Coyote Hours
The programmer's note
We keep this on the shelf for people who cannot sleep. It is a documentary about a job, and the job happens to be listening. Rourke does almost nothing: he walks, he records, he stays out of the way of a scientist who is not performing for a camera. The receiver clicking as it loses and finds a signal is the score. If you liked Low Tide, this is the same instinct in another country.
The film
There are coyotes in every neighbourhood of Portland and almost nobody sees them. Ilse Kroeger has collared eleven. Six nights a month she walks a grid from midnight until five with a handheld antenna, a headset and a paper notebook, because a phone screen ruins her night vision for twenty minutes. Rourke walks with her on four of those nights across one winter. There is no narration and nothing said that Kroeger does not say on the walk. The pleasure of the film is its sound: the click of the receiver going in and out of range, a sprinkler, a bus two streets over, and, twice, an animal that stops and looks back. Seventeen minutes of a city as a set of overlapping territories, ours and theirs, mostly not in conflict. The last five minutes were shot on a golf course at four in the morning, and almost nothing happens in them.
