Water Like Stone by Zack Godshall and Michael Pasquier (review)

Water Like Stone, a feature-length documentary film by Zack Godshall and Michael Pasquier, is set in and on the waterways around Leeville, Louisiana, a coastal town that is literally disappearing due to coastal erosion. The filmmakers picked Leeville because it represents a microcosm of the problems of coastal wetland loss that exist throughout the state. (According to the film, Louisiana accounts for 90 percent of the continental United States’s total coastal wetland loss, or sixteen square miles a year.) After an introduction to the region’s cultural history and environmental challenges, the narrative focuses on the many ways Leeville’s residents interact with water, primarily via fishing. Recreational and commercial fishermen, an oysterman, and an ice-plant worker are among those featured.

The reasons for Leeville’s decline are multiple. Not only does the community suffer physical land loss due to erosion (a point that fishermen, intimate with the circuitous waterways of the bayou, can speak to better than nearly anyone else), but the expanding oil and gas industry, just down the road in Port Fourchon, has surpassed fishing as the most important industry in the region. A reminder of the new regional hierarchy is the elevated highway to Port Fourchon, which bypasses Leeville entirely. Only a few people in the film mention the new road overtly, but much of the film is shot from the water, and the miles-long bridge looms in the background. While Leeville’s residents have always lived a life on and with the water, Water Like Stone tells the story of how this community is becoming perilously isolated, a disappearing island.

The filmmakers, both professors at Louisiana State University (LSU) (Pasquier in Religious Studies, Godshall in English), are Louisiana natives, and they have been friends for over a decade. They were both commuting to Louisiana’s Gulf Coast for independent projects when they decided to collaborate on the film. Pasquier has spent significant time in the area for his own oral history project on the role of religion in Bayou Lafourche, a historic waterway that passes near Leeville. (As a summer graduate assistant, I processed this oral history collection for LSU’s T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History; the indexes are available online at: http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/williams/collections/bayoulafourche.html.) Godshall knew he wanted to make a film about Louisiana’s vanishing coast but was looking for the right framework. When they found Leeville, they spent many hours in town, getting to know their subjects. When they started filming, Godshall explains:

We did our best to create a comfortable atmosphere, so when the camera was rolling, we were already on pretty firm ground in terms of how we would relate to the individual. Oftentimes, Mike and I would discuss what questions we wanted to ask, and then during the interview one of us would serve as the primary conversant. This helped create a conversational tone as well as a visual continuity in each segment.

Water Like Stone is not strictly an oral history film, but the project could not have been completed without oral history. Pasquier’s interviewing experience in Bayou Lafourche had what he calls a “direct impact on my decision to team up with Zack to work in Leeville,” and his expertise is apparent in the subjects’ ease and candor on screen. And while Godshall has not undertaken formal training in oral history, the echoes of oral history are clear in this film and others of his. In Water Like Stone, God’s Architects (his feature-length documentary that was screened at the Sundance Film Festival), and his most recent short documentary, A Man Without Words, Godshall focuses on compelling individuals, giving his subjects the time and space to tell their stories, including the pauses, repetition, elaboration, and omissions that can make oral history such a dramatic form of storytelling.

However, because it is short for a feature-length...