Some of cinema's first images documented and analyzed the movements of animals and humans. From a cat's free fall to a horse's gallop, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey independently realized that film had the capacity to break down movements invisible to the human eye. Since then, cinema has continued to turn its eye on nature, whether in the lyrical tributes of the avant-garde or in documentary explorations of our relationship to animals and plants. This series of recent works looks at how activists, artists, philosophers, scientists, and fabulists frame the natural world in varying terms, and in the process, see different worlds. In some of these works, the unfolding of natural history, linked as it is to human intervention, is filled with chance and happenstance. The introduction of a non-native fish to Tanzania's Lake Victoria, richly detailed in the Berkeley premiere of Hubert Sauper's fascinating Darwin's Nightmare, had profound, unexpected ramifications for the region and the world. More fanciful works, perhaps reflecting recent revelations of the genomic closeness of humans and animals, blur these very boundaries, as humans communicate directly with animals or evolve into cross-species beings. Still other films are personal reflections; they shift the terms of discussion to the poetic, the inexplicable, and have no less an impact on our sensibilities.
Kathy Geritz