The Flying Sailor

Halifax, 1917. Friday, morning. The 7th December. Two vessels, the Norwegian Imo and the French Mont-Blanc are in the same channel. The Scandinavian ship was on her way to New York for relief supplies, kept overnight by the anti-submarine nets as part of a succession of delays. The European vessel was on her way to the theatre of war laden with fuel and explosives. She'd had to wait outside those same nets that same night because she too was delayed.

They were not alone in the harbour, HMS Highflyer, Changuinola, Knight Templar, Calgarian, HMCS Acadia, Niobe, the merchant vessels Stella Maris and Old Colony among those in the bustling port. Canada's gateway to the Atlantic still undergoing rapid expansion as the Great War raged. Effectively an outpost of the Royal Navy, it was a key part in the extension of His Majesty's Canadian sea forces. As the docks expanded and score of piers were built, a massive railyard and warehousing grew along the shore in Halifax and the town of Dartmouth across the narrows to the Bedford Basin.

Just before nine, in what amounted to a dispute over right of way in that narrow access route, and despite multiple efforts to avoid it, the vessels collided. Not quickly, despite Imo's haste to make up for the past day's delays. Not simply, with efforts to warn and avoid and last minute manoeuvring highlighting the orders of magnitude between intent and inertia. It was at perhaps one knot that the two hulls came into contact. A bump so slow it would make a trolley blown across a supermarket car park seem like a challenge to Superman.

What happened next would be too. Mont-Blanc was carrying a cargo rich in exotic chemistry. Among some three thousand tonnes was a deck full of benzole barrels, a fuel made of the solvents benzene and toluene. Below them holds of nitrocellulose, usually known as guncotton, of more toluene in its more famous tri-nitro configuration, TNT, and making up about 80% of the load was picric acid. The name means "bitter", from the taste, but it's the "tri-nitro" in its own chemical name that indicates its parallels with all the other explosives aboard.

In the catastrophe 1782 people were killed. That's an estimate, bound up in the complexities of a colonial outpost in wartime, the various racisms of North America. So too the 9000 or so casualties, direct and indirect, the relief efforts hampered by a blizzard the following day and the fear that the event was an attack. Among those injured a sailor by the name of Charles Mayers, of the Middleham Castle.

The blast disappeared the Mont-Blanc. It became shrapnel, an eponym itself bound up in British (colonial) military history. In Lawrencetown, 15 miles away, folk felt a push and pull of the blast wave. Another wave of the straits waters started at some half a dozen meters in height and tripled as it roared across Halifax. The shank of her anchor, the long bit that runs parallel to Popeye's arms, was hurled more than two miles. I throw another handful of measurements in there, the long and the short of it is that the nautical doesn't just have its own vocabulary but its own metrics. Throw being the operative word, because Charles was chucked roughly half as far, landing with only his boots on.

This is, and is not, his story. That long contextual pre-amble is indebted to a variety of sources, especially Sharon Adams piece in Canada's Legion Magazine. The Flying Sailor's debts are less to that, or truth, than Canadian filmmaking.

Capital throughout, and not just financial. Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby are an animation team so joined that they share a Wikipedia page. Supported by the National Film Board, it was only doing later research that I discovered the seeming archive footage is more contemporary that I thought, not to the events but an earlier project of theirs. The name on a building is that of the 3-D modeller. The tone is as mixed as the media. A life might flash before eyes before us, but it's a thing constructed.

Relatively light too. Our anonymous, albeit inspired, protagonist isn't so much barrel-chested as steamer-trunked, a rectangle with brawls and disappointed woman and a black cat past crossed his path. There's modified footage, there's a weight of stock that I'd consider to be National Film Board (of Canada) issued but that's almost certainly one of those contextual things like Danske Filminstitut where some words impart different meaning. The Flying Sailor could have done with it. In attempting to make sense of something possibly too large to make sense of it finds itself gasping like its protagonist, not quite able to function.

It's pretty. The version I saw was hosted by The New Yorker and there's a certain style of serio-comic drawing that traces its lines back to their house style. The more transporting element of this film isn't the digital animation or perspective conveyed with splattered film-grain and that cliche of tinnital tones but the score. Nineteen musicians by my count, so one shy, Luigi Allemano's string heavy work doing much of the lifting.

Not that there's much too lift. One can make a lot of a lack of context, I often think of the reframing of Plot Point, or Terminal Communication as a less successful example. This is almost experimental filmmaking but it's very clearly trying to imply, if not tell, a story. It has the almost inevitable strobing and noises. It just doesn't show too much for it. Resistance is what denudes our sailor, but it makes it hard for it to transport audiences. The act of falling imbues something like weightlessness, but given the scale and scope of the inciting incident it feels unbecoming.

It may be that in a more traditional cinematic environment the film gains a bit of power, but the best works benefit from but don't require it. I think of similarly awarded Too Rough which grabbed me from my laptop and and through a swathe of cables to my television and on a big screen. I think of the hypnotic impact of seeing Akira's opening sequence for the umpteenth time from the front row of the main auditorium of Glasgow's Film Theatre. That upscaling and enlarging is a projection of power, not a replacement for it, and despite the forces involved The Flying Sailor doesn't have it.