The Nature Camera

Islands are like miniature worlds, small-scale ecosystems demarcated by water and with landscapes and specific cycles that can highlight global trends and changes. They are also perceived as places of isolation, spaces removed from the concerns of the continent which appear to possess their own rhythms and ways of life. Bloom refers to the legend of Saint Brendan, the mythical and mysterious ninth island of the Canary Islands archipelago which appears and disappears at will: mountains rising above sandy beaches, stretches of tropical plants as far as the eye can see, underwater rock formations undergoing scientific research through robotic tools. Enys Men, meanwhile, speaks of an island off the coast of Cornwall, also a place of scientific interest which, simultaneously, is inhabited by spirits from an era in which people went to extract tin from its land and left behind a landscape where nature erases all traces of human intervention. The year is 1973 and a volunteer begins living on the otherwise deserted island to observe the unique flowers that grow there. As the days unfold in their monotony, the environment increasingly engulfs her and the lichens start to grow on her flesh as well as the flowers. Her relationship with the landscape brings to mind the verses of English poet John Donne: “No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main”.

Non-human realities have always been customary themes of narrations and myths, yet all film-makers depend on the power of the imagination if they wish to represent their vision of the world. In Fainting Spells, Sky Hopinka weaves a series of stories around Xąwįska (the Indian Pipe Plant), used by the Ho-Chunk Nation to revive those who have fainted. We witness conversations with a plant as guide, protector and friend, and which also shows a unique Indigenous concept of nature. Last Things takes as its point of departure two short novels by J.-H. Rosny, the pseudonym of French-Belgian Joseph-Henry-Honoré and Séraphin-Justin-François Boex, to explore the perspective of rocks. These early works of speculative fiction are coupled with, via strangely sensual scientific diagrams, references to a broad array of theoretical and fictional texts (among them, by Donna Haraway and Clarice Lispector) and successive images of the mineral world and its most astounding aspects. The latest work by Deborah Stratman, with its characteristic density and digressions, is at once apocalyptic and optimistic: stones survive everything, even us, and there is a strange consolation in them.

Allowing time to explore a specific place is also often the best way to evoke the world that lies outside, and with all the tensions this entails. In her recent short film The Birth of the Loire, Rose Lowder, a film-maker who has devoted her life to examining the relationship between human beings and nature, travels through the upper course of the Loire River, a stretch considered the last wild river in Europe but one which is little more than a murmuring stream in the mountains. In the process, she separates sound and image to single out the perception of each one. As the stream becomes a torrent and despite the natural serenity of the zone, the city constantly looms in the background of the frame. In Geographies of Solitude, meanwhile, Jacquelyn Mills travels to a tiny and uninhabited Canadian island called Sable Island to weave a tender and clever portrait of aficionado naturalist Zoe Lucas, who has devoted her life to classifying the island’s plant and animal life. With wild horses, insects and grasses and herbs there are also growing quantities of waste plastic that wash onto the beach, the effects of an unruly ecosystem of consumption which still, from a distance, exerts pressure on this remote location.

Although dividing the world into the human and the non-human is a comfortable way to measure our impact on nature, the reality is inevitably more complex since human beings are part of the natural world and are inseparable from it. Terra Mater - Mother Land shapes an oneiric picture of a perfectly hybrid landscape: a landfill in Rwanda surrounded by trees and populated with birds and human beings, resulting from both colonialism and the extraction of minerals and globalisation. A Common Sequence is an essay which also follows the traces of a border running between the natural and the human that is increasingly blurring, establishing connections between a Mexican axolotl which only continues to exist through scientific interference, recently patented apples from an orchard in the USA collected through artificial intelligence and Indigenous efforts to protest against the commercialisation of the human genome. In a film packed full of paradoxes, perhaps the most severe is the fact that human intervention is the only way to inhabit a world that becomes a wreck precisely through our intervention.

Despite this series focusing on how contemporary film-makers have captured the relationship between humanity and the natural world, its subject matter is inscribed within a long tradition of filmic commitment to nature stretching back to the dawn of cinema. In this special session, film-maker and archivist Leandro Listorti, the director of Herbaria (2022) and the current beneficiary of the Joaquim Jordà residency organised by the Museo Reina Sofía, presents and contextualises a selection of 16mm films on nature and botany belonging to the archive of the Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, where Listorti has worked since 2016.

There is not one unique nature and film is an indispensable medium for visiting, experimenting with and becoming immersed in the richness and diversity of the natural world. An immersive quality owing largely to sound, which can take us to specific environments images alone cannot. The films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul have always put forward fluid borders between the human and the non-human, particularly through his exquisite soundscapes, with Night Colonies no exception. This hypnotic short film transports the viewer to a cabin, seemingly devoid of human life in the middle of the jungle, during a storm. A swarm of buzzing insects gather in the cabin’s bed to soften, with their din and the howling wind, any human concern. The Sri Lankan jungle is also depicted with an immense richness of sound in Carlos Casas’s Cemetery, the story of a mythical and sensorial journey to an elephants’ graveyard. Poachers who try to capture a hundred-year-old elephant and its carer are progressively engulfed by the sound of animals, trees and water until there is only a darkness which fuses into that of the auditorium.

There are numerous examples in film of encounters that occur when humans move deeper into nature, but what materialises when the opposite happens? What occurs when nature interferes in the city, the human habitat par excellence? In The Secret Garden, a thicket of plants, flowers and trees appears overnight around the streets and squares of an anonymous city in the Near East. Across eight chapters narrated with a voice-over, two women attempt to discover the reason behind this sudden upsurge of plant life, both literal and allegorical. Fragments of audio from different genres transmit agitation while spellbinding images in 16mm show flowers and foliage of every type, but without a human being in sight. Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air, for its part, tells the unusual true story Antoine Yates, arrested in 2003 after it was discovered he was sharing his apartment in Harlem, New York, with a tiger called Ming and an alligator called Al. The director Philip Warrell reconstructs part of the apartment in the cages of two animals that share similarities with a zoo, recording their movements with static cameras. The images are contrasted with an extensive interview with Yates, whose claim that “true wild nature no longer exists” is hard to refute in the present day, despite the clear eccentricity of this example.