Newport This Week

Two Films Celebrate Creativity and Genius

FILM REVIEW


Visitors get a look inside Biosphere 2, from the captivating new documentary

Visitors get a look inside Biosphere 2, from the captivating new documentary “Spaceship Earth.”

It’s too bad that director Matt Wolf’s captivating, visually stunning new documentary “Spaceship Earth” isn’t being beamed onto the big screen. But how fortuitous for this not-to-be-missed gem of a film about voluntary isolation that it’s so appropriate for the current moment, when many viewers will be watching while self-quarantined.

While the title invokes science fiction, the film is a fascinating piece of recent history and science fact. In 1991, eight intrepid men and women volunteered to live for two years in the “Biosphere 2,” an ultra-modern, glass-enclosed eight-story, three-acre structure near Tucson, deep in the Arizona desert, where they would conduct research on how to live in a sealed, self-sustaining environment. They kept animals and plants, grew and harvested food, tended to a small ocean and a rain forest, all with the idea that the self-contained Biosphere 2 might one day be transferred to outer space.

Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.

Loren King is an arts and entertainment writer whose work appears regularly in The Boston Globe and other publications.

Though the participants made it to the two-year mark, exiting the sealed structure in 1993, the experiment suffered financial and control troubles, and the participants often clashed with one another. Biosphere 2 was derided in some scientific circles. Since oxygen had to be pumped into the facility when the eight residents were basically suffocating inside, many considered the experiment a failure.

But not those who lived it. Besides enlightening interviews with the articulate and entertaining surviving participants, “Spaceship Earth” takes us back to the late 1960s with rich archival footage that elegantly unfolds to tell this stranger-than-fiction story of a merry band of creative intellectuals, free-thinkers and environmentalists who understood the potential for destruction due to climate change long before almost everyone else.

They managed to find each other and lived as an adventurous collective, making Avant Garde theater and creating ambitious environments, including a sustainable farm and constructing a ship that sailed from San Francisco Bay around the world. They were led by John Allen, interviewed in the film, who’s described as a charismatic genius who brought out talents and skills from scientific research to project management to architecture that the eager and adventurous young men and women in his orbit didn’t even know they had.

The film details how Allen financed his elaborate projects by teaming with Ed Bass, scion of a billionaire Texas oil family who was keenly interested in novel environmental research.

Much of the fascinating footage in “Spaceship Earth” comes from the daily documentation shot in 16mm by the group’s physician, Roy Walford. Wolf, who directed last year’s “Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project,” another uncovering of a true tale rich with vintage footage, has crafted an elegant and absorbing film, aided by the topnotch work of editor David Teague and composer Owen Pallett.

“Starship Earth” is also an engaging record of how the television media like Diane Sawyer, Peter Jennings and other ‘90s news stars, lavished attention on the irresistible story, and then later treated it as a joke. There’s Rue McClanahan of “Golden Girls” fame reporting from outside the Biosphere 2 site, and other delightful visual trips back to an era that now seems more innocent, and certainly more hopeful.

Also available for streaming through the Jane Pickens Theater is “Up from the Streets,” a vibrant, enlightening and foot-stomping tribute to New Orleans jazz. This is another timely film, since the annual Jazz Fest in the Big Easy was recently canceled for this first time in decades. Director Michael Murphy traces the journey from jazz’s origins in New Orleans, an amalgam of African, Cuban and Creole influences, among others, right to up the present and the lively funk, rap and bounce scenes. It’s both educational and joyful.

Acclaimed musician and New Orleans native Terence Blanchard, one of the film’s producers, serves as its host, taking viewers on a trip to the past when the likes of Sidney Bechet, Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong forged a new improvisational style from the traditions of the blues, ragtime and Dixieland.

Other luminaries who recount the city’s rich musical heritage include Harry Connick, Jr.; Wynton Marsalis; Irma Thomas; Aaron Neville; Robert Plant; and Keith Richards. Best of all are the musical performances from legends such as Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, Dr. John, Earl King and Allen Toussaint from such renowned New Orleans concert venues as Preservation Hall and Tipitina’s. There’s also ample footage of Mardi Gras celebrations and the city’s famed brass marching bands.

Viewers who stream the film not only get a feel-good movie, they get to feel good about supporting both the JPT and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation COVID-19 relief fund for musicians, which gets a portion of ticket sales. There’s also a live Q&A via ZOOM with Terence Blanchard and Michael Murphy at 7 p.m. on May 16.

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