Big Sky Documentary Film Festival: The Artistry of ‘Cranes’

By Guest Writer, 2-14-08

City of Cranes
Friday, Feb. 15, 4:00 p.m.
Director: Eva Weber
Producer: Samantha Zarzosa

It’s films like these — films that you watch and wonder, hmm, what a great idea — that really stick in your memory. Films about some mundane thing that people see all the time, but never really stop to think about. City of Cranes is one of those films.

Split into four parts, this fourteen-minute film documents the lives of a handful of crane operators and their craft. Looking out of their tiny glass boxes over new commercial construction projects or taking apart old ones, these men have a certain calmness and complacency to their voices that one may not expect from someone in that type of field.

What little dialog there is doesn’t necessarily help to drive the story, however. It acts more as a light dust of powdered sugar on top of a delicious bundt cake—certainly not essential, but a nice sweet extra, nonetheless.

The cranes themselves are the truly fascinating characters, and this film gives them a voice. Silently swinging, leering, nodding over our heads, quietly watching the city. This is the type of storytelling that needs no dialogue. The images truly speak for themselves.

From a photographic standpoint, the film is stunningly beautiful. The camera rarely physically moves, instead relying on the birds in flocks gliding in the sky, drifting clusters of clouds, and the smooth and graceful movements of the cranes themselves, to create movement and interest. It’s brilliantly composed with creative cinematography. Each shot is something that I would hang on my wall. And because of that, I only wish the filmmakers would have held some of the shots just a little longer.

For every one of its fourteen minutes, City of Cranes is an exceptionally inspiring visual masterpiece.

City of Cranes screens this week at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

Marshall Hibbard is the Creative Director at NewWest.Net