Ah, the feel of a genuine Gibson Acoustic Guitar! Don't all of us amateur guitar twangers pay homage to the instrument? Now comes this documentary that's torn this illusion of beauty and its gonna break your heart a little. I'm talking about MUSICWOOD. And my guitar gently weeps....
If the purpose of an environmental documentary is to make
you see an otherwise invisible world of problems attached to an item in your
hands, Musicwood is a striking success.
This elegant, troubling 2012 feature by director Maxine
Trump follows top brass from three of the U.S.’s most revered makers of
acoustic guitars—Martin, Gibson, and Taylor—as they grapple with the ecological
costs of one of their prime ingredients: old-growth Sitka spruce, the wood of
choice for building the light, resonant soundboards of their instruments.
Nearly all of this
wood comes from one place, Tongass National Forest in the Alaskan Panhandle.
Tongass contains the largest unbroken stretch of temperate coniferous
rainforest in the world.
But only a few short
decades of clear-cutting, to feed not just the relatively tiny guitar market
but the booming Asian-based industries in construction materials and veneers,
has erased a huge percentage of old spruce stands.
Like most compelling films, Musicwood lays out a story in
which heroes and villains are harder to separate than they seem at first. Golly Miss Molly!
For starters, the product under the microscope here isn’t a
roll of paper towels. It’s a soul-stirring, centuries-old musical device—and
almost everyone, from the most ardent environmentalist to the most
profit-obsessed corporate CEO, has a favourite song that’s played on one. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind...
Add to this the fact
that the clearcuts are being carried out not by some faceless multinational but
by a First Nation-run corporation that emerged from years of struggle over land
claims.
And then complicate matters with tensions between the well-heeled
executives of that corporation and its poor and embittered “shareholders”, many
of whom see their traditional resources and way of life being liquidated.
Even the nobly intended Musicwood Coalition—formed by the
otherwise competing guitar makers at the behest of Greenpeace—ends up getting
compromised.
After gaining a degree of trust and cooperation from the
Aboriginal business leaders in Tongass, its mission to conserve old-growth
spruce is suspended when the Gibson company gets raided by U.S. officials for
importing illegal wood from Madagascar.
With cameo appearances by Yo La Tengo, Steve Earle, Kaki
King, and Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, Musicwood is charged with the West Coast
landscape and the much-loved musical instruments that rely on it. Viewers,
whether guitarists or not, will rightfully worry about the future of both.
