ALT/KINO is covering the Experimenta strand of this year’s London Film Festival via a series of correspondences between Patrick Gamble and Sophia Satchell-Baeza. In the fourth and final of these letters, Sophia reflects on internal and external geographies across several films from the Experimenta programme and beyond.
Seaweed (Julia Parks, 2022)
Dear Patrick,
You’ll be pleased to know I lasted the distance with De Humani Corporis Fabrica. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly disgusted by the ‘depictions of human physiology’ you mention in your letter, that graphic footage of intestines and orifices, breasts and bladders. In a media landscape where you can pretty much access anything online, I’m not convinced the human body is the ‘ultimate frontier,’ as Leonardo Goi says in Reverse Shot. Medical imaging is such a standard procedure in hospitals now, that if you’ve gone through any major surgery you’ve likely already travelled through the canals and waterways of your own body. I’ve watched Caesareans on Tiktok, and vaginal births on Instagram. By the time I gave birth to my daughter, I was completely nonplussed about peering at my watery insides through multiple screens. There are cinematic precedents for the internal study of the human body, although none match this film for its visceral, glistening, in-your-face quality. There’s a curious little science documentary-cum-sex film called The Body (1971) by British director Roy Battersby, best known for his work on Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost and his Play for Today films. The Body uses endoscopic photography, to the music of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, to plunge us into the deepest crevasses of the human body. I recommend it as a ‘70s psychedelic curio: just for heads.
What did shock me about De Humani Corporis Fabrica were the scenes in the psych ward, where patients, imprisoned by their condition and trapped within the walls of the institution, pace the corridors like caged animals. Critics have already compared the film to Stan Brakhage’s documentary of autopsies, The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971), down to the carving into a human skull, but the psych-ward scenes brought me back to Frederick Wiseman’s still controversial Direct Cinema documentary, Titticut Follies (1967). It felt exploitative and unnecessary, there merely to reinforce the idea of the hospital as a Dantean hellscape from which one might never escape. Shot across several French hospitals over a period of five years, De Humani Corporis Fabrica is above all a study of labour conditions, an expose of the effects that chronic understaffing and underfunding have wreaked on institutions over time. (I did enjoy the gallows humour of the medical professionals, obviously disassociating from the work of chopping up bodies to chat about their holidays!)
As I segue out of organs and into the natural world, I notice that several films in the Experimenta strand also highlight the labours of care and extraction. Both Lisandro Listorti’s feature-length film Herbaria (2022), about the mutual preservation of analogue film and botanical specimens, and Julia Parks’ short Seaweed (2022) explore, through the medium of 16mm film, our implicated relationship to the natural world and its rapidly dwindling resources.
Imbued with the elegiac spirit of Margaret Tait, Seaweed is an exquisite 16mm film exploring the folklore and working practices of those who harvest marine algae on the Hebridean shoreline. Threaded through the film are the voices of modern-day seaweed harvesters, alginate factory works and environmental activists alongside Gallic folk songs and archival soundbites, offering a rich aural and visual tapestry of ideas about algae and what might be lost if we zealously overfarm.
Argentine filmmaker and archivist Lisandro Listorti’s Herbaria examines the intricate and time-consuming conservation of celluloid film and botanical specimens, making links between these two fragile and finite spheres as they hover on the brink of disappearance. As with De Humani Corporis Fabrica and Seaweed, we watch hands hard at work, caring, cataloguing, and protecting from loss; these are hands that preserve but that also wrench, pulling up from the body, from the earth, and the sea in ways that are not always questioned. Like Seaweed, Herbaria merges archival footage with new material shot on 16mm (and here also 35mm). The film is a collage, tactile and teasing, which merges its materials into a unifying whole, obscuring at times our ability to identify the old from the new. (Listorti is working with the same sound designer as his first feature-length work, The Endless Film (2018), to imperceptibly stitch together and hide the seams between time frames.) As well as connecting practices across time, Herbaria unites people across space: film preservationists in Berlin and botanists in Argentina share similar goals and analogous processes, each little changed over the years.
Herbaria and Seaweed brought to mind another film at the festival, Jacquelyn Mills’ Geographies of Solitude (2022), which was lurking with intent in the ‘Create’ strand. (I’m sorry, I’ll never not prickle at the naming of these sections, and quite purposefully included films not in Experimenta in my correspondence!) Both elegant and somehow messy, Geographies of Solitude also tackles nature conservation through the medium of 16mm film, but does so to curious, un-worked out ends. There are other links too: sections of the film are developed in seaweed, and the sound of insects, processed with sensors, feature on the score (Listorti’s film uses plant sounds in a similar way). Geographies of Solitude is a beautiful portrait of a place—the remote island of Sable in the Atlantic Ocean—and an unspoken homage to a dedicated individual, the environmentalist Zoe Lucas. Here’s where the film is rendered fascinatingly strange. Unlike Herbaria and Seaweed, the filmmaker seems infatuated with the person behind the preservation, her admiration for Lucas seemingly stopping her from asking further questions. Who is this person really? Why have they lived on this island, alone, for 40 years? What’s behind their subsuming drive to kill, skin, pin, dissect, bottle, preserve, and catalogue? The film’s title and snippets of speech, begin to tease this out, but don’t quite arrive at that point. Geographies of Solitude is nature conservation as psychodrama. I wanted the real story, the love affair behind the camera.
Thanks Patrick for sharing your observations and recommendations with me. I’ve enjoyed all of them, Jill, Uncredited and Lewis Klahr’s film in particular. I’ve relished the space to swap notes and traverse the seemingly random through the left-field byways of film: from highways and entrails to seaweed fronds. I think some of those trails tie up nicely.
All the best,
Sophia
You can read the other parts of the Experimenta correspondence here: #1, #2 and #3.
The 2022 edition of London Film Festival runs from 5 - 16 October.
Sophia Satchell-Baeza is a writer and editor, focusing on artists' film, psychedelic art, and the 1960s counterculture.