Los Angeles Filmforum and Brain Dead present
Old Nature: Natural History Films from the Silent Era

Sunday, January 19, 2025, 7:30 pm

At Brain Dead Studios, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., Los Angeles CA 90036

 

Live musical accompaniment by musicians Marc Merza and Emma Palm.

Introduction by Jennifer Peterson

 

Tickets: $20 GA, $5 for Filmforum members

At:

 

Strikingly different from today’s nature documentaries, these films celebrate logging, hunting, and other forms of resource extraction. Portraying nature through the lens of popular scientific knowledge, this program illuminates the impulse of objectification underpinning Western science. Watching these films today, a dialectic between colonialist/capitalist domination and nascent ecological awareness emerges in the collision between “old nature” as depicted on screen and “new nature” as we understand it today, in our era of global warming and mass extinction.

 

Curated by Jennifer Peterson

 

Special thanks to the EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam

 

Jennifer Lynn Peterson is Professor and Chair of the department of Media Studies at Woodbury. Her scholarly articles have been published in Feminist Media Histories, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, Getty Research Journal, and numerous edited book collections. She is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). She has published film, art, and book reviews in Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artforum.com. Previously a tenured Associate Professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder (where she taught for a decade), she has also taught as an adjunct instructor at UC Riverside, CalArts, UCLA, and USC. In the early 2000s she worked as an Oral Historian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and briefly in the Home Entertainment division at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She is currently writing her second book, Cinema’s Ecological Past: Film History, Nature and Endangerment Before 1960, which is under contract for publication by Columbia University Press.

Emma Palm is a Taiwanese-American Los Angeles based musician and multimedia artist. Her music blends synthesizers, field recordings, guqin and vocals to create meditative soundscapes and textures that attempt to translate the nuances of identity, environment, and memory.

 

Marc Merza is a Filipino-American artist and musician based in Los Angeles, California. His recordings are at times improvisational and spontaneous, and other times, heavily crafted, sculpted and reworked. He often composes on guitar, clarinet and Kulintang (a Filipino gong set) to speak to others, but the use of tape loops, field recordings and electronic equipment are not foreign in his music making practice.

 

Experimentations: Imag(in)ing Knowledge in Film is Filmforum’s expansive film series and upcoming publication that investigates the ways that experimental and scientific films produce and question the visualization of the world.  Combining artist films utilizing scientific imagery, science and natural history films, and films of indigenous and traditional knowledge, the series examines how science, nature, and technology films shape our understanding of humans, nature, gender, knowledge, and progress.  The multi-venue public screening series presents analog and digital time-based media incorporating diverse scientific and experimental film traditions from across the globe.  The series will include eighteen screenings between September 2024 and February 2025, with films and digital works from 1874 to today from around the world, multiple guests, panels and wonderful collaborations that will reveal the possibilities and circumstances of cinema in this realm.  www.filmforumexperimentations.org

Screening (subject to change):

Oiseaux aquatiques d’Afrique Occidentale (Pathé, M. Livier, 1925, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 4:03)

De Woudmieren/Rupsen/de Krekel [Forest Ants, Caterpillars, The Cricket] (Unknown, circa 1925, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 10:36)

Hout uit het Hoge Noorden [Wood from the high north] (Fox Film Corporation, 1926,  digital transfer, b&w, silent, 11:38)

Capture d’oursons blancs dans les glaces de l’océan [Catching polar bears in the icy ocean] (Pathé, 1911, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 5:10)

Hokkaido (Japan) (Universal Animated Weekly, 1920, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 4:59)

Uit den schoot der aarde [From the Lap of the Earth] (Unknown, 1919, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 10:01)

La Pieuvre [The Octopus] (Pathé, 1912, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 4:44)

Leven in Algerije [Falcon Hunting in Algeria] (Pathé, 1913, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 2:15)

Industrie des marbres à carrare [Marble Industry at Carrara] (Gaumont, 1914, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 6:05)

Berchtesgaden en het Koningsmeer [Berchtesgaden Park and the King’s Lake] (Eclair, circa 1915, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 3:18)

Turkije/Stamboul et la Corne d’Or [Turkey] (Radios, FR, 1912, digital transfer, b&w, silent, 3:51)