost is produced by Dugong Films together with Rai Cinema. Intramovies is handling world sales.
