MAIL EXCHANGE ON GARDEN FILMS
Verina Gfader, Lucy Reynolds, Peter Todd   
Winter09/10
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

5/6 points, questions on garden films for Lucy Reynolds and Peter Todd
Verina Gfader

_ who is acting in garden films?

_ is there a filmic non-romantic garden?

_ in what way is the garden a “place of potentiality” (Margaret Tait)?   

_ can ‘garden film’ (film that in a wider sense deals with gardening) be something other than peripheral? Relation to mainstream, the commercial, product, or economies? (maintaining a ‘minor’ dimension, or place?)

_ is the skin of film non-organic, organic, hybrid – in what way?

_ what does technology to the body as organism?



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
5/6 points
Lucy Reynolds

_ who is acting in garden films?
I would say no-one. Experimental garden or landscape films are one of the few places where nature in cinema is not the backdrop or setting but the central protagonist. For the most pronounced version of experimental landscape films see the work of Chris Welsby, where the unpredictable aspects of the weather, wind and movement of people across the space provide the narrative/structuring momentum.

_ is there a filmic non-romantic garden?
Absolutely. In many cases the film artist seeks to go beyond romantic (nineteenth century) ideas of nature to imbue it with a modernist self reflexivity. This is particularly the case with Structural filmmakers such as Welsby, or the French filmmaker Rose Lowder. Indeed, Tait was also concerned with an observational preciseness which I believe has more to do with attempting to present a true non-fictional picture of nature(don’t forget her roots in neo-Realism) and also notions of loss (if one can disconnect those from the romantic) to do with changing environment. I think Tait’s interest in poets such as Gerald Manley Hopkins is revealing. The hallucinatory quality of Hopkins’ poems on nature fundamentally question perception rather than present a romantic view of nature. Even Brakhage presents nature as a space of decay, and renewal in works such as Dog Star Man and Sirius Remembered.

_ in what way is the garden a “place of potentiality” (Margaret Tait)?   
AS that is a quote from Tait it is difficult to know whether she is referring to the potential of nature itself to growth and renewal or the potential of film to capture it. For my own part, gardens – where a historically nuanced notion of nature overlays the growth of things – is a space of the uncanny and a space heavy with different traces of time passing. In my own work I’m interested in how film can translate this. In my writing I’m interested in how artists have used the camera to understand and reach beyond the artificial towards some sort of truth of nature.

_ can ‘garden film’ (film that in a wider sense deals with gardening) be something other than peripheral? Relation to mainstream, the commercial, product, or economies? (maintaining a ‘minor’ dimension, or place?)
I don’t see garden film as peripheral at all – but part of a long tradition in avant-garde filmmaking. Therefore, it is peripheral only in the sense in which artists’ filmmaking has been seen as peripheral. Which is up for debate. I think that the importance of film to art practice, and making meaning through art, is widely acknowledged.

_ is the skin of film non-organic, organic, hybrid – in what way?
If you are talking about celluloid – I would say that it is organic – or indeed the patina of any moving image technology could be equated to natural surfaces. It entirely depends on the approach of the filmmaker. What Vivian Sobchack refers to as the ‘echo focus’ of technology can always be felt at the heart of the filmmaking process – however much the presence of the camera is erased. So from this point of view, it could be seen as a haptic merging of the natural and technology (by which I don’t mean a hybrid).

_ what does technology to the body as organism?
See above. It becomes at best a form of merging in the film image. This question is too broad to be answered here – in terms of film, it reflects the design of the Victorian garden – which developed in parallel to the perceptual technology of the camera. Both are a product of industrialization. The mediated relationship of the body through technology – as a mobile spectator in the garden – or as a disembodied spectator in the cinema –becomes navigated through sight rather than touch. Experimental filmmakers, I would argue, sought to bring a sense of touch back to the experience of the garden, through devices inherited from modernism. This is paradoxical in that cinema is about distance – whereas the garden is about presence.



- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Dear Verina,

Thank you for your questions.

Some thoughts for you.

Today, late November, there is rain and wind. All the leaves have fallen from the pear tree, while the apple tree has a few left. As the leaves fall, they leave a fading echo of their summer form, in the shape they make on the ground. In winter you can see the structure of trees and shrubs.

I think in looking at, being in, and/or working a garden, there is immediacy. This is probably the same looking at a film or artwork. Afterwards, other things come in to play.

Many things are always happening in the garden.

I have been filming over the past few years, in particular, round the house and garden. A daily practice of looking, it is quite central for me.

When projected, onto a screen, wall, sheet, whatever, there is a place where the image and surface meet which is always changing.

In her poem For Using, Margaret Tait writes,

‘A tool has the feel of the user’s hand on it
If it’s a real tool.
A tool that is fully used
Gets a bloom on it
From its own essential-ness.’
    

Peter.

20.11.2009.

Ps. Some of my thoughts relating to the garden and film are reflected in the three programmes I curated with the title Garden Pieces (2001-2009) which screened at BFI Southbank in April 2009, and the piece for Luxonline, Films of An Afternoon (2005).



* * * * * * * * *
* * * * * * * * *