UMBRELLAS (1994) tells the controversial story of the artist Christo’s grand-scale environmental art project in Japan and California that ended in the tragic death of two of its spectators. At its world premiere in 1994 at the Berlin International Film Festival, Howard Feinstein of Variety praised the film as, “highly original and structurally flawless . . . an ambitious documentary about an ambitious project.” Umbrellas went on to win The Grand Prize at the Montreal International Film Festival and was exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and The Louvre Museum, Paris before its television premiere on the European network ARTE. Umbrellas aired on PBS in 2005.

"The one Christo and Jeanne-Claude film that climaxes on a note of anything less than triumph for the artists and workers is Umbrellas. Here the installation of large umbrellas across two mountainous valleys, one in California and the other in Japan, ultimately resulted in the death of two individuals, a woman in California and a man in Japan, due to weather conditions. The crises of Umbrellas go beyond self-inducement, as nature overwhelms Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s confidence that they are able to peacefully coexist with the natural world. “Whenever you add something artificial to nature,” states a Japanese shop owner in the film, “there are consequences.” The camera in Umbrellas loses its prior omniscience once the deaths occur; our only views of Christo and Jeanne-Claude from this point on are through television broadcasts. The film ends on a note of pathos, with the film dedicated to the two people who died as a result of the project.

Even this ending, though, does not negate most of what precedes it, nor are the deaths positioned within the film as a culminating point of violence and decadence, as with the death in Gimme Shelter. Gone from Umbrellas are the conflicts in Running Fence, Islands, and Christo in Paris between politicians and “ordinary” people unable to appreciate the art. Instead, the film shows virtually everyone in Japan and California embracing the installation and profoundly moved by the final result. The same Japanese shop owner who warns about the dangers of mixing the natural with the artificial describes the umbrella project as one in which “dream and reality have come together,” while in California a woman is moved to tears by the sight of the umbrellas. “It was truly a blooming,” she declares (a statement echoing Christo’s earlier description of umbrellas that will “open like a flower”), adding that the only other sight that has moved her as much was the birth of her own daughter.

The parallel editing of Umbrellas not only structurally mimics a primary ambition of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s project to link the cultures of Japan and the United States. It most often does this through a secondary and related structuring element built around families, children, and couples mating or individuals looking for their ideal lifetime partner. In a brief sequence that has no direct bearing on the construction of the umbrellas, a forty-four-year-old Japanese man describes himself a middle-aged and says that it is difficult for him to work and find a wife; later in the film, his friends say that they believe he will eventually find the wife that he is looking for; another Japanese woman tells of meeting her husband while asking him for directions on a train platform; in California, an elderly woman who supports the umbrellas project says that she has a son who married a Japanese woman, and so on. These brief moments serve not only to link the two cultures but also to strengthen the film’s emphasis on the devotion of Christo and Jeanne-Claude to one another. Their art is tied to the nature and the social. It literally brings people and cultures together to work on its installation, and the finished result is ultimately designed for them as well, to move them to tears and to remind them of their relationship to the natural world. The film’s insistence on family, mating, and children becomes the physical and biological extension of this ideology, with Christo and Jeanne-Claude at the center of this idealized male/female formation."