Griff Griffith, a park ranger in the Humboldt Redwoods can be seen gregariously speaking to a group of children about the forest in “Humboldt, USA,” creating engagement with the natural world by teaching them to make the call of a spotted owl, only there’s something slightly muted about their response. It becomes quite a telling scene in G. Anthony Svatek’s intriguing meditation on this particular moment in time when the director pulls back the camera to reveal that Griffith is conducting this tour over a livestream on his iPhone, which would account for the enthusiasm gap as there probably is some excitement on the other side of the line, but the exchange leaves both sides wanting and while it yields an experience for the kids, it’s not as if they’ve really been there.
Such abstract distances are what Svatek strives to make tactile in the contemplative doc, which takes its title as it turns out so many other things do from the German geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who spent five years criss-crossing America at the turn of the 19th century and his myriad discoveries resulted in countless landmarks and species being named in his honor. Although his name hasn’t disappeared as a result, his memory has and Svatek explores the disparity when his interest in the natural world has seemed to have vanished along with him, despite the fact that like his name, it remains ever-present. The fact that Svatek ties the piece together with a ruminative voiceover that occasionally communes in Humboldt’s native tongue is the kind of flirtation with pretension that might alienate some viewers as the director rumbles around the U.S. at a deliberate pace, but there is something profound in trying to reconcile Humboldt’s idea that “everything is interconnectedness” in a climate where people seem increasingly out of touch with reality in a variety of ways.
That isn’t true of those that Svatek directly follows all in places named after Humboldt, though you wonder how infectious their own passion for nature will be. In Nevada’s Humboldt County, Ed and Emily are state employees who monitor the migration of bighorn sheep who stray from the Paiute reservation where they belong and are charged with bringing them back and in the Humboldt Redwoods, Griffith has some company in Chris and Emily, whose work in nearby Silicon Valley has led them to try and map the forest with strings of GoPros that they can eventually use to create predictive algorithms, putting their tech knowledge to the test when they find themselves at nature’s whims. The director also heads to Buffalo, New York where Terry and Marcia, a married couple, contend with living next to the Humboldt Parkway, a busy thoroughfare that has caused considerable pollution that threatens to get even worse with the introduction of a seemingly ill-conceived project to cover it with a park where the toxins are expected to be more damaging when concentrated. If that situation appears hopeless as Terry tries to rally the political will necessary to block the changes, at least Svatek is able to turn the camera to the nearby science museum where the effort to get people excited about how it all really works with the help of an impending solar eclipse that could lead to a greater consciousness of the potential hazard of the parkway.
In depicting the efforts of others to build bridges of understanding, “Humboldt, USA” is admirably able to construct one of its own, engaging throughout visually as it sees the wonder that its subjects do in nature while acknowledging that the same technology that has made his own project possible may be at the root of the unraveling of the whole human one when it’s largely erased curiosity about the environment or the appetite to experience it directly and while Svatek opens up the space to consider the cost to both the rural and urban areas he visits if not enough attention is paid in an unforced way, the film has an urgency about it that encourages taking notice.
“Humboldt, USA” does not yet have U.S. distribution.