Dancing Flowers and Sprouting Seeds: Films of Botanical Motion

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As part of the Seed Time series, Block Cinema presents a robust spring-time bouquet of films and videos focused on flowers, plants, and seeds. Taking the work of Winnetka-based photographer, filmmaker, and inventor John Nash Ott, a time-lapse expert who built his own elaborate set up to capture plant growth and movement and whose films pop with astounding color, as a starting point, this diverse program takes movement as a central theme. These films capture the ways the various botanical subjects move day to day and throughout the life cycle of the plants. They also reflect the ways that filmmakers and scientists capture movement and growth – through time-lapse, single-frame shooting, editing, reverse motion, and other techniques. Time also factors into the selection of the works, which range from Wilhelm Pfeffer’s pioneering scientific time-lapse plant studies from 1899-1900 to a short experimental film by Jodie Mack from 2021. In between are celebrated popular science films by British filmmakers F. Percy Smith and Mary Field and by an unknown American maker, rotating flowers and fruits as the subject in an early Chrono-chrome Gaumont process color film from Gaumont in France, and striking uses of floral imagery by experimental film and video makers, including Charlotte Pryce, Julie Murray, Rose Lowder, and John Smith and Ian Bourn.

This program includes a selection of digital and 16mm films. Additional details and the list of films in this program coming soon!

This program will feature an introduction by Colin Williamson (Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon), addressing histories of time-lapse photography in early cinema and popular science films.

About the speaker:

Colin Williamson is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon, and Associate Editor at Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He specializes in media archaeology and histories and theories of early cinema, animation, and the visual cultures of the sciences. He is the author of Hidden in Plain Sight: An Archaeology of Magic and the Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2015), which charts the history of special effects films as forms of popular science education. His new book, Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science (under contract University of Minnesota Press), examines the overlooked impacts that the natural sciences have had on stylistic trends in American animated cartoons. He has also published articles and essays in such edited collections and journals as Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke University Press, 2019), Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (Rutgers University Press, 2016), Leonardo, The Moving Image, Imaginations, Discourse, Early Popular Visual Culture, Film History, and Philosophies. His research has been supported by fellowships and awards from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and the University of Pennsylvania. Colin received his PhD in cinema and media studies from the University of Chicago.

Image credit: BIRTH OF A FLOWER (F. Percy Smith, 1910, UK) 
 

SCIENCE ON SCREEN: SEED TIME

This event is part of the SEED TIME film series, a selection of films screening in Winter and Spring quarter 2024.

Supported by the Sloan Foundation and the Coolidge Corner Cinema’s Science on Screen program, each of the screenings in the series invites viewers to observe poet William Blake’s proverb, “in seed time, learn,” through informative introductions and discussions with scientists, filmmakers, researchers, and archivists involved in cultivating and preserving seeds and films alike.

An initiative of the COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE, with major support from the ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION.