Common Grounds: Thinking With Ruderal Plants About Other (Filmic) Histories

Abstract

This article explores the connections between film and ruderal plants: plants that grow spontaneously in anthropized environments and that we often call “weeds”. Thriving across damaged lands, ruderals are not only exceptional companions for thinking with at a time of ecological rupture, but also a way of engaging with less anthropocentric histories. As argued in this paper, such histories also pertain to film. Despite its timid representational interest in ruderals and “weeds”, cinema is concerned with the stories of collaborative survival, companionship and contaminated diversity raised by such turbulent creatures. Framed by a reflection on our ruderal condition, a discussion around some recent artists’ films allows us to explore some of these problems, while putting an accent on the idea of affective ecologies and involutionary modes of perception.

1. Introduction: Beyond Representation Alone

Celebrated as the co-creator of a world-changing device known as the cinématographe, French inventor Auguste Lumière apparently used the machine’s prototype only once, in order to shoot a view called Mauvaises herbes (“Weeds”, view nº 64, 1896) ¹. Despite its suggestive title, the film in question is less about the fortuitous plants known as “weeds” than about the rising swirls of evanescent white smoke caused by their burning. In those early years, and for many decades to come, trees, plants, let alone the humble and reviled weeds—“nature’s most unloved plants” [1]—rarely made it to the foreground. From its beginnings, film was pictured as a human-centred medium, as illustrated by the views that the Lumière brothers displayed to marvelled audiences in France and abroad. If the rustling leaves in the garden setting of Repas de bébé (“The Baby’s Meal”, Louis Lumière, view nº 88, 1895) famously caught their eye, briefly rescuing our vegetal companions from the background, film consistently measured its shots against human bodies and human time scales. Unsurprisingly, the ten views shown at the historic Grand Café screening in late 1895 were all carefully composed around human figures, renewing with anthropocentric modes of vision and temporalities ². Moreover, the early spectators’ fascination with moving leaves does not actually suggest an undocumented affinity towards the vegetal realm. Swirling sea-waves, tossing waterfalls and fluttering clouds (of steam, dust or smoke) equally attracted their attention. Hinting at the powerful experience of seeing fugitive, unplannable movements captured on screen, even a beer’s fleeting head could stand out against a lively tableau (p. 308, [2]).

Historically, cinema’s timid but noteworthy interest in plants as filmic subjects in their own right goes back to this initial period. As early as 1896, there was talk in the French press of documenting the lifecycle of a rose (or of a rhododendron) by means of the movie camera ³. Before the Institute Marey put the idea into practice, German botanist Wilhelm Pfeffer shot four time-lapse studies on plant motion between 1898 and 1900, the technique “endow[ing] plants with a vivid sense of vitality” (p. 56, [3]) ⁴. Envisaged as a new research tool by different disciplines, among which was plant physiology, filmic technology began to unmoor itself from its anthropocentric underpinnings, exploring other-than-human scales and helping to shake the boundaries of century-old conceptions about life and the living ⁵. Writing about The Life of a Plant (Percy Smith, 1926), a Secrets of Nature production starring a garden nasturtium, a reviewer commented that after seeing the film “you find it difficult to believe (…) that the life of a plant is not as sentient as your own” (p. 9, [4]) ⁶.

Nonetheless, beyond the specific interest evinced by a handful of experts and scientific popularisers alike in vegetative movements (and the audiences’ continuing fascination with time-lapse technology), plants were rarely promoted to the role of film stars ⁷. Certainly, once stencilling became mechanized (1907) and as different additive two- and three-colour systems were perfectioned in the following years, flowers graciously lent themselves to the spectacular showcase of flamboyant palettes, like in Gaumont’s Études des fleurs (“The Kingdom of Flowers”, 1910) [5] or Bouquets dans des vases (“Bouquets in vases”, Gaumont, 1912) [6] (Figure 1). Placed on rotating pedestals, as if arrayed behind the glass of a fancy shop window, flowers (but also fruits and vegetables) occupy the centre of the screen. But such films are exceptional, and the subgenre too modest with regards to its supposedly phytocentric ambitions, to turn plants into more than just a curious footnote in the history of cinema.

However, to think about cinema with plants is not necessarily to focus on representation alone ⁸. To return to Étude des fleurs and Bouquets dans des vases, the most relevant aspect of these pictures concerns our perception of their colours and what they tell us about filmic flowers. If their vibrant hues strike us as nonnatural (in particular the chronochrome florae of Bouquets dans des vases), it is probably because of the synthetic, celluloid character of these specimens—yet another iteration of what Sarah Cooper has aptly named “techno-flowers”, flowers that come to matter through cinematic means and, one can add, through very concrete, material supports, such as the flexible and highly-flammable material known as celluloid [7]. Curiously, before it became the motion pictures’ stock of choice (and a synonym for cinema generally), celluloid—essentially composed of nitrocellulose and camphor (a plant-derived chemical in its natural form, synthetised in the early 20th century)—had also transformed the buoyant industry of artificial flowers. Indeed, if silk and fine cotton remained the privileged choice for dressmakers and milliners excelling in the fine art of fabricating flowers, celluloid imposed itself as a cheaper alternative to organic funeral wreaths ⁹. Jean-Luc Godard (incidentally, an exquisite filmer of flowers and gardens ¹⁰) seemed to recall this curious fact when he observed, in his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–1998), that “Technicolor films will use the same dominants as funeral wreaths” [8]. Whatever the case, celluloid wreaths and artificial plants are as much the child of chemical industries as aniline dyes, colour filters and special film stocks manufactured during cinema’s quest to achieve so-called “natural colour” ¹¹. Relying on voracious energy economies ¹², all of these products leave their toxic imprint on the planet, the environmental impact of film inviting us to reframe the old question of ontology. As pointed out by Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (drawing on Nadia Bozak’s The Cinematic Footprint [9]), a retooled filmic ontology stresses cinema’s extractive nature by reconsidering indexicality as the “hinge or hook that connects the [photographic and digital] image to the world” (p. 3, [10]) ¹³.

If thinking about cinema with plants potentially means to engage in discussions around ontology, complex materialities and overlooked industrial ecologies such as those interweaving celluloid film, industrial dyes and artificial flowers, my essay wishes to explore yet another facet of this problem. Taking Auguste Lumière’s paradoxical (non-)inscription of plants in film history as a cue, I wish to concentrate on the humblest of them all: “weeds” and, more specifically, disturbance-adapted species known as ruderal plants. As we will see, ruderal plants are much more than the “weeds” of cities and industrial sites, the successful “colonizers” of wastelands and urine-saturated tree beds. Flourishing in what we can call, as did anthropologist Anna Tsing, the everyday ruins of capitalism, and embodying what she calls a “third nature” (p. viii, [11]), ruderals are exceptional companions for thinking with, in particular at a time of rupture, when “all the world’s a dump” and that particular condition “wreck[s] the very-being world of the world” (p. 2, [12]) ¹⁴. Relegated to the fringes of our screens, ruderals will allow me to illustrate the theoretical and methodological point that I wish to make about the challenge of thinking cinema with plants: if plant representation can be our starting point, plants can always tell us an array of complex stories, including about film itself. In the context of this essay, ruderals will take us from the representational to the surprising entanglements bringing together human (film)makers and spectators, plants and the camera.

Thinking with ruderals about other filmic histories (but also, as we will see, with lichens: reliable bio-indicators and composite organisms standing for collaborative survival and symbiosis ¹⁵) is no minor affair. Among others, it implies reckoning with the politicisation of the living to which ecological thought has been inviting us for several decades. To politicise forms of life as neglected as lichens and ruderal plants means bringing the unnoticed, the trampled and the trodden to the space of our agonistic polis, to reimagine it as a common ground: a place of care and mutual recognition open to all sorts of humans and the more-than-human. In other words, thinking with ruderals and lichens is perhaps a way of articulating visions on the new communities to be invented if we wish to make a “world” out of the devastation that according to philosopher Michael Marder and others equally permeates our senses and thoughts. In the hope that the lethal logic of the dump and the “ontological toxicity” [12] on which it relies can still be subverted, this is clearly a difficult, but vital task. Film has an evident role to play, in particular when it comes to reframing the terms in which we think about attention. Turned into the most valuable of commodities by the boom in digital content, “attention” must be rescued from the grips of economy, particularly if we wish to revitalise our capacity to see. To “undump” attention is to think about it in ethical terms, not as a resource or an asset, but as a means of caring; a way of noticing what we were taught to ignore and to background. Film can help us do that—and more: it can give shape to new (“involutionary”) modes of attention, kinder and more generous to others.

“The wisdom of the plants”, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari once wrote, is that “even when they have roots, there is always an outside where they form a rhizome with something else—with the wind, an animal, human beings” (p. 11, [13]). With a bit of luck, thinking with ruderals and lichens might bring us closer to the wisdom of plants, helping us forge more ecological rationalities. By this necessarily plural notion (ecological rationalities can express themselves in various forms), philosopher and eco-feminist Val Plumwood understood the different ways of “phasing out destructive capacities and evolving a sympathetic partnership or communicative relationship with nature” (p. 68, [14]). But one could also recall Marder on the “strategies of undumping”: “uncluttering, revitalising physiological, cognitive, ecological and planetary metabolisms, reactivating becoming beyond mutations provoked by the dreams of immutability at every one of those levels” (p. xiv, [12]). More concretely, thinking with ruderals and lichens is also a way of engaging with less anthropocentric histories, accounts that ignore the nature–culture divide and which can tell us “small, partial, and wild stories of more-than-human attempts to stay alive” (p. 6, [15]). As we will see, such histories equally pertain to film: a medium whose general lack of representational interest in ruderal plants (and lichens) does not mean that cinema is not concerned by the issues raised by such strange, queer and turbulent creatures.

2. Our Ruderal Condition

Certain vegetal species are called ruderals, from the Latin rudus, ruderis: gravel, rubble, ruins. Ruderal plants are those that grow spontaneously in anthropized environments, that is, habitats disturbed by human presence or action, such as the piles of debris evoked by the word’s etymology. The use of the term in a botanical context goes back to Carl Linnaeus’ nomenclature. In the 10th edition of its Systema Naturae (1758), ruderale refers to the type of soil where certain plants grow ¹⁶. For instance, vervains are known to flourish in damp ditches, sandy roadsides, abandoned gravel pits: in sum, typical ruderal milieus. Even though Linnaeus could not have known this (the ruderalisation of the planet accelerated considerably only after his lifetime), ruderals thrive in devastated soils, saturated with iron, phosphates and, of course, nitrates ¹⁷. Widely used in agriculture, man-made fertilisers have radically improved agricultural productivity, but the abundance of ammonia and nitrates has its cost. Synthetic fertilisers have not only transformed the global nitrogen cycle (one of the most altered biogeochemical cycles on Earth and one of the largest contributors to global warming today), but are also the cause of increasing nitrate pollution, harmful to people, animals, plants, soils, bacteria and bodies of water alike. Usually, nitrophilous ruderal plants (or at least those tolerant of the high nitrate contents frequently found in their disturbed habitats) are reliable bioindicators—as we will see, a there is very concrete way of implicating them in worlding projects.

In the 18th century, the term ruderal did not have the connotation that it was to acquire once it became bound to disturbance processes such as soil nitrification. Then fundamentally linked to ruins, some ruderal plants played an active cultural role in the Romantic monumentalisation of certain specific landscapes. The Cymbalaria muralis or ivy-leaved toadflax, a floriferous perennial with small lilac flowers, vulgarly seen on the ruins of Rome and also known as the “Colosseum ivy” is a case in point. Before the brushing and cleaning of multiple restoration campaigns ripped most species off its walls, the Colosseum—described as “a giant stone vase” by German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius (p. 294, [16])—was actually inhabited by all sorts of trees and plants. In his Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (1855), the amateur botanist Richard Deakin recorded as many as 420 species, among which rare flowers that grew nowhere else in Europe and whose seeds were perhaps transported to the capital of the Roman empire by the African animals who once fought in the Flavia amphitheatre ¹⁸. Today, most of them have disappeared, even if the Colosseum still harbours species that can no longer survive outside its perimeter due to increased pollution and raising temperatures, such as Asphodelus fistulosus (onionweed) and Sedum dasyphyllum (the Corsican stonecrop).

Other common names for the ivy-leaved toadflax include mother of thousands, travelling sailor and Oxford weeds. Indeed, many ruderals are considered “weeds”: an imprecise, deprecative term, tainted by discussions on “alien” and “immigrant” species and rife with fear-mongering metaphors on “biological invasions” ¹⁹. Introduced in England in the early 17th century (supposedly via seeds dissimulated in the boxing of marble statues brought from Italy), the ivy-leaved toadflax was originally found in the Mediterranean basin and is now considered a “naturalised” species in many temperate regions of the planet. On the contrary, the Asphodelus fistulosus that still subsists in the Colosseum features as an “invasive” plant in the Federal Noxious Weed List published by the United States Department of Agriculture ²⁰. It is true that the “naturalization” of certain species to the local flora can cause serious damage to so-called “native” plants, as “cosmopolitan” species (an adjective sometimes used by botanists to describe ubiquitous plants) take over their living environments and effectively reduce biodiversity. But the problem with onionweed is that livestock avoids eating it and that it outcompetes grasses and more “desirable” forage plants. British nature writer Richard Mabey appropriately sums the “weed” problem when he writes that “plants become weeds when they obstruct our plans, our tidy maps of the world” [1].

As Romanticism faded and more disciplined standards were set for urban landscapes (in Paris, even lichens were sometimes removed from tree trunks during the 19th and the 20th centuries ²¹), ruderals came to refer to plants that grow on gutters, sidewalks, wastelands, road verges, railways and freight yards, industrial landfills, eroded lands, etc. In sum, the everyday ruins of capitalism: highly disturbed habitats where ruderal vagabonds precariously coexist with other species, among which is our own ²². Like certain fungi, ruderal vegetation is that which emerges despite devastation, whether that devastation is invisible to the human eye, as with contaminated soils, or whether it assumes more flamboyant expressions, as in Beirut, where the famous “green line” that separated the eastern and western sectors of the city during the civil war became a death strip overgrown with brambles, grass, sycamores and wild fig trees ²³.

Ruderal plants are often mentioned for their capacity to “recolonise” debris after violent conflicts ²⁴. In Germany, the flora and vegetation of Trümmerlandschaften, the rubble landscapes of the early post-war years, did not fail to catch the eye of botanists and ecologists, in particular in Berlin, a city divided by the Cold War and dotted with many interstitial, feral spaces ²⁵. In Germania, Anno Zero (“Germany Year Zero”, 1948), Roberto Rossellini’s conclusion to his war trilogy, shot in Berlin in the summer of 1947, ruderals can be spotted pretty much everywhere. One sequence in particular comes to mind: after telling his teacher that he has just poisoned his ailing father, young Edmund Kohler wanders the city. He comes across a group of children playing football in a heavily blasted but blossoming street. He tries to join them, but the children rebuff him: Edmund walks away, making his way among a jungle of what looks like sticky goosefoot (Chenopodium botrys) ²⁶ (Figure 2).

Unlike ruderal plants, Edmund is unable to survive in the heavily-disturbed milieus of post-war Berlin. The history of the city’s Brachen (a term that can be translated as “wastelands” or “abandoned lots”) has been explored by British geographer Matthew Gandy in his documentary Natura Urbana—The Brachen of Berlin (2017). Drawing a cross-generational history of these marginal spaces, Gandy’s film is a thought-provoking meditation on evolving botanical and ecological discourses, urban biotopes and the question of the commons. If Brachen are ephemeral spaces by definition, the predatory practices of big property developers, as well as the city’s hyper-gentrification, have turned such urban commons into an endangered naturecultural form. Anthropologist Bettina Stoetzer has equally made clear that such interstitial spaces are inseparable from plant–people relations, as well as questions of social justice, very often implicating immigrant and racialized communities. “Exploring Berlin’s urban ecologies ethnographically”, she writes, “involves looking for unanticipated human-nonhuman interactions that occur at the edges of the city’s infrastructures and that do not adhere to national or capitalist schemes for multicultural gardening and rehabilitating nature” (p. 309, [17]). To put it differently, urban and ruderal ecologies bring about untamed forms of diversity, beyond strict garden infrastructures and their designs on vegetal life ²⁷.

If “weeds” are the nemesis of human endeavours—certain humans struggling and often failing to “control” them, poisoning soils, rivers, lakes and all sorts of living bodies in the process—ruderals are anthropophiles or, more specifically, synanthropic organisms, i.e., undomesticated species living closely alongside or benefiting from human beings. Humans may not always notice or appreciate them, but they are embedded in the fabric of our lives. A 1986 episode of L’Aventure des plantes (“The Adventure of Plants”, TF1), a series by French botanist and pioneer urban ecologist Jean-Marie Pelt and filmmaker Jean-Pierre Cuny, remind us exactly of that. In its opening sequence, the camera turns its attention to pellitories-of-the-wall, Canadian fleabanes, buddleias, fat-hens and trees of heaven growing in Paris ²⁸. Despite their love of humans, ruderal plants have a slightly murky status, like the rainwater that so often spreads their seeds. On the one hand, they have a bad reputation: they are sometimes called “invaders” and “opportunists”. In the name of “diversity”, ruderals are accused of “biotic homogenization”, fuelling narratives of fear and safety and nourishing fantasies of pristine ecologies, very often inseparable from nation-making projects ²⁹. On the other hand, they are amazingly resilient, at least from a human perspective, thriving in the most unlikely places. In fact, the term ruderal also refers to a specific survival strategy: according to the C-S-R triangle strategy, coined in 1974 by British ecologist J. Philip Grime, plant species are either competitors (C), stress-tolerators (S) or ruderals (R) [18]. Ruderals are plants that thrive in (highly) disturbed situations, but that only support low levels of stress (such as extremes of temperature and moisture supply); on the contrary, stress-tolerators such as lichens, composite organisms able to survive in extremely harsh environments, are disturbance sensitive (for instance, lichens are sensitive to nitrogen atmospheric pollution and for that reason reliable bioindicators). Ruderals tend to be small and to have short lifecycles (many ruderals are annuals). Nonetheless, they are capable of restoring minerals and nutrients, of attracting insects and birds, of regenerating life. They are also the vegetal allies that some still know how to use and prepare. Ruderals can be our first nourishment and our first medicine: green purslane makes for delicious soups and the common vervain is a well-known medicinal herb.

Standing for the alien, the undesirable, the out of place—but also for the multiple, the decentred and the entangled—ruderals, like “weeds”, are fitting companions for those who grow in-between (Figure 3). Those who prosper in the fissures and cracks of dominant discourses; those who infuse wildness and diversity in all sorts of toxic monocultures. Those, in sum, who invite us to read against the grain of conventional natural and cultural histories. After all, ruderal plants are the migrants of the vegetable realm, the anti-forest of urban wastelands, the overlooked flora of our ecological obliviousness. They are the vegetation of the contaminated commons, the interstitial condition of the undercommons ³⁰. They embody what Tsing calls “third nature”: precarious forms of multispecies coexistence in the ruins of advanced capitalism ³¹. In other words, the possibility of transforming “the dump” into a breeding ground for life: the prospect of world-making in the midst of the devastation.

3. Common Grounds: On the Affective Ecologies Binding Humans, Ruderals and the Camera

A handful of artists and creators—among which is the late Lois Weinberger (1947–2020), often remembered for his ground-breaking work around marginal zones, nature–culture hierarchies and ruderal ecologies ³²—have engaged with what Sarah Cowles calls “a ruderal aesthetics”, explored in works of contemporary art and design where “ruderal species are dispatched as artistic subject and medium” (p. 388, [19]). When it comes to film, the medium’s aforementioned human-centredness means that explicit references to ruderal plants are historically rare, rarer even than mentions of “weeds” ³³. In order to find them, cinematic incursions into urban interstitial spaces and man-made industrial wastelands provide us with interesting (but nonexclusive) clues. Robert Siodmak’s and Edgar G. Ulmer’s Menschen am Sonntag (“People on Sunday”, 1939), George Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (“Blood of the Beasts”, 1949), Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle (“My Uncle”, 1958), Marcel Carné’s Terrain Vague (“Wasteland”, 1960), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accatone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962) or Uccelacci e Uccellini (“The Hawks and the Sparrows”, 1966), Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (“The Eclipse”, 1962), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Cmaлкep (“Stalker”, 1979), Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981), Agnès Varda’s Sans toit ni loi (“Vagabond”, 1985), Bela Tarr’s Kárhozat (“Damnation”, 1988) and Sátántangó (“Satan’s tango”, 1994), Bruno Dumont’s La Vie de Jésus (“The Life of Jesus”, 1997), Wang Bing’s West of the Tracks (2002) and Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins (2010), to quote but an evident few, all offer us valuable insights to the stories told by ruderals. Some of these tales are about the terrain vague as a place of leisure and pleasure, the home of vibrant and transgressive communities; others about forms of governance and biopolitics dictating what should be valued or relegated and even excluded: what should be “weeded”. In these films, ruderals often stand for the proletarianization of different lifeforms (and forms of life), embodying power relations, as well as the fallouts from globalization, labour migration and capitalism.

Amongst these non-exhaustive examples, Tarkovsky’s Stalker is certainly one of the most striking. The ruderal is much more than a “simple” landscape: it tells us a “rush of troubled stories” about “contaminated diversity” (p. 34, [11]). In a film otherwise known for its allusions to the environmental dangers of nuclear waste, ruderal vegetation plays a prominent role, both in the city’s apocalyptic wasteland and in particular in the Zone. As explained by the Stalker, the latter is a “very complex maze of traps”: “as soon as humans appear, everything begins to change” [20]. For this reason, the Zone has been likened to the phenomenological reality of the Anthropocene (a notion not yet coined at the time of the film’s shooting) ³⁴. Concretely however, and in line with Tarkovsky’s refusal to understand it in allegorical or metaphorical terms, the Zone (from the Latin zōna, “belt, girdle, imaginary band circling the earth”) is a ruderal milieu, a fragile and unstable environment haunted by incessant transformation and precarious survival. A place where the Stalker, the Professor and the Writer (in other words, the Human) are all affected by the more-than-human. Beyond its remarkable depiction of ruderal landscapes, Stalker also tells us other stories: cacophonous tales about our entangled vulnerability, linked to historical contingencies and the “indeterminacies of encounter” (pp. 46–47, [11]) ³⁵. According to camera technician Sergey Bessmertny, the dam and abandoned power plant on the Jägala river, Estonia, where most of the shooting took place, “had an expressive texture: cracked, lichen-covered concrete broken glass, oil stains” [21] (Figure 4 and Figure 5) ³⁶.

Because of a chemical complex upstream, that section of the river was heavily polluted, as evinced in a famous shot, where snow can be seen falling on toxic foam floating down the river. “A few years later, when it turned out that most of the members of the crew had passed away”, Bessmertny adds, “rumours appeared that it was because the area around the place of filming had been poisoned” [21]. Sound recordist Vladimir Sharun is likely behind such reports: according to him, the cancers that took Tarkovsky’s and his wife Larissa’s lives (as well as those of Nikolai Grinko and Anatoly Solonitsyn, who play the Professor and the Writer, respectively) were caused by contamination from the chemical plant [22].

However, the stories of “contaminated diversity” that I have in mind are about companionship and collaborative survival, not death. As Tsing herself writes, “I use the term ‘contaminated diversity’ to refer to cultural and biological ways of life that have developed in relation to the last few hundred years of widespread human disturbance. Contaminated diversity is collaborative adaptation to human-disturbed ecosystems” (p. 95, [23]). Certainly, such stories can be deeply disturbing for humans, challenging their perceived individualism and exceptionalism, like in Alex Garland’s Annihilation (2018). In this xenobiological tale set in yet another Zone (a toxic ecosystem known as Area X), plant buds sprout in one of the characters’ arms (a timid astrophysicist played by Tessa Thompson) (Figure 6).

But again, it is not on such fears and anxieties that I wish to dwell—or even on strictly representational issues around ruderal plants. If filmic images can bear witness to the complex natureculture entanglements they express, I would like to suggest that cinema is also the place where affective ecologies involving humans, ruderals and filmic technology can be reconfigured. Moreover, maybe film can be a way of reclaiming what historian Carla Hustak and anthropologist Natasha Myers have named, in their rereading of Darwin’s work on orchids, “involutionary” modes of attention: accounts that “map interspecies enmeshments and intimacies” fashioned by “pleasure, play and experimental propositions” (p. 78 and p. 98, [24]) ³⁷. Shifting Hustak’s and Myers’s unhinging of evolutionary logics towards the domain of cinema means reinventing the former, in order to accommodate the camera within configurations usually restricted to living organisms. Thinking with lichens might help us do that.

Soils-Habit-Plants (2017, 11 min), a short film by artists Mikhail Lylov and Elke Marhöfer, provides us with an interesting case-study. Interested in more-than-human communities and advocating for a less anthropocentric cinema, Lylov and Marhöfer focus here on a number of ruderal “weedy” plants, such as wild millet and Japanese knotweed. As Marhöfer writes, the “plants in the film are typical of landscapes shared between humans and nonhumans. Despite their widespread and ubiquitous status, they can be called ‘fringe species’” [25] ³⁸. Shot in Japan, while Marhöfer was conducting research on disturbed ecologies, the film also takes us to a plantation of sugi cedars and hinoki cypresses, the most noble of Japanese trees ³⁹. Established in the post-war years (sugi and hinoki provide high-quality and decay-resistant timber used for posts, pillars, floors, panels, etc., in shrines and temples in particular), such human-planted forests account for 30% of the total wooded area in the country and are today investigated for their high nitrogen leaching. A photograph lying on the forest floor, taken in Sarawak, Borneo, when the Malaysian state was still a British colony, documents “a by now logged down primary forest” [25] and alludes to the replacement of Japanese cedars and cypresses by other cheaper, natural “resources”.

But the filmmakers also direct their attention to soil. Shot by Marhöfer with a macro lens (Lylov filmed the plants), the soil sequences are particularly striking. The ground level point of view adopted, as well as the unstable use of focus—the extreme close-ups of the soil, plants and even micro test plates oscillate between sharpness and blurriness (Figure 7) ⁴⁰—contribute to the feeling of a cinema unfettered by human-centred standards.

Lylov describes how he and Marhöfer involved themselves haptically and erotically with plants and the soil, caressing them with the camera and hinting at a relational cinema:

If we speak of pleasure as a physical experience, filming plants and soil—in macro with no tripod—requires a lot of physical concentration and guessing. You are moving the camera, trying to follow the curve of a leaf or a soil particle, which induces an extremely strange state of the body. It’s like you are maintaining a sense of touch on the verge of the sensible [26] ⁴¹.

Commissioned for an exhibition on Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s work (two filmmakers known for their attention to soils and geology ⁴²), Soils-Habit-Plants effectively moves beyond oversight, perspectival form and logocentric knowledge, exercising its own involutionary mode of attention. Moreover, the film equally documents an affective ecology where the 16 mm camera (an avatar for filmic technology) is an active participant. Marhöfer in particular has insisted on the idea that filming is for her a means of generating affects and intensifying sensations, instead of creating representations. Her relationship with the 16 mm camera is crucial. Thinking of a different film (Shape Shifting, 2015, 18 min), the artist explains that she likes “to understand the camera as a machinic companion” [27]. Marhöfer remarks that “companions transform one another” and that “their entanglement with the environment from which they emerge, forms them”; “this companionship”, she adds, “overlaps perspectives of the environment, the camera, and the human. It creates a diversity of sensations and temporalities and activates relational modes of perception” [27] ⁴³.

Mapping on screen some of the enmeshments and intimacies that bind together humans and other-than-humans such as soil, bacteria and ruderal plants (what Shape Shifting does by delving into the Japanese satoyama, the border zone or area between mountain foothills, yama, and the arable flat land next to the villages, yama), Lylov and Marhöfer recall to us that exploring the other-than-human by means of film is also a way of shaping affective relationships encompassing machinic fellows. The joyful myriad of other-than-human agents potentially implicated are not limited to organic actants: in Soils-Habit-Plants, the camera’s tremulousness, as well as the rapid editing of close-up shots of wild millet, evokes the collaboration of the wind ⁴⁴. Soils-Habit-Plants reminds us that other-than-human subjects hint at specific modes of sensing, feeling, affecting and being affected. Filming here means attuning both human makers and human spectators to the sensibilities of the soil, plants, the wind. Their positions and experiences are not the same: makers, and in particular the camera operator, are at the forefront of such “thinking with”, understood here not only as an exercise in speculative reasoning, but as playful physical investigation (“thinking with” being an invitation to do our thinking otherwise, not only with our brains, but with our bodies). Questioning our human ways of perceiving the milieu, but also “the self”, Soils-Habit-Plants is an experiment in “becoming with”, an exercise in terms of an ecological subjectivity, for makers and spectators alike. This is where thinking with lichens might be helpful: symbiosis in lichens is a good way of thinking about ecological subjectivities, subjectivities deeply entangled with other forms of life, but also with technology and media.

Even though they are often plant-like, lichens are not plants. Mistaken for mosses, and for a long time reduced to the status of primitive plants situated somewhere between fungi and algae, lichens are composite organisms, resulting from the perennial association between fungi, algae or cyanobacteria living in mutualistic association. For this reason, they challenge the essentialist insularity of the “individual” and have come to embody the chimeric and resolutely ecological vision according to which we are symbiotic beings in constant becoming. Associated with libertarian thinking and suspected of bias, mutualism was considered an anomaly for many decades. In the eyes of serious scientists, it seemed to suffer from that greater evil from which parasitism and other conflicting relations, reasonably focused on the “struggle for life”, had always miraculously escaped: anthropomorphism. If not for the rebellious intelligence of the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, who began to rewrite the history of our own cells from an endosymbiotic point of view at the end of the 1960s, the rehabilitation of mutualistic symbioses would certainly have taken a great deal longer ⁴⁵. In the wake of Margulies’ work, three scientists concluded in 2012 that, from a biological point of view, we have never been individuals. Therefore, “we are all lichens” [28].

Lichens feature prominently in Marhöfer’s Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) (2017), a film shot in the Russian Southern steppes, in the Divnogorye Natural Museum reserve, as the crow flies not very far away from Chernobyl (Figure 8).

The park is known for its wild grasslands—many of which are threatened—as well as for its unique collection of animal bones (in particular, the remains of the ancient ancestors of tarpan horses, a feral species of steppe horses, extinguished in the early 20th century). In line with the idea of disturbed ecologies, the excavation sites in the Divnogorye concretely become places of collaborative survival between fungi, grass, flowers, insects and bacteria. As the artist puts it, the film “speculates about more-than-human relationalities, attempting to stimulate an environmentally attuned mode of acting in a damaged world” [29]. Anticipating many of the sensorial strategies favoured in Soils-Habit-Plants, Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) explores sensations of colour, movement and sound, equally refusing oversight and engaging in (stunning) involutionary modes of attention. As Marhöfer writes,

Affective encounters beyond the lived, and outside the human with machines, earth strata, light, lichens, soil, bacteria, plants, animals and their symbiotic endeavors, heterogeneous micro- and macro-perceptions and temporalities might potentially help us to learn inhuman interspecies modes of care and attention and enable us to confront the limits of the very concept of the human [29].

To “confront the limits of the very concept of the human” is, of course, to undermine anthropocentrism and human exceptionalism as we have known them, but also, potentially, to address the question of the untamed ecological subjectivities to come ⁴⁶. This point again brings me to Marder’s remarks on the “ontological toxicity” that haunts our very selves. It is not only that “all the world’s a dump” and that the dump is depriving us from a world: according to Marder, we, as human subjects, are also becoming toxic and incapable of making world(s). The need to intersect the “natural environment”, (eroding) social relations and the psychic had already been made by Guattari in his book The Three Ecologies (1989) [30]; writing thirty years later, Marder goes farther, detailing how we stopped being of and from the world ⁴⁷. Observing that “noxious thoughts and poisoned senses, toxic built environments, social milieus, and contaminated ecosystems merge and reinforce one another”, he identifies “the desire to cleanse my garden of unwanted intruders” as a symptom of this ontological malaise (pp. 188–189, [12]).

Strongly marked by Deleuze and Guattari’s work, Marhöfer recalls their credo on the “wisdom of plants”: their capacity to form rhizomes and to entangle with the fabric of life. In addition to disputing the nature–culture divide, Soils-Habit-Plants and Becoming Extinct (Wild Grass) tell us the tangled, split and venturesome histories that we need to imagine in order to become again of and from the world—to sow worlds, to terraform with Earth Others. Such stories are likely to involve ruderals and lichens: if the first call us to “commoning”, the second call us to symbiose.