Staff Pick Premiere: Logging by hand on a Swiss mountain

Ian Durkin is a filmmaker and former curator at Vimeo.
Ian Durkin

Observational documentary possesses the unique power to transport a viewer into a foreign world. In this week’s Staff Pick Premiere, filmmakers Corina Schwingruber Ilić and Thomas Horat take us to the cold, steep woods above Lake Ägeri in Switzerland and put us to work alongside loggers practicing their traditional craft. We watch as the crew of men maneuver the snowy banks with heavy chainsaws, hooks, and jacks to cut down enormous trees and send them flying down to the lake below like runaway freight trains. These loggers compare their craft to a farmer harvesting fruit or vegetables; they return to Lake Ägeri every four years to select the trees that have reached the proper age to cut for lumber, all while creating new space in the forest for sunlight to come through and saplings to grow.

Among the contrasting dead silence of the forest and loud whizzing of the chainsaws, you realize the amount of skill and practice that goes into this Swiss craft. The stakes are high and it’s too dangerous to approach it with any degree of carelessness: the trees are tall, heavy, and when they fall on the steep bank of the lake, they move very fast. So the loggers take into account the angle of their cuts, the path the trees will inevitably fall and slide down, and the timing in which this will all take place. For Horat and Ilić, they describe the documentation process as exciting and interesting “to feel the danger [that the loggers] never talked about.”

But amidst the danger and intensity, there remains a beauty to the craft and the camaraderie between the men as they are able to work in complete isolation from the rest of the world. The things the crew sees and hears on a normal day of work are, until now, shared only within their small team. For Horat and Ilić, a major force in creating the film was this opportunity to document a craft which “is almost extinct in all of the countries in Europe.” We, the viewers, are able to tap into and understand a unique culture. As “In the Woods” ends and the camera leaves the forest for the first time to reveal an aerial shot of all the fallen trees symmetrically arranged on the lake, it shows the scope of work that was accomplished — offering a smidge of the satisfaction of a job well done that the loggers must feel. It feels good.

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