Extending Life Through Image
A silhouette is drawn on the wall. A whistle expands and measures the territory in decibels. A kind of omen is revealed in the cinema: an ecological and poetic phantasmagoria of the biosphere. {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves is a film directed by Lucy Davis and performed in cooperation with the Migrant Ecologies Project collective. In this piece, we are invited to a tour that, in the way of ecological cartography, scrutinizes those more than human activities that have given voice and echo to Tanglin Halt, one of the oldest buildings in Singapore. For 50 years, this space has been home to at least identified 105 species of birds so far.
This short film creates a visual and sound exploration that generates a perceptual experience that unites the concerns related to ecology, life, and cinema. Cinema’s overthrowing works as an effective reorganization from which we can speak of the ecology of the gaze that allows us to watch films, a portal that opens up to the existing relations between image and nature. The initial sequence of this short film weaves the stories of the local people together with the songs of the birds. The images focus on microscopic shots of feathers and a man walking through a forest at night. This short film constantly parallels human and animal activities, creating reciprocity between cinema and the ecosystem. The relationship between the different biological presences acquires a relevant value in cinema, making the space of the image a tool to reimagine the politics of life. The camera becomes a microscope and explores all those polyphonic existences we coexist: animals, plants, cells.
The camera is a device that captures light, a kind of trap that stores fragments. {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves expand the idea of what the camera is believed to see: it turns it into an investigative and speculative device that constantly questions life, giving rise to thoughts that transcend humanity. As spectators, we walk a path that embraces our body and invites us to drill through the linear time of human history. How to pierce the anthropocentric cinematographic temporality? The potentialities of this project respond to it in different ways: The potentialities of this project respond to it in different ways: it is a short film, in-depth research into the relationship between humans and birds, and the creation of divergent exhibitions and interactive song-maps. As this short film progresses, we see different shadows of birds, small details that join with the soundscapes. Animal sounds and reflections seem like a spirit that lives in the cinema as if timeless rumors envelop this work in a halo of beauty and mystery. The shadows shaped like birds invite us to think about the biological realities that become ghostly reflections. The advance of capitalism destroys life to the point that it reduces it to a ghost, a shadow, or a song heard from a distance, like the sounds of birds.
In {if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves, the songs of birds live inside people. At different times we see men replicating the songs, invoking the bird’s life. To think of a political ecology of cinema is to think of the emergence of a biospheric consciousness making the profession of cinema a profession of life, cultural biology, and an ecologic-visual thought. The political ecology of cinema is to incorporate bird’s songs into our own.
{if your bait can sing the wild one will come} Like Shadows Through Leaves is a short film bringing the discussion of a fundamental topic: the plurality of life. In times of eco-social crisis, cinema can emerge as an aesthetic tool that resizes and reimagines care policies, allowing us to glimpse that perhaps the images and sounds are a possibility of observation and a gesture of healing from those species with whom we coexist in the world.
Valentina Giraldo Sánchez
Edited by Justine Smith
© FIPRESCI 2021