documentary film review: Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin

I drove (rental car, natch) down to Santa Cruz for a special presentation sponsored by the town's film festival, the first (I think) area screening of the long-hatching documentary by Arwen Curry, Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin. A small but appreciative audience gathered in a hotel ballroom (on the tourist side of town, where I rarely go).

The roughly hour-long film is an impressive mix of Curry's own footage of Le Guin (who was still alive during the film's long gestation), old photos and film clips (including film from Aussiecon showing UKL with [an uncredited] Susan Wood, whom I was especially pleased to see), a staggeringly impressive list of recent interviewees, headlined by Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, and Samuel R. Delany; and including brief appearances by UKL's husband and all three of their children, and some animations enlivening discussions of her books, notably some impressive rotoscoped oil painting animation for Earthsea.

The flow of the documentary's topics is most impressive, running seamlessly between segments discussing selected works of hers with ones on her personal life and background. She reads a few brief excerpts of her fiction. It begins rather offbeat with a depiction of how science fiction was a literary ghetto in the pulp age, then moves through UKL's early attempts to find a market until she settled in to writing humanistic adventure sf for Don Wollheim; then it jumps to Earthsea before returning to the major early SF. The latest works covered are Tehanu and Always Coming Home, except for her National Book Award speech, though others briefly appear as book covers. The subtlety of the transitions comes in how the segment on Tombs of Atuan follows a personal one on UKL's fondness for the Oregon high desert, whose landscape inspired the Kargish islands; and how another personal segment on the family home in the Napa Valley leads into, of course, Always Coming Home. There's a Berkeley High classroom discussion of "Omelas", with students taking each of the points of view possible in response to that story. The film is too short, but better that than too long. It's a real portrait that shows both what Le Guin did and what makes it both important and great reading.