Leven in Algerije [Falcon Hunting in Algeria], 1913
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.
Live musical accompaniment by musician Jeremiah Chiu and Marta Honer.
SCREENING
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
Tickets: $10 General | $8 Student/Seniors | FREE for LA Filmforum Members
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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.