THE BIRDS AND THE BEES RE/UNMASTERED

Deviant studies of the nature documentary. This programme screens on Friday 13th August 2021 hosted by GAMIS and curated by Dr. Amy Cutler. Tickets (on a sliding scale) are available here.

From magic lantern optics, to Super 8 pedagogy, to digital love stories of revenge, transformation, and mourning, the programme twists the intimate lessons learned from the nature documentary. Like a remastered recording, each artist re-works or glitches the archive in some format, from its synthetic emotions (“crocodile tears”) to longer histories of nature media, curiosity, and science.

Under a Glass Bell (extracts) – Amy Cutler, 6 min (2020)

Four short extracts from a lockdown video book of audio-visual specimens and their feedback.

La Peine du Talion (The Judgement of Butterflies) – Gaston Velle, 5 min (1906)

The pioneer hand-painted and stencilled film about the morality of butterfly catching and its connection to the magic of film. A key example of early cinema’s transformational ‘scènes de féeries’.

Concerning Flight: Five Illuminations in Miniature – Charlotte Pryce, 7 min (2004)

A Kinematographic Film Comprised of Five Brief Fictions in Which is Explored the Mystery of Insect Flight. Interpretations of a Mythological and Fantastical Nature are Illuminated in Motion and Time.

Con cierto Animal (Animal Within) – Ivonne Sheen & Rebeca Alván, 12 min (2018)

By the appropriation of 16mm educational images, Humans, Animals, Earth, Wind and Water converge with the same energy of a filmic fire, which crosses and relates them.

Homenaje a la obra de Philip Henry Gosse (Homage to the work of Philip Henry Gosse) – Pablo Weber, 22 min (2020)

Using images and sounds from his own personal archive and taking a broad approach to his subject matter – including insights into artificial intelligence, the philosophical theory of positivism, and even H.P. Lovecraft – Weber builds a poetic film essay about scientific passion.

Looking Glass Insects – Charlotte Pryce, 4 min (2012)

Delighting in the act and play of observation, the film finds a visual metaphor for the cinematic process in Through the Looking Glass; making use of magnifying glasses as an optical pun, pointing to the instruments used by both entomologists and filmmakers alike.

Madame Babylas Aime les Animaux (Mrs. Pussy Loves Animals) – Alfred Machin, 4 min (1911)

Mrs. Pussy loves animals so much that she adopts everything she sees. The cinematic farce of animals as living props.

Anemone Blink – Amy Cutler, 3 min (2020)

Reading as reverie, drawing on Victorian science writing.

3 Songs for Saturn – Misho Antadze, 12 mins (2021)

In May 2020, an alligator died in the Moscow zoo. What did he remember? 3 Songs for Saturn uses found-footage from cinema history and YouTube to reconstruct the journey of a real-life alligator, whose biography echoes a lesser-known mass deportation of the 20th century.

For the Love of Corals – Sonia Levy, 24 min (2018)

A cinematic inquiry that focuses on the daily labour of caring for endangered beings to resuscitate them from their imminent human-induced extinction. The technology of the ad hoc laboratory; scientific knowledge; the complexity of marine ecologies; and the intimacy of providing care converge with the frames of cinema and museum display.

Same Old Story – Stevie Wonder, 4 min (1979)

A strange ballad written for the equally strange nature documentary The Secret Life of Plants (1979), which explored the emotional lives of plants and made a case for plant-human telepathy. Stevie Wonder’s soundtrack celebrated flower power and the femme fatales of the plant world, including Venus flytraps and black orchids, but this song also addressed the colonial history of plant scientists and their experiments.

Codex Entropia – Rich Pell, 9 min (2021)

A dystopian epic in the form of a 3D anaglyph informational film. Using archival stereoscopic images that document the work of Western Pennsylvania laborers, the film narrates an alternative history that speaks to the entanglement of biological life forms, computational data, and political ideology.

All Her Beautiful Green Remains in Tears – Amy Cutler, 11 min (2018)

Sexist nature documentary archives are re-mixed and re-narrated by machine learning. This film’s narrator is an artificial consciousness which has learned its existence entirely from reading the female protagonist voice in 14 million passages of romance novels. Using image recognition/ closed captioning, it tells an entirely different story of the “birds and the bees” of nature documentary: one of female desire, trauma, masochism, and emotional fantasy.

Signs of Life – Lines of Flight, 3 min (2021)

A pop song written in lockdown in honour of Victorian fossil collector Mary Anning, who inspired the “She Sells Seashells” tongue twister. From Dorset to deep time, the visuals combine Super 8, educational VHS, animation, geology watercolours, and rare fieldtrip footage of a seashell market by chemical engineer Watson Kintner. It balances the patriarchal men of science with the spirit of Anning and cryptic fragments of nature.

Disappearance – Lines of Flight, 5 min (2021)

Obsolete media and obsolete animals, running to survive. The song’s theme of lost futures is explored via ghostly or captive lives on an ark heading nowhere. From Prelinger home movies to night vision cameras to the last surviving footage of endlings (the last individual in a species), this multi-format film exposes the fate of the electric animal in the mausoleum of cinema.

All films programmed by GAMIS (Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios) and various community partners as part of Govanhill International Festival and Carnival 2021. Supported by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.

What is the Bat. Lab.? The Batson Street Laboratory or Bat. Lab. is a new experimental open-air screening space adjacent to the historic Govanhill Picture House, 49 Bankhall St, Glasgow G42 8SW built from a shipping container and recycled planters supported by Glasgow City Council’s Animating Spaces Fund and built by the Govanhill Baths Up Hub.

Image credits (from top down): Charlotte Pryce, Pablo Weber, Ivonne Sheen & Rebeca Alván, Amy Cutler & Lines of Flight, Sonia Levy