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Thinking Cinema—With Plants

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A special issue of Philosophies (ISSN 2409-9287).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 October 2022) | Viewed by 28741

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Prof. Dr. Sarah Cooper

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Guest Editor

Film Studies Department, King’s College London, London WC2R 2NE, UK
Interests: ecology and the moving image; film and philosophy; history of film theory; modern critical theory

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In his philosophy of film, Gilles Deleuze compares filmmakers to philosophers, saying that the former think with images rather than concepts (Deleuze 1983). In subsequent scholarship on film and philosophy (Constable 2005; Frampton 2006), this thinking in images transfers from the filmmaker to the film, as film itself is understood to think. For philosopher John Mullarkey, however, the thinking that film is said to do is usually based on a pre-established philosophy rather than on an ability to philosophize in its own right (Mullarkey 2009). Mullarkey proposes a non-philosophy of cinema to overcome this impasse, which would redefine what we imagine philosophy to be and what it can become. This Special Issue proposes a different turn—a turn towards the vegetal world—in order to revisit relations between film and thinking.

How does filmic engagement with the vegetal prompt new kinds of thinking? What if film was understood not only to think, but to think like a plant? Michael Marder speaks of plant-thinking as ‘non-imagistic’, and it is the way in which this vegetal philosophy removes the head from thinking that serves to inspire thinking differently with, about, and through cinema. However, this is just a starting point for a broader series of reflections, interrogations, and imaginings in this Special Issue of Philosophies, 'Thinking Cinema—with Plants'. Building on the steady increase in film scholarship on plants in recent years, this volume will explore how engaging with a myriad of aspects of the vegetal world through film has the capacity to open up new lines of thought, in film and beyond.

Contributions are invited to consider how any of the following areas encourage innovative ways of thinking about plants through film: cinematic time and plant time; early pioneers of filming plants (Darwin, Comandon, Field and Smith, Pillsbury); experimental film and the vegetal; film, forests, woods, and arboreal ecosystems; film, plants, colonialism, and decolonization; film, vegetables, and fruits; film and veganism; film and weeds; film and the ‘Planthropocene’ (Natasha Myers); filmic engagement with the aesthetics, nature, artifice, and technologies of plant life; filmic exploration of plants and sentience, plants and intelligence; filmic probing of darkness, soil, roots and post-phenomenological, post-metaphysical thinking; filmic reflections on ‘how like a leaf we are’ (Donna Haraway); filmic treatment of plant stillness, movement, transformation in death, decomposition, and compost; filming moss; films that go beyond or challenge distinctions between plant and animal life (on fungus, on slime mould); ‘Flower power’—social and political movements and the power of plants in film; light, photosynthesis, plant growth, and filmmaking; natural history filmmaking and nature documentary focused on plants; plant science and film; plants and queerness in film, plants and the feminine in film; plants as ingredients for green film processing; plants as props, part of mise en scène, décor, foreground, and backdrop; symbiosis and sympoiesis of animal–vegetal–mineral relations in film; time-lapse and animation of the vegetal world; underwater plants and the filming of vegetal marine life; vegetal silence and the sound of plants in film.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is 1 December 2021. Abstracts could be sent either via the Special Issue website or to the guest editor via email <[email protected]>. The deadline for final manuscript submissions is 1 September 2022.

Prof. Dr. Sarah Cooper
Guest Editor

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Keywords

film philosophy and plants
plant thinking and film thinking
cinematic and plant time and movement
animal–vegetal–mineral relations in film
plants, film, and politics
human–technology–plant relations
ecology and the moving image
plant and film ethics
plant aesthetics and film
plant science and film

Published Papers (11 papers)

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Editorial

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10 pages, 249 KiB

Open AccessEditorial

Introduction: Thinking Cinema—With Plants

by Sarah Cooper

Philosophies 2023, 8(2), 20; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8020020 - 3 Mar 2023

Viewed by 2113

Abstract

There is a moment in Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth’s Khadak (2006) when the image of a tree is rotated 180 degrees [...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

Research

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14 pages, 2696 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Ngā Pūrakau No Ngā Rākau: Stories from Trees

by Nova Paul and Tessa Laird

Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 15; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010015 - 15 Feb 2023

Viewed by 2379

Abstract

Within te ao Māori—the Māori world view—whakapapa, or genealogical connections, link together every being. Relationships with trees are traced through ancestral bonds that are recited through storytelling. Trees are tūpuna, elders, who hold knowledge, reflected in the etymology of rākāu (tree) being the pū (base) of pūrākau (stories). The Atua Tāne Mahuta, sought ngā kete o te wānanga, the three baskets of knowledge. The wānanga is a place of learning and was brought into being by the god of trees, forests, and birds. Ngāpuhi artist Nova Paul’s experimental films are made with kaupapa Māori values. Her most recent films Rākau and Hawaiki, both 2022, reflect on lessons from trees, the latter premiering at the Sundance Film Festival 2023. These films are not so much about trees as by trees. Nova has made film developer from foliage of the trees that are filmed so that, for example, the riverside pōhutukawa tree is processed in a bath of pōhutukawa chlorophyl developer. For Nova, this process reveals not only an image but the mauri (life force) of the tree through the taking and then the making of her tree films. The films produced are more like an arboreal self-portrait: trees speaking directly through an embodied medium. If trees process sunlight to produce chlorophyl, here, chlorophyl produces images of light in order to communicate messages across species. The tohunga Reverend Māori Marsden wrote that photographic technologies might provide spiritual insight into perceiving life force: “Those with the powers and insight and perceptions (Matakite), perceived mauri as an aura of light and energy radiating from all animate life. It is now possible to photograph the mauri in living things.” In previous films, Nova experimented with colour-separation techniques to pull apart the fabric of time and space, which Tessa wrote about for the Third Text online forum “Decolonising Colour?” That article was translated into Spanish for the book Pensamientos Migrantes: Intersecciones cinematográficas by the Colombian experimental film publishers Hambre Cine (2020). Continuing with a conversation about the ways in which experimental film practices can open up a space for decolonial thought and Indigenous epistemologies, Nova and Tessa co-write this paper in order to share the pūrākau (stories) arising from the images of these rākāu (trees), in which photosynthesis, filmmaking, and spirit, are intertwined, and where the mauri (life force) is revealed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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11 pages, 7573 KiB

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‘What Am I Going to Do with My Philodendron?’ Looking at a Plant in Desk Set

by Georgina Evans

Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010009 - 13 Jan 2023

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Abstract

Desk Set, a 1957 20th Century Fox studio comedy, made with the sponsorship of IBM, charts the relationship between a reference librarian, Bunny Watson, and Richard Sumner, the inventor of a computer which appears to threaten her job. The film displays a thriving philodendron within Bunny’s skyscraper office, illustrating her organic style of thinking, and implicitly inviting us to see the plant in opposition to the computer. The suggestion that the plant is in some sense excessive, claiming attention beyond the norms of the ornamental background houseplant, opens questions about how we look at plants on film. We find here a reframing of figure and ground, which relates the philodendron to moments where plants become conspicuous in early film and in horror. Desk Set reflects a vegetal landscape characterised by all the commonplace instrumentalising of plants in modernity, amongst which the philodendron emerges as an exception. The plant does not point outwards to a putative wilderness. Instead, our looking at it allows us to contemplate it as an individuated specimen, and to move from that act of looking to recognise its deep entanglement with the urban environment, and with human care. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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18 pages, 17166 KiB

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Common Grounds: Thinking With Ruderal Plants About Other (Filmic) Histories

by Teresa Castro

Philosophies 2023, 8(1), 7; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8010007 - 11 Jan 2023

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2830

Abstract

This article explores the connections between film and ruderal plants: plants that grow spontaneously in anthropized environments and that we often call “weeds”. Thriving across damaged lands, ruderals are not only exceptional companions for thinking with at a time of ecological rupture, but also a way of engaging with less anthropocentric histories. As argued in this paper, such histories also pertain to film. Despite its timid representational interest in ruderals and “weeds”, cinema is concerned with the stories of collaborative survival, companionship and contaminated diversity raised by such turbulent creatures. Framed by a reflection on our ruderal condition, a discussion around some recent artists’ films allows us to explore some of these problems, while putting an accent on the idea of affective ecologies and involutionary modes of perception. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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16 pages, 17370 KiB

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Hélène Cixous, Laida Lertxundi, and the Fruits of the Feminine

by Laura Staab

Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 145; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060145 - 14 Dec 2022

Viewed by 1860

Abstract

In the fields of experimental writing and experimental filmmaking, respectively, Hélène Cixous and Laida Lertxundi gather images of fruits: apples, oranges and lemons. Although Cixous and Lertxundi are well-known for seeking something of the feminine for writing and filmmaking, in these texts and these films, fruit is not equivalent to feminine anatomy and the juiciness of neither apple, nor orange, nor lemon is mere metaphor for feminine jouissance. While Cixous and Lertxundi recognise in art, literature and philosophy an historical relation of women to nature, an essentialist equation of one to the other is loosened as the texts and the films situate apples, oranges and lemons as organic things in the world. Neither Cixous nor Lertxundi, then, eradicate the distance between human and non-human on the ground of the feminine: fruit is not entwined with women—but women do look, from time to time, at fruit. As if photosynthetically towards the sun, both Cixous and Lertxundi turn from the self towards the world, taken by the beauty and the light of fruit. In an addition to recent ecofeminist philosophy (Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray) and also to recent feminist film-philosophy on attention (by way of Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil), I refer throughout the article to Kaja Silverman’s philosophy of ‘world spectatorship’ (2000) as I outline the way Cixous and Lertxundi each post-deconstructively combine a language of desire—feminine appetite, curiosity and pleasure—with a language of things to affirm, with women’s eyes on a simple piece of fruit, the world anew. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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20 pages, 16335 KiB

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Paper Flowers: Jane Campion, Plant Life, and The Power of the Dog (2021)

by Sarah Cooper

Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 143; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060143 - 13 Dec 2022

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Abstract

Taking as its point of departure the place of the vegetal realm within Jane Campion’s filmmaking, this article attends to both living and artificial plants, homing in on the exquisitely crafted paper flowers of The Power of the Dog to explore their entanglement with human power relations. Manmade flowers are clearly distinct from the flowers of the garden or the prairie, but in this Western, they form part of a broader floral aesthetic with their living kin. Drawing upon thought that stems from actual plants (Deleuze and Guattari’s arboreal-rhizomatic thinking) and vegetal philosophy (Marder, Coccia), as well as parallel botany’s attention to the artificial (Lionni), I follow the fate of one paper flower as it intersects with the gendered history of artificial flower making and floral sexual symbolism. Thinking with this paper flower, I engage with theories that variously question binary power relations (Cixous, Barthes, Steinbock), reading these alongside scholarship on sex, gender, and masculinity in the Western (Neale, Mulvey, Bruzzi), and broaching the hierarchies of settler colonialism. The film’s floral aesthetic, I argue, challenges the either/or logic of male or female, masculine or feminine, and even though it cannot fully break away from the binaries it critiques, it is indebted to registering the importance of the nuance (Barthes) in the unthreading of power. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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14 pages, 7748 KiB

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Animist Phytofilm: Plants in Amazonian Indigenous Filmmaking

by Patrícia Isabel Lontro Vieira

Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 138; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060138 - 8 Dec 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1824

Abstract

Early films about plants offer a glimpse into the behavior of vegetal life, which had hitherto remained hidden from humans. Critics have praised this animistic capacity of cinema, allowing audiences to see the movement of beings that appeared to be inert and lifeless. With these reflections as a starting point, this article examines the notion of animist cinema. I argue that early movies still remained beholden to the goal of showing the multiple ways in which plants resemble humans, a tendency we often still find today in work on critical plant studies. I discuss the concept of animism in the context of Amazonian Indigenous societies as a springboard into an analysis of movies by Indigenous filmmakers from the region that highlight the plantness of human beings. I end the essay with an analysis of Ika Muru Huni Kuin’s film Shuku Shukuwe as an example of animist phytocinema. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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14 pages, 315 KiB

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Feminism and Vegetal Freedom in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985)

by Graig Uhlin

Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 130; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060130 - 16 Nov 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2558

Abstract

This essay examines French filmmaker Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965) and Vagabond (1985) for their critical invocation of the persistent and patriarchal association of women with plants. Both women and plants are thought within the metaphysical tradition to have a deficient or negative relation to freedom. Varda’s films, however, link the liberation of women in postwar France to the liberation of vegetal being; her female protagonists pursue their liberation by accessing the vegetal freedom that subtends human freedom. In Le Bonheur, Varda uses visual irony to critique the processes of idealization that turn both women and flowers into signifiers of ideal beauty in thrall to the enchantments of happiness. In Vagabond, the enigmatic female drifter at the center of the film enacts a plant-like refusal of self-preservation. In both films, female liberation takes vegetal shape, as their protagonists embody a vegetal silence or vegetal indifference in defiance of the patriarchal situations they encounter. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

18 pages, 1814 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Permacinema

by Anat Pick and Chris Dymond

Philosophies 2022, 7(6), 122; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7060122 - 27 Oct 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2367

Abstract

This article charts the contiguity of farming and film, blending permaculture and cinema to advance a modality of sustainable film theory and practice we call “permacinema.” As an alternative approach to looking and labour, permaculture exhibits a suite of cinematic concerns, and offers a model for cinematic creativity that is environmentally accountable and sensitive to multispecies entanglements. Through the peaceable gestures of cultivation and restraint, permacinema proposes an ecologically attentive philosophy of moving images in accordance with permaculture’s three ethics: care of earth, care of people, and fair share. We focus on work by Indigenous artists in which plants are encountered not only as raw material or as aesthetic resource but as ingenious agents and insightful teachers whose pedagogical and creative inputs are welcomed into the filmmaking process. By integrating Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies we hope to situate permacinema in the wider project of cinema’s decolonization and rewilding. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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16 pages, 2230 KiB

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The Garden in the Laboratory: Arthur C. Pillsbury’s Time-Lapse Films and the American Conservation Movement

by Colin Williamson

Philosophies 2022, 7(5), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7050118 - 18 Oct 2022

Viewed by 1945

Abstract

From the 1910s through the 1930s, the American naturalist and photographer Arthur C. Pillsbury made time-lapse and microscopic films documenting what he, in common parlance, called the “miracles of plant life”. While these films are now mostly lost, they were part of Pillsbury’s prolific work as a conservationist and traveling film lecturer who used his cameras everywhere from Yosemite National Park to Samoa to promote both public understanding of plants and a desire to protect the natural world. Guiding this work was Pillsbury’s belief that the nonhuman optics of the film camera, which revealed the animacy of plants, could also incite viewers to sympathize with them. In the context of the early American conservation movement, that sympathy stemmed in complicated ways from longstanding transcendental and pastoral ideas of nature that were entangled with imperialist visions of controlling nature. With an eye to that context, I show that Pillsbury’s filmmaking was not simply about using motion picture technologies to shape attitudes toward plants and nature more broadly; it was also about using nature to think through the techno-scientific possibilities of the cinema in the early part of the twentieth century. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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16 pages, 288 KiB

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Black (W)hole Foods: Okra, Soil and Blackness in The Underground Railroad (Barry Jenkins, USA, 2021)

by William Brown

Philosophies 2022, 7(5), 117; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies7050117 - 14 Oct 2022

Viewed by 2147

Abstract

This essay analyses the role played by okra in The Underground Railroad, together with how it functions in relation to the soil that sustains it and which allows it to grow. I argue that okra represents an otherwise lost African past for both protagonist Cora and for the show in general and that this transplanted plant, similar to the transplanted Africans who endured the Middle Passage on the way to ‘New World’ slave plantations, survives by going through ‘black holes’, something that is not only linked poetically to the established trope of the otherwise absent Black mother but which also finds support from physics, where wormholes (similar to the holes created by worms in the soil) take us through black holes and into new worlds, realities or dimensions. This is reflected in Jenkins’s series (as well as Whitehead’s novel) by the titular Underground Railroad itself, which sees Cora and others disappear underground only to reappear in new states (the show travels from Georgia to South Carolina to North Carolina to Tennessee to Indiana and so on), as well as specifically in the show through the formal properties of the audio-visual (cinematic/televisual) medium, which, with its cuts and movements, similarly keeps shifting through space and time in a nonlinear but generative fashion. Finally, I suggest that we cannot philosophise the plant or the medium of film (or television or streaming media) without philosophising race, with The Underground Railroad serving as a means for bringing together plants and plantations, soil and wormholes and Blackness and black holes, which, collectively and playfully, I group under the umbrella term ‘black (w)hole foods’. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Thinking Cinema—With Plants)

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