Who Killed the Electric Car?
(The movie, Allen says, will be screened again this year “because so few people were able to come” in 2007.) Allen understands that potential viewers can be wary of the bleakness that often accompanies environmentally themed documentaries – even such audience-friendly box-office hits as 2005’s Oscar winner. (“And ever since that [movie] came out, the story for the penguins just keeps getting worse,” states Allen.) Yet the festival’s organizer says, “We don’t want people to leave feeling depressed. We want them, hopefully, to leave feeling like ‘I, too, can be an activist at some level. And that may just mean changing something in my daily life.’ That’s where it begins. I don’t look at these films as being depressing so much as informational, educational, and even inspirational.” Also, hopefully, motivational. “I think that some people need to be made good and angry before they will move,” says Allen. “Before they will change. Before they will feel the compulsion to do something about t
It begins with a solemn funeral for a car. By the end of Chris Paine’s lively and informative documentary, the idea doesn’t seem quite so strange. As narrator Martin Sheen notes, “They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline.” Paine proceeds to show how this unique vehicle came into being and why General Motors ended up reclaiming its once-prized creation less than a decade later. He begins 100 years ago with the original electric car. By the 1920s, the internal-combustion engine had rendered it obsolete. By the 1980s, however, car companies started exploring alternative energy sources, like solar power. This, in turn, led to the late, great battery-powered EV1. Throughout, Paine deftly translates hard science and complex politics, such as California’s Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate, into lay person’s terms (director Alex Gibney, Oscar-nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, served as consulting producer). And everyone gets the chance to have their
