Experimentations 14 | Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era

This screening of archival natural history films from the 1910s and 1920s reveals how animals, science, industry, and geography were visualized by motion pictures one hundred years ago. Beautifully preserved by the EYE Film Museum Amsterdam, most of these films feature applied color processes such as tinting, toning, or stencil coloring. These shorts were made by early film companies in Europe and the United States, but they are from the collection of a Dutch film distributor and were shown in the Netherlands, which explains their Dutch intertitles (for which we have provided English-language translations). Strikingly different from today's nature documentaries, these films celebrate hunting, logging, mining, and other forms of resource extraction. Portraying nature through the lens of popular scientific knowledge, this program shows some of the styles of visualization, as well as the impulses of objectification, underpinning the history of Western science and knowledge production. Popular science films such as these were seen by millions of viewers in the years before World War II, in both theatrical venues (as short films before the main feature) and in “nontheatrical” venues such as schools, museums, lecture halls, churches, and prisons, where they were often presented along with a live lecture. Such films aimed to speak to popular audiences. They were not used by scientists but functioned rather as a form of education for the layperson.

When these films were made, they were thought to represent the peak of modern visual education, demonstrating the apparent triumph of capitalist domination of the earth. As much as these films embody an appreciation for nature, they are also explicit about their hierarchical, colonialist value system. Watching these films now, however, produces a collision between “old nature” as depicted on screen and “new nature” today. As new forms of ecological awareness emerge in the face of the interlocking environmental crises of global warming, mass extinction, and climate injustice, images and stories are more important than ever. Film, with its unparalleled ability to direct and focus our attention, provides opportunities to shape our emotional understanding of the environment and its history, bringing it down to human scale. Cinema is a medium well-suited to help us perceive the disorienting scale and temporal complexity of the Anthropocene (the human epoch). It does this, especially in popular science films such as these, by focusing our attention on specific animals, ecosystems, places, and power dynamics. These century-old natural history films can help shape our sense of present-day environmental loss, enabling us to perceive the contradictory ‘‘time of the biographical and the time of the geological’’ together. It is precisely the disorienting perspective of the Anthropocene viewing condition that revitalizes these old films with new meaning. A live performance of ambient electronic music will open access points for the audience to more fully draw out these complexities and others through the experience of public spectatorship.

All eleven films are from the archival collection of the EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam, which has preserved and digitized them. All films are silent and will be accompanied by live music performed by Marc Merza and Emma Palm. Viewers should be aware that this screening contains some graphic scenes of violence against animals and animal death.

This program is located at Brain Dead Studios, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles CA 90036

Presented as part of Los Angeles Filmforum's PST ART: Art & Science Collide public screening series Experimentations: Imag(In)ing Knowledge in Film.