География одиночества (Geographies of Solitude)

[empathy]

[программа «форум»

берлинского фестиваля]

Год 2022

Страна Канада

Жанр документальный

Время 01:43

Премьера 12 февраля 2022, Берлин

Режиссура Жаклин Миллс

Камера Жаклин Миллс

В ролях

Зои Лукас

Описание

Погружение в богатые пейзажи острова Сейбл и жизнь Зои Лукас,

натуралистки и экологини, прожившей более 40 лет на этой отдаленной полосе песка.

vBulletin [media]

Изменено 04.05.2022 11:19 пользователем empathy

[empathy]

gregory zinman

GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE is an examination of how organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman processes, can not only affect and inform one another, but also contribute to a creative method. Mills’ process sets aside goals of controlling or taming nature in order to pursue a documentary practice that decentres the human while increasing our sensitivity toward—and potentially reframes our co-existence with—the animals, insects, plants, and matter that constitute our shared world.

Mills buttresses her approach with select archival footage as well as thrilling experimentation with materials from the island. She buries her 35mm film in horse dung, horse hair, sand, and seawater, exposes it to the night sky, and develops it in yarrow. Mills rhymes the many shots of Lucas laying her hand on the grass or sun-bleached horse skeletons with her own handmade and hand-processed techniques, thereby amplifying the sense of kinship that Lucas models with the nonhuman inhabitants of the island. Through these chance-based collaborations, which yield startlingly varied abstractions, Mills models a documentary practice that practices ego sublimation through a kind of shared authorship with Sable Island. The result is a documentary encounter with the natural world that doesn’t just mediate one’s relation to the environment, but allows the nonhuman to literally imprint itself on film, granting otherwise unattainable cinematic perspectives.

GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE is a film about immersive process. Lucas says that as a child, she was drawn to “wild and messy places”. Her meticulous, relentless efforts to make sense of Sable Island by recording the behaviours of its occupants and its pollutants are embraced and echoed in Mills’ decision to show us the flares and handwritten characters at the end of her films reels, as well as by announcing, both in voiceover and in onscreen titles, what she has done to the celluloid itself at various junctures. Such interventions range from Mills encouraging Lucas to bring a contact mic into the island’s sunken, dilapidated A-frame that once served as James’ research headquarters, beetle rustlings converted into music, or the off-screen voice of the filmmaker proclaiming “this is roll 41, 35mm buried in juniper roots,” as the attendant imagery lights up the screen, its material pulse reminiscent of silvery ice floes.

These twinned efforts by the naturalist and the filmmaker reveal happy accidents in terms of imagery and soundtrack, but also serve to demonstrate how devotion to such efforts can result in tough decisions and even missed opportunities. GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE presents the conundrum of being alone as simultaneously a series of absences and opportunities for staunchly admirable independence, tempered by an awareness of existence as a part of and participant in wildly diverse and complex systems. It’s not that the human perspective can be completely eradicated, but Lucas and Mills’ shared approach is one of openness to notions of alterity and the aleatory, and to how caring for the nonhuman broadens and enriches our understanding of our own subject positioning with respect to the planet at large.

caitlin quinlan (reverse shot, mubi, lwlies, sight & sound, frieze)

In heaven with Jacquelyn Mills' GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE today in the Berlinale Forum. Pure sensory experience on Sable Island alongside ruminations on the beauty/loneliness of dedication

 

vBulletin [media]