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The Nature Film as Elegy, Parody and Propaganda

31.12.69

In one scene in “Gone to Earth” (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1950) Jennifer Jones races up a place called God’s Little Mountain and almost falls into an unmarked well. Jones is Hazel, an untamed, Welsh peasant woman played here the old-fashioned way, nobly but with a lot of cleavage. Her father tells her two cows fell in that well once and were instantly killed. Hazel, who is in her element in the forest and among animals, is frightened by the thought of nature as dangerous, and comes to a life-changing realization. Framed in a close-up, Jones delivers her character’s epiphany with a fantastic flourish: “Seems the world’s a big spring trap and us in it.” I love that line; Charles Busch probably does a pitch-perfect re-enactment of it.

“Gone to Earth” kicked off a new Flaherty NYC film series at the 92Y Tribeca, “Snapshots: Tourism in Cinema,” that looks at a range of movies–from industrial short films (“Chicken Real”), experimental shorts (“Le mort du rat”), travelogues (“Mur Murs”), commercial comedies (“The Life Aquatic”)–that take viewers on visual trips to foreign lands, be it the Welsh countryside or a chicken farm in North Carolina. The critic Miriam Bale, the series’s curator, uses the phrase “cinematic tourism” to describe them, and the series is meant to examine the aesthetic attributes of the genre as well as to highlight some of the problems it raises. Bale’s project with the series also seems, either by design or happenstance, to look at films that are uniquely preoccupied with nature and man’s role in it. Relationships with animals, in particular, seem to have her attention.

Source: Cinespect