Walking on Water is the first documentary featuring Christo after the death of his wife and artistic partner, Jeanne-Claude. The pair is most famous for The Gates, a large outdoor art installation in Central Park, which I never saw in person, but I admired through a framed photograph. It focuses on his first solo project, “The Floating Piers” in Lake Isea, Italy, and covers March 13, 2016 through January 3, 2016 with a slight postscript that acts as a teaser for future projects.
How psyched was I to see Walking on Water? I saw the preview and bought tickets weeks in advance to a special showing featuring the documentary’s producer, Izabella Tzenkova, and Christo’s Operations Director and nephew, Vladimir Yavachev, as if it were a Marvel movie. I love art, artists and documentaries so it seemed right up my alley. I was wrong, but at least the Q&A session was engaging. I learned more about the project and the people after the movie than I did watching a film for one hour forty-five minutes. Thank you, Yavachev.
During the Q&A session, I discovered that the director, Andrey Paounov, shouldn’t be blamed for any issues that any viewer may have with Walking on Water. He was given 700 hours of footage and told to make a movie, which means that he was more of an editor, not a director. He never had any input on what to shoot or how to shoot it. The documentary even uses clips from YouTube of amateur videos, which actually were more beautiful and evocative than the majority of the footage. It was the wrong way to approach the film. The person behind the camera matters because that person is really creating the story and setting the tone. Paounov can’t go back and make different choices. The moment is gone. Incidentally Christo loved it, according to Yavachev, and Christo is a successful artist so what do I know? On the other hand, considering how much Christo likes real things, and I love movies, maybe I’m right. You decide.
Walking on Water is an observational documentary. The camera takes an unobtrusive position and observes daily life without narration or participating. We basically get an intimate look at what it takes to create these large-scale installations, but it feels very superficial. It feels more like a clash of personalities than anything substantive. I’ve always believed that every movie has one scene that perfectly captures the mood of the film. Christo and Yavachev are stuck in a meeting with Italian bureaucrats and start to fall asleep not seeing the glaring red flag that these officials literally mean to hand everything off to them, even things that the artist and his team should not be responsible for. They weren’t the only one. I started to nod off too even though I was prepared for what was coming.
Walking on Water shows, but does not illuminate. It is more Big Brother than Hoop Dreams. A lot of it feels like laughing at the subjects than with them, especially playing up the old man artist who is stubborn, loud and hates technology. Let’s be honest! That side of him is true, but he also accomplishes great things, and the movie never captures that side of him as well. He talks in front of adoring audiences, barks directions and greets people who want to get his attention whether working class or upper crust, but it never really captures him. If I’m being shown something, it should serve a purpose or communicate something, but it feels two-dimensional like a trope.
Walking on Water’s cameras were too respectful. Crucial interactions are permitted to occur outside of its view. People deliberately walk in and out of the room to avoid attention and negotiate in privacy. The biggest dramatic moment ends up seeming like one thing and actually being another. For example, while watching the film, I thought that the problem was capacity of the piers to hold a certain number of people, but according to Yavachev, the actual problem was the capacity of the town to accommodate a certain number of visitors and maintain services such as a functional sewer system without complete system failure! Did the filmmakers not get it and/or did they fail to convey it? Either way, there are numerous moments like this one in which there is a reference to a problem, but the depiction does not actually reflect the real problem, but is more interested in the raised voices and hurled insults.
Tzenkova inadvertently revealed the real problem behind Walking on Water. They were concerned about being boring so that means omitting the nitty-gritty details behind the negotiations and the mechanics of the project. The filmmakers had no faith in its audience to get engrossed in what truly matters behind the scenes and lowers itself to the level of a reality tv show by solely focusing on personalities. I hate to break it to them, but there are probably very few people interested in reality television that overlap the Venn diagram and are interested in art in a foreign country. It is such a missed opportunity to truly understand and empathize with the complete experience of creating this installation. It was fascinating to find out how Christo funds his projects, hires his workers and disposes of the materials once he is done. Tzenkova said that the filmmaker makes a movie about people, not things, but the way that people use things tells us a lot about them, and the fact that the film never fully depicts that part of Christo’s life except for laughs accurately shows that he takes a lot for granted about what makes a person unique and how it is a reflection of personal history.
If I haven’t completely dissuaded you from seeing Walking on Water in theaters, on a shallow note, it may be best to watch the documentary at home because subtitles would have been helpful. I don’t think that there will ever be subtitles from Italian to English because the filmmakers made a deliberate choice to let the viewer be as clueless as Christo during the discussions with the Italian bureaucrats, but with so many different European accents, it takes some effort to calibrate and understand what everyone is saying when they do speak in English. I use subtitles when Americans are speaking so I don’t miss anything so this experience with subtitles would have helped me not to miss crucial moments if there were any. There was one moment when Yavachev was telling Christo what the big drama of the day was on June 20, 2016. I missed one word, and I have no idea what he said or what it was. It was probably crucial.
Walking on Water was a huge disappointment, a waste of time, money and resources. I was happy to discover during the Q&A session that there are numerous documentaries about Christo and Jeanne-Claude so if you have recommendations, please share them. I already put The Gates and 5 Films About Christo & Jeanne-Claude in my queue.
