If you were worried about losing your digital files, would you immediately think of building an ark? Ian Cheney, documentary filmmaker, was worried about his film footage in his hard drives going bad. It was making sounds like his son playing basketball at night. This is a metaphor for the fleeting nature of life, how nothing lasts, and thinking about preserving the things that matter to us.

The movie starts with Cheney having an ark, a literal wooden ship, landlocked, but a ship, built on a piece of land in Maine owned by his parents. During the course of this architecture project, we hear from scientists who study the rings in trees, in clams, in fish, how they determine the kind of years they had as they grew older. We hear from a cave scientist, in Majorca, Spain, who digs deep into the guano laid down by thousands of bats, because the soil over the years tells the story of what happened, in terms of its chemical makeup, its moisture content, etc. As Cheney delves into the subject, which turns out to be archiving, and storage of memory, he digs deep. The science verges on philosophy.

What is worth keeping? Who gets to decide? What ever lasts? In the process of exploring these questions, he visits not only Majorca, Spain, but also the Sahara desert where some of the oldest libraries in the world attempt to keep the books safe from the encroaching sand. He visits the Bahamas where a poet, Yasmin Glinton Poitier, visits the house where she grew up, its walls still painted pink, that was destroyed by hurricane Dorian in 2019. We meet Carrie House, a native American filmmaker who wanted to make a film about her brother who had died. She and Ian were working together in Maine on the project, and the footage they made got lost. One of the terrible things about not keeping track, of not archiving, especially with digital, is that when it is gone, there is no trace. An element of sadness creeps in during this segment.

But most of the movie points to discovery, learning the ways that things are organized, preserved. How human activity has already had an impact on what we thought was pristine, the Arctic,, which shows traces of antidepressant chemicals in the waters. A great deal of energy goes in to the beautiful photography. A walrus hovers near the shore and it is hard to get tired of watching his orb shaped face, his long whiskers of cinnamon color, his seeking eyes. What are we looking for he seems to say.

The ark gets built from the ground up, with the carpenter sawing the tree, planing the wood, and marveling at the lunar moth that lands on his saw. The carpenter describes it as only a Maine citizen would: as “wicked pretty.” Other random elements stand out, like the footage of Cheney’s son, in pajamas, playing basketball one night when he couldn’t sleep, the small phone recording the boy’s excellence at sinking shot after shot. Photography can be considered a kind of archive. Ian Cheney likes to show his video on old 1950s size tvs, a reminder of how technology is constantly changing.

Just because I could ask the man in Austria to record a poem of mine by having it engraved on ceramic plates and buried in the bottom of the Alps as an archive, does not mean that I am even remotely tempted to do so. Some things go too far to be archived. Like the scientist who wants his bones to be buried at the foot of the Mississippi so that they will be fossilized. Everything isn’t fossilized. And that is not a bad thing.

In the end, we hear a poem by Shelley read by Herzog, the one that ends,

By then, we have gotten the point, and enjoyed so many images and scientific ideas and philosophical questions.