When working on a text for journal on film I remembered a text I read a few years ago linking film and vegetation through the dependence on light. And I found a scanned version of the text by Graig Uhlin in my files. The author is impressed by Michael Marder’s at the time fairly recent book on Plant-Thinking (2013) and uses his ideas to compare the ontology of film and plants. In the subchapter titled Photosynthesis he writes: “Both plants and film are defined by their receptivity to light” (Uhlin 2015, 203) and “Like the plant’s conversion of solar energy , film carries out a photosynthesis of light.” (Ibid) He further notes how “movement is integral to defining both film and vegetal life” (204) and despite their seeming motionlessness “plants exhibit movement not only through growth but also directed motion toward sunlight.” (Ibid) He argues that “The expressivity of plants, communicated by film, allows for a renewed relationship between humans an plants, one not based on the instrumentalization of vegetal life.” (Ibid). In the subchapter Filming without a head he compares film’s relationship to the specificities of vegetal being in detail, beginning with André Bazin and Gilles Deleuze, before ending his text with three examples Andrei Tarkovsky’s Reed, Chris Welsby’s Branch and John Smith’s Flower. Of these very different approaches to the vegetal, I guess Tarkovsky’s emphasis on “the time running through the shot, to its internal rhythm, which he called its ‘time-pressure'” (211). The idea that “Respect for the time-pressure of the shot … renders material reality expressive” (Ibid) comes closest to my heart, although Welsby’s technical experiments involving “the autonomy and particularity of plant being” and the “depiction of the world from the perspective of a tree branch” by “direct exposure to natural elements” (213) are fascinating and go much further conceptually. Uhlin summarises: “Vegetal filmmaking is not concerned with the thematic or symbolic use of plants in cinema” but aims instead at “the incorporation of the perspectives of plant-thinking as a structural mechanism in the production of images.” (215) Well, that is indeed a challenge.
 
 
 
Graig Uhlin “Plant-Thinking with Film: Reed, Branch, Flower,” in Vieira, Patricia, Gagliano, Monica & Ryan, John Charles (eds.) The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World. Lexington Books, 2015, 201-217.