May 9
Block Cinema: Northwestern University Evanston, IL
TicketsColin Williamson
Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies, University of Oregon; Associate Editor, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Films of Botanical Motion— Dancing flowers and sprouting seeds
Program Description
Block Cinema presents a robust spring-time bouquet of films and videos spanning from the late 1800s scientific studies to contemporary experimental shorts focused on flowers, plants, and seeds. 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.
Film Synopsis
a robust spring-time bouquet of films and videos spanning from the late 1800s scientific studies to contemporary experimental shorts focused on flowers, plants, and seeds.
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.
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.