This communique, the 27th in the infrequent series, takes the miniature as its theme and suggests that by peering into a microcosm we might glimpse the universal. Also, this edition ponders origins and looks at the cyclical emergence of new worlds, as well as their inevitable, pre-ordained, dissolution.
The Butterfly, film still, 2020
Lifecycle
My 2020 film The Butterfly is an attempt to depict the origins of a world in miniature. The film begins in a fecund liminal zone where fire and water paradoxically intermingle, a space that suggests both the chaos that precedes creation and the upheaval that, sometime later in the mythic life cycle, returns to violently overwhelm existence. Whilst making the film I also considered that this mysterious space, of uncertain dimension, might represent the undulating insides an overactive internal organ. The film’s second image reveals the new world that has been birthed from this overheated entwining of elements. In a verdant, moisture-saturated grotto a dormant butterfly flutters sluggishly as it attempts to rouse itself into existence. A sense of emergent creation also proliferates in the film’s dense audio-space, where composer Abi Fry’s orchestration combines diverse instrumentation with a profusion of augmented natural sounds, suggesting the urgent pulse of new life. To me, alongside the impressions of a new world being convulsed into being, the improbable spaces in the film also evoke the deepest regions of the imagination where, perhaps, recollections of the oversized atavistic forests of prehistory abide in the deepest trenches of our ancestral memory.
The Butterfly is one of a number of my films that have dwelt on origins, works where I have trained the camera on recreations of pre-human landscapes, the environments that abided on Earth during the aeons prior to our emergence. These also include my 2013 films A World Assembled, where new landscapes also arise from an enchanted aqueous medium, and Monsters, my attempt to revisit the lost ages of the dinosaurs. The ossified dinosaurs in Monsters are glimpsed posed among tangles of foliage, partially enveloped by the petals of gigantic oversized flowers. Monsters was once installed at Horsham Museum next to a vitrine displaying actual dinosaur bones. Between the projected film on the wall and the adjacent time-darkened relics yawned immense, dizzying gulfs of erasing time.
The Primitive World, from C.G.W. Vollmer's Wonder of the Primitive World, 1855
Francis Danby, The Deluge, oil on canvas, 1840
My fascination with emergent worlds is twinned with a fascination for their polar opposites: the terminal worlds. I have a number of films that meditate on post-human, end-times landscapes. These include Lost Gardens, Blacklands and The Loom. In The Loom a sense of foreboding gathers over darkening, abandoned forests. The Loom’s twilight groves might be the lost forests of Romanticism, now forgotten and growing dark. Lost Gardens returns to an Eden long abandoned and now warped into improbable perspectives. In Blacklands we seem to have crossed over into a purgatorial after-life realm, one where a haunted landscape of ruins is guarded by a flaming sentinel and where the passage of a white bird across a chasm offers transcendence. Perhaps a looming sense of ecological disaster also colours these works, a subject not dealt with directly, but one that may well be subtly infusing these slightly unsettling dreamscapes.
For me, some of the most intoxicating imagery found in our culture evokes the mythic twins of creation and destruction. Images of aeon-buried temples discovered entombed by vegetation or photographs of barnacled classical statuary posed for millennia on the sea floor are imaginative super-foods, their consumption triggering deep reverie. Similarly, depictions of the immense tree ferns and armoured saurians of the vastly scaled-up antediluvian world seem to expand the imagination, transporting us closer to our primordial beginnings.
The head of a Ptolomeic king depicted as a pharoah, discovered in the lost city of Canopus. Photograph by Christoph Gerigk.
Hiroshi Sugimoto, Permian-Land, gelatin silver print, 1992
El aire que respiraban los dioses…
Critic Borja Castillejo Calvo, in his review for The Butterfly for Cinesinfin, wrote that the film returns us to a mythic terrain, evoking "those islands far from any current place. Where the hand of man has not yet acted, where the pure and beautiful appears in every corner." Calvo goes on to call the film "a piece of hybrid beauty" that appears to conjure "the air that the gods breathed …" I’m very pleased that Calvo took the time to ponder The Butterfly and to so poetically write about the film. Anyone with an interest in the outer reaches of cinema is advised to investigate Cinesinfin and to explore the multifaceted enthusiasms of this passionate, visionary critic. Calvo’s review of The Butterfly is online here. The text is in Spanish but, for non-Spanish speakers, there are translation options available.
Cultural Infusion
The Butterfly has been selected to premiere at the 2021 Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival, where it will be streaming throughout the event as part of A Thing That Holds Something Else, Alchemy's exhibitions programme. Like last year, this marvellous festival will beam forth online, allowing moving image devotees to tune-in worldwide whilst hopefully avoiding the latest advances in airborne bio-hazards.
A Thing That Holds Something Else also features new work by Avner Pinchover, Eva Wang, Aminder Virdee, Panteha Abareshi, Ellie Kyungran Heo, Lauren Heckler, Toby Parker Rees, Vardit Goldner, Sweætshops®. A Thing That Holds Something Else is curated by Rachael Disbury, Michael Pattison, Alix Rothnie, Shuge Xing.
The Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival runs from 29th April to 3rd May. For more information about A Thing That Holds Something Else visit: https://alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/festival-2021-exhibition/
Megaflora
Changing scale changes our relation to the thing observed. The Butterfly peers into a microcosm in the hope that, through doing so, I might arrive at something that approximates the universal. The work I have made since making The Butterfly in 2020 goes deeper into this microscopic terrain. The Blue Flower, a film I’ve recently finished, draws us into the world of one particular flower, one of the many that we could conceivably walk past on a stroll in the park. To me, the magnified flower, shown in extreme close-up in the film, seems like an omnipotent presence. In other moments this huge, gently swaying bio-form seems to recede into the numinous haze that surrounds it, becoming momentarily indistinct as it dissolves into the cascades of light that bloom around it. Microcosmic life teems in this miniature world and around the blue flower flies an aerial host of attendant phenomena, suggesting a profusion of life ungraspable in its totality. To me, The Blue Flower reaches into the small to suggest immense cosmic spaces, new worlds accessible via portals of light.
The Blue Flower, film still, 2021