Conference Vegetal Mediations: Plant Agency in Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities
Ballets Botaniques: How Early Film Makes the Plant Soul Visible in France
During the 19th century various botanists and psychologists described the movement of plants as an indication of their soul. However, it was only in 1902 when Lucien Bull (1876–1972), Étienne-Jules Marey’s assistant, made the first French time lapse film of a blooming lily that a plant’s movement was aesthetically experienced. By the 1910s, the botanic time lapse was very popular and in the repertory of the big distributors like Pathé Frères, Gaumont or Éclair, who staged the movies as a proof of the proximity of plants to the human species.
In this paper, Chonja Lee aims to discuss the aesthetic properties of the early time lapse film and its media theoretical position within the fields of cinema, history of science and popular culture like magic shows, theater and dance. She elaborates on how the blooming flower was a current motive in these cinematographic genres at the time, how its images were connected to animistic ideas and how they continued or transformed the common feminization of the flower, e.g. in the serpentine dances of modern dance pioneer Loïe Fuller (1862–1928). She will conclude this paper with the theory of French avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac (1882–1942), who found the motto of her “cinéma pur” in the botanic time lapse, with the plant movement being not locomotion but metamorphosis. She considered the plant a sentient being and a cinematographic form, since its organically grown body renders temporality visible.
Conference Vegetal Mediations: Plant Agency in Contemporary Art and Environmental Humanities