“Can Plant Preservation Illuminate Moving Image Archival Practice?”
Rick Prelinger (UC, Santa Cruz)
What we make of archives mostly tells us about ourselves. Archives are much more than cultural repositories; they’re reflectors of anxieties, fears, and hopes. Their completeness triggers awe; their lacunae nurture anxiety. Fear of loss and cultural amnesia coexists with cautious excitement at the possibility that fragile and impermanent physical and digital objects may survive. The privileged construct archives to reflect the world as they believe it exists, while the powerless are left to experience the consequences of archival biases, gaps, and erasures. In short, archives are indeterminate, often intimidating, and an open field for subjectivity and speculation.
This gives us reason to welcome a film from a maker whose understanding of archival materiality comes from working inside archives for a long time. Leandro Listorti’s Herbaria joins a small but growing group of films focusing on “archivalness” as a key attribute. Essay rather than elegy, it splits its focus between preservation of cinema and preservation of plant specimens. The encounter between moving image archives and herbaria — which we might thematize as a meeting between industrially and organically produced collections — is formative, a conjunction long overdue. And staging a meeting between the cinematic preservation apparatus and the natural world is also a strategic gesture in an era of anthropogenic climate change, when archives and cultural collections are already threatened by accelerating temperatures and rising waters.
Listorti also confers a favor on archives by foregrounding a central attribute that finds little place in the body of metaphysical writing about “the archive.” Archives — a term that many archivists prefer to “the archive” — may be places that embody power and generate meaning, but they’re preeminently places of labor, where the work of preservation, description, and providing access is performed. In particular, archival labor is often gendered and racialized. Listorti endorses the visibility of archival workers by showing the labor of processing and preservation in intimate closeups. The inevitable slowness of much archival work — a few ticks of the clock on the timescale of permanent preservation — also plays out in the film as duration.
Both archives and herbaria are described as places where time stops: life is arrested but may again resume. “Latent life,” states the narration, “is a defensive phenomenon observed in certain plants and animals. When the environment is not favorable, the seeds retain their vitality and their germination power for some time. In this state, the vital phenomena are reduced to a minimum. So much so that the organism seems to be dead.” But here the shared identity of herbaria and film archives falters. While both specimens and films carry the potential of revitalization, the appearance of death lingers for many films, which are often prevented from resurrection by archival, legal, and financial enclosure. Films lack the intrinsic agency of seeds: they need more than soil, water, and sun to resprout. Their rebirth is expensive and most often permission-based. For film, “what matters most is that the conditions remain stable,” states the narration. And stability is enforced by regimes both inside and outside the archives.
An optimistic reading of Herbaria might focus on herbaria’s promise and how this promise reflects on moving image archives — that they offer cause to believe that we might one day rebuild our broken environment. On the surface, films lack similar power to intervene. But perhaps we might think of films and the archives that hold them as potentially reparative actors. And perhaps we should attempt to tackle the disjunction between repositories that preserve species diversity and repositories whose mission is at least in part tied up with preserving the monocultures of industrially produced media. I read the film as a canny exercise in defamiliarization. While pretending to draw lines of similarity between film and collections, it in fact speaks to their differences, critiquing the limits of moving image archival practice in these times.
Beyond conceptual defamiliarization lies monkeywrenching — active cultural provocation. While individual or local solutions to climate change can only go so far, it is possible to stage cultural experiments that illuminate opportunities for repair and renewal. Listorti inverts this and points to the keeping of plants as a way to better understand the keeping of film. The cross-species imperative to maintain and foster biodiversity casts light on archival enclosure — in fact, on all the walls that separate knowledge and science from those who most need it. We might look to herbaria as a vision of what moving image archives might be: preservers of diversity, collaborative and shared science, and embodiments of reparative potential.
“Similar, but so different” might be a phrase to describe this staged encounter of herbaria and archives. At base they both preserve biological material — plants and film, whose biological constitution is based on industrialized violence because it includes gelatin emulsion made from the bodies of cows and pigs. Both archives and museums occupy a position on the nature/culture interface — we might say its cultural quarter — using old and new technologies to preserve objects whose life expectancies are limited without human intervention. At first sight both preservation practices seem easily understandable, even virtuous. As climate change forces species to migrate and others to be extirpated or rendered extinct, herbaria and associated natural history collections offer the possibility of at least partially reconstituting a world that humans have placed in deep stress.
But like the gathering and organization of archival records, plant gathering and possession of herbaria are essential components of colonial conquest. This is not only a condition dating back to the age of exploration but is true today, as Indigenous and traditional communities fight to maintain possession and cultural and scientific sovereignty over species they have discovered, venerated, and used. The film hovers lightly over this point, while pointing out that the repatriation of specimens from the colonial metropolis to their countries of origin constitutes a gesture toward justice.
Listorti’s enigmatic and idea-driven minimalism deserves both praise and caution. Its deceptive simplicity avoids the pervasive clichés shared by most films that take archives as subject (with the notable exception of Inés Toharia’s recent Film: The Living Record of Our Memory, a nuanced and actionable presentation of contemporary archival issues). At the same time the film may ask for more engagement than many of its viewers are positioned to provide. Images of herbaria and archives do not necessarily illuminate the multiple ambiguities they reproduce or clarify their potential to enable planetary and human hope. This is a film that’s meant to be read and discussed, not an experience that ends with lights-up. Developing the patience and insight needed to preserve bio- and cultural diversity will require the patience to parse and interpret complex texts. One hopes that this film will find audiences that are ready for it.
“The Lush, Latent Lives of Plants and Films”
Oliver Gaycken (University of Maryland)
An herbarium is a collection of preserved plant specimens. Preceded by medieval collections of medicinal plants, the herbarium is a venerable mode of scientific collecting that originated in the eighteenth century. Herbaria, however, as its title announces, is not about a single herbarium. Indeed, the film’s task is not only to document various collections of preserved plants and how they are created and maintained but also to make an extended comparison between these collections and the medium of cinema. As a promotional caption for the film notes, it is “an excursion into the work of botanical and filmic preservation.”
How, then, does Herbaria demonstrate a similarity between a botanical specimen—a dried plant sewn to paper bound into a volume on a shelf—and a motion picture? The film proceeds by a process of juxtaposition, suggesting myriad similarities. An initial connection between the botanical and the filmic emerges from the specific historical actors involved in the collections that the film investigates. Cristobal Hicken was a prominent nineteenth-century botanist whose collection totaled some 150,000 specimens; his nephew Pablo Hicken was a film equipment collector whose collection forms the basis for the Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken in Buenos Aires. Furthermore, both plant and cinema collections require similar infrastructure. Several long pans delineate the large spaces full of shelves containing row after row of artifacts—plant specimens in the one space, 35mm projectors in another. And preserving both plants and films involves manual labor—the careful handiwork of sewing a botanical sample to its sheet of paper parallels the activity of inspecting and repairing a film print.
Underlying these historical and infrastructural correspondences are core similarities between herbaria and motion-picture films: namely, their shared archival capacities. Cinema’s qualities as a preservative medium have long been noted, perhaps most famously in André Bazin’s characterization of cinema as “change mummified.” But there is also a more specific lineage of cinema as a form of scientific preservation, which would include the adventurer, taxidermist, and camera inventor Charles Akeley as a key figure (which is illuminated by Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa’s recent book The Celluloid Specimen). Indeed, scientific filmmaking often understands cinema as a medium not for telling stories but for preserving records of movement. The German term Bewegungsdauerpräparat is a good example of this understanding. Coined by Gotthard Wolf in 1967, this neologism takes the pre-existing compound word Dauerpräparat, which denotes a permanently fixed specimen on a microscope slide, and adds the element of movement. In this sense, the phrase is similar to early cinema’s plethora of photographic terms modified by words for movement to describe the new medium, e.g. “animated photography.” The film dwells on the variety of preservative processes that can constitute an herbarium—dried plants sewn onto a page as well as plants preserved in jars of alcohol, and the natural history museum’s signature use of taxidermy.
We might at first associate scientific collections with stability and even unchangingness, but as the film notes, “The herbarium is alive—it is open and grows constantly.” [Fig. 1] Collections are constantly being expanded, maintained, and reconfigured, and these activities constitute a significant part of Herbaria. For instance, we see individual plant records, the so-called exsiccate, being scanned. Here, as elsewhere, the film’s visual ingenuity comes to the fore, with the camera placed inside or directly below the scanner. This position allows for an unusual perspective on a process that is typically invisible or shown on a monitor; here, the plant specimen glows green with the passage of the scanning light, highlighting, so to speak, the procedure’s similarity to film projection (a link that is further supported by the filmmaker’s own identification as not only a filmmaker but also as a projectionist).
Many herbaria have been or are in the process of being digitized, making their records more widely available. Shortly after the sequence that features the process of scanning, Herbaria introduces the concept of “latent life,” which the film defines as “a defensive phenomenon adopted by certain plants and animals” “when the environment is not favorable.” In other words, certain plant seeds can remain viable for long periods of time, waiting for the right environmental conditions to trigger their growth. An archival quality thus exists in nature, and this notion of latency connects the natural and the technological. Furthermore, as the film points out, one key value of this latency for the present is that herbaria can help with an understanding of climate change. Plants collected a hundred years ago, before anthropogenic climate change was understood (although already underway), can now be used to measure certain aspects of the phenomenon—the effect of increased temperature on plant ranges or physiology, for instance. Films, too, contain latent life, and can therefore aid in an understanding of climate change, as Jennifer Lynn Peterson has recently argued. In both cases, Herbaria prompts a consideration of what biologists have called “exaptation,” a feature in an organism that takes on a new function (the classic example is feathers, which initially evolved not for flight but thermoregulation). Herbaria and films, then, are filled with samples of the world whose significance will change over time, providing unknown future knowledge, not unlike the situation that the historian of science Joanna Radin has investigated in her history of biobanking, Life on Ice.
The presence of unexpected life is a hopeful note against a more dire backdrop; the film’s first intertitle states that “since 1750, 500 plants species have disappeared,” which is more than the combined number of bird, mammal, and amphibian species that have vanished. Near the film’s end, it makes the point that over 90% of silent-era films and over 50% of sound-era films have disappeared. To return to the language of its promotional blurb, Herbaria documents how media of preservation interact with “a world that stubbornly disappears.”
There are many more intriguing aspects of Herbaria that this brief analysis cannot dwell on—I, for one, would love to discuss the film’s use of early popular science films as a leitmotif, and the appearance of the Argentine avant-garde filmmaker Narcisa Hirsch, whose films have been digitized recently, also merits further consideration. And the film’s consideration of the politics of preservation also deserves more attention; as one of the film’s voices says, “There are not easy answers about what to keep or not, but it’s important who decides about it, right?” Indeed, the profusion of connections mobilized by the film prompts me to suggest that Herbaria itself resembles an herbarium—a collection of samples that are ordered but whose order is not definitive. The film’s inevitable linear progression takes advantage of certain narrative gestures, to be sure. The conclusion returns to images that were encountered near the beginning—a repetition with a difference that constitutes a hallmark of narrative cinema. But the film contains an exceptional nonlinear potential. It bears repeated consultation; with time, this value will, I suspect, only grow.
DOCALOGUE 