A Brief History of Chasing Storms

«It’s impossible to anticipate a storm without another storm in mind» says the voiceover of A Brief History of Chasing Storms by Curtis Miller. Another storm was indeed in my mind as I walked into the cinema to catch my last film at the festival Visions du Réel before heading home. It had nothing to do with the festival. I just happened to be sad that day, because, well, the current state of the world. I don’t know if I projected my own cloudy thoughts on the screen or if this film actively carried such a strong sense of melancholy… anyway, my emotional hurricanes seem to have met the cinematic ones halfway, somewhere.

Curtis Miller’s project starts very romantic and then moves to a more historical approach. Nevertheless, the feelings in each frame remain powerful, and every factual sentence appears to contain poetry. Even the words of a shelter seller, who proudly says «everything that you build in pieces will come out in pieces», left me wondering in the cinema, trying to figure out if I should build my life in one piece to avoid fragmentation. «It’s impossible to anticipate a storm without another storm in mind». Thinking about storms goes in circles: since every storm is related to another one, there was never a first storm. There was a first photograph of a storm, though. It wasn’t a powerful storm, but it was very photogenic and that’s why it became famous. The history of storms is intricately woven in together with the history of capturing images.

It's difficult for me to recall how the film started, and even more so how it ended. It resists a linear commentary. The dramaturgy is akin to a spiral, coming back to certain elements to create a variation of loops. It is a history told in brief cycles overlapping one another, like a pile of film reels. The documentary combines diverse materials: text, archive footage, interview scenes, photographs, maps and other objects. It’s a careful recollection of fragments, crafting an abstract monument to the lost ones. Sometimes a wind instrument or a radio clip intrudes in the sound design. At some point the discourse even becomes the lyrics of a song with a recurring accordion part. It’s La Tragedia De Lubbock, by Gabriel Treviño y Sus Bohemios, that plays while the camera turns rapidly on itself, blurring the background behind the lyrics. «I’ll try to keep this from being too political», had just said a man who lost relatives in the Guadalupe neighborhood, a neighborhood who wasn’t viewed as a significant part of Lubbock. «It was redlined, and if you were Mexican this is where you lived». Displayed right after this interview, the song lyrics in Spanish now carry an unspoken weight. It reveals how the history of storms is also a history of territories and colonization.

Several times the film becomes a museum, while the directors visit local exhibitions about the movies Twister and The Wizard of Oz, or actual tornadoes. The fiction becomes a tool with which to apprehend the complexity of feelings around storms. As the director says, people are «scared, fascinated and dismissive» all at the same time. Storms challenge our relationship to the very materiality of life. It can evolve to an almost spiritual connection, as it does for this amateur storm chaser who refers to the danger of death as «when your time comes».

There is something peculiar about these interactions happening in front of the camera. As mentioned before, the film first seems to present itself as a collection of objects. Some parts even display a table where different artefacts are manipulated, and throughout the film human protagonists seem to always revolve around these “objects”, be it the tape of the “behind the scenes” of Twister, a tornado simulator or a storm chasing car. However, the camera never objectifies anyone. It’s a playful visit where protagonists receive the space to show us their materiality, in other words the artefacts to which they relate. At the screening, the moderator asked if people were angry at the Hollywood appropriation of the catastrophes caused by storms. The director responded that they were mostly angry at the negligence toward this “forgotten area” and the damages caused by the privatization of the weather service. With climate change and the weakening of public services, storms are the symptoms of a much bigger crisis. Storms are inherently political.

In his essay, the filmmaker says that «one can’t unsee a tornado». I also can’t unsee this film. It changed something in me, but it’s hard to explain with words what it is exactly. Curtis Miller’s voiceover also evokes how throughout history different metaphors were used to describe the sound of tornadoes. So, I left the cinema, wondering what my inner storms sound like.