Modern Nature:
Hannah Bonner on First Look’s Illuminations
In The Medium Is the Message (1967), Marshall McLuhan writes, “Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible.” For McLuhan, the ecosystems of natural and manmade environments indelibly intertwine. So ubiquitous is the exchange of their energies that it is almost impossible to disentangle or separate the vibrancy of marshes, prairies, or deserts from the anthropoid communities that inhabit them. The Anthropocene’s materials ripple rhizomatically through the ground, sea, and sky.
In First Look’s 2025 Illuminations Program of avant-garde shorts, various landscapes—and media—abound. Each of the eleven filmmakers activates celluloid’s formal potentials while also negotiating the tensions among technologies that irrevocably alter our world—and ways of seeing. Split into two sections, Working the Garden and Finding the Forest, the program presents “environments” as broadly encompassing oceans, gardens, French hospitals, communitarians, college dances, and the apparatuses that are already altered by the visible (or invisible) presence of a human hand.
To wit, Sam Drake’s ambient, ecosensory Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air (2025) bridges natural and technological environments. Filmed on expired film stock, Drake’s website describes Suspicions as a film that “trac[es] a hidden history of covert Cold-War era human radiation testing [on United States civilians],” wherein the government’s “active processes” on both corporeal bodies and geographical topographies are indeed “invisible.” These noxious chemicals disperse throughout the horizon’s ether in a deadly, miasmic haze.
The film opens in a lush copse bathed by late afternoon light. Almost instantly, the camera begins to zoom out, a steady and measured movement that contradicts the unease of the muddled and murky soundscape. “Check this out,” a woman breathily commands before the camera reverses course, rapidly zooming back out. The speed of the zoom foregrounds that this is neither a pastoral nor a peaceful film. Drake then cuts to a handheld tracking shot of the moon captured from a car window. Fumbling and unsteady, Drake’s cinematography reminds us that we are watching a film, a mechanical rendering of a highly constructed, and mediated, world.
While Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of Air gestures towards its director’s presence off-screen, Luke Fowler features his own body and voice in Being Blue (2024). Fowler’s film, a portrait of Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, frames the late British filmmaker’s archives, household objects, and shingle beach in gorgeous tableaus. Early in the film, Fowler captures his reflection in an etched mirror while adjusting the Arriflex 16 mm camera’s lens. He then cuts to a close up of a rock while racking focus. Though the rock is not the subject of the previous shot, it is impossible not to see Fowler’s technique as a manifestation of his own gesture in the previous scene. The juxtaposition of both shots feels like an invitation, welcoming the viewer into the decision making of the film as it unfolds before us.
Generated during a residency at Prospect Cottage, Fowler’s project demonstrates how landscapes imprint on us just as we imprint ourselves on them. Various sequences showcase Fowler’s hands opening Jarman’s books, stuffed with scraps of paper or swollen with marginalia. In other moments, the camera pans across counter tops cluttered with various statues, artifacts, and stones. Fowler subsequently cuts to those objects in close-up to study them more intimately. There is a cut piece of glass, indented and grooved as if by fingers; and there is the glass in even more extreme close-up, carved letters glittering atop its translucent surface like hieroglyphs. The viewer embodies the camera’s curiosity, coming closer and closer to the details that recurrently draw Fowler’s own capacious and generous eye.
The original string and analog synthesizer score by Oliver Coates and Simon Fisher Turner washes the film in the melancholy, the blueness, of Jarman’s absence. Jarman’s physical trace remains only in his plants and sundry things, as well as old recordings of his voice. As Jarman speaks about his sexuality as a gay man, Fowler’s shadow dapples cone bushes, clusters of Erysimum cheiri, or bunches of grape-hyacinth quaking in the breeze. The reverb from the score accentuates the atmospheric airiness as Fowler and the camera drift from flower bed to flower bed, an exploration of the topography that offers no answers, save the flashes of paradise’s fruits in the sunlit, verdant blooms.
Earlier, a long shot of Jarman’s garden revealed a nuclear power plant looming in the distant background, the sky in dusk light thin as silk, almost pink. A full yellow lucent moon blooms in the upper corner, recalling the lines “sky / all / trembling / linden” from Jonas Mekas’s Words Apart and Others. Though Fowler carefully captures each daffodil or fruit bowl in close-up, this seemingly halcyon landscape is still swathed in environmental toxins when you step back and regard it from a distance. Part of Jarman’s work, as both a gardener and filmmaker, was to beautify the world even as he came under threat by its evils (industrial facilities or heterosexism to name just two). Fowler continues in Jarman’s tradition by imbuing every object, mineral, or plant with relevance and meaning which is another way of saying, in other words, with love. In The Garden Against Time Olivia Laing writes, “[Jarman’s] garden has no walls or fences, deliberately obliterating the border between cultivated and wild, the roses and red-hot pokers giving way to wind-sculpted clumps of sea kale and gorse. In this way it makes visible one of the most interesting aspects of gardens: that they exist on the threshold between artifice and nature, conscious decision and wild happenstance.”
Ben Balcom’s The Phalanx is a project deeply (and movingly) imbricated in “conscious decision and wild happenstance.” The film explores the former site of Ceresco, a 19th-century agrarian commune in Ripon, Wisconsin that promised the possibility of collective living without hierarchy. Through both archival research and ludic scenes of reenactments, Balcom’s film, like Fowler’s, is a portrait of a place and the ghosts who linger there. Shadows of a window frame lattice wooden floorboards. A woman washes dishes before a wall of exposed brick. History is as much in the old wallpaper as it is in the social politics of governing bodies. Due to Balcom’s framing, each actor remains faceless and unknown. Such anonymity collapses the past with the present, as the actors drift like specters through empty rooms, aimless, almost as if lost in both space and time.
In the opening, a handheld camera walks through an overgrown field, luminously lit from the setting sun. Already the dream of an egalitarian community has ended. We’re left with the agricultural and architectural remains. Due to The Phalanx’s positioning near the end of the first program in Illuminations, the film itself becomes almost ghostly and liminal, straddling all that has come before, and all that is yet to come. The garden is gone. Now what? Where can we go from here?
In the final film of Illuminations, Full Out (pictured above), Sarah Ballard offers one potential answer with her own elegant and phenomenological exploration of ghosts from the past. Partially filmed at the Salpêtrière Hospital, Ballard’s film teases out the ablative relationship between patriarchy and psychiatry in the 19th century. It was here where doctors hypnotized their patients to replicate the symptoms of hysteria as a kind of theater and source of medical diagnosis. But Ballard is uninterested in the empirical knowledge instated by the medical industry. Rather, Full Out illuminates mass hysteria as an affective phenomenon that proliferates among young women precisely because of the aforementioned institutions that provide them with no other options to voice (or embody) their eroticism—and social discontents. As Peters’ states elsewhere in The Marvelous Clouds, “We are conditioned by the conditions we condition.”
In an increasingly uninhabitable world (whether due to climate change, ongoing global genocides, the rise of oligarchies, etc.), the body, as John Durham Peters’ writes, “is the most basic of all media,” as well as the instrument through which we make sense of the vagaries of the world. When our institutions fail us, we must return to our bodies as the site from which all perception and meaning making begins. Ergo, in Ballard’s final sequence, cheerleaders twirl in midair like samaras. A flurry of hands reach to catch the falling bodies of their peers. These girls possess great physical prowess as well as innate affective potential—mysteriously, like their foremothers, they transmit invisible frequencies that cause them to faint en masse.
For Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, the body is a site of joy in Chelsea Drive (2025) where Black college students at the University of Virginia commune and dance. Close-ups on various young students’ faces offer a panoply of portraits as we bear witness to their unfettered freedom of movement and play. In Helena Wittmann’s A Thousand Waves Away (2025), an array of actors explore a public park. One plucks azalea petals and scatters them in a stream. Another sits in a patch of Devil’s club laced with ferns. One gently grasps a pinecone in their palm. Throughout these scenes, an electronic soundtrack pulses, increasing in volume, as if a single harmonic heartbeat sonically synching each body into one beating unit. In Maximilien Luc Proctor’s much more understated silent film Aotearoa (2024), in-camera superimpositions layer images of the beach in Matapōuri over a reposing hand. The lack of soundtrack imbues each frame with a hushed wonder. The water churns in a scintillating froth of grainy silvers and blues.
So our hands extend, like our cameras, touching sun-dappled waves or wild flowers which, in turn, touch us. “Brilliant sunshine,” Derek Jarman writes in his diary Modern Nature, “skies so clear your vision is stretched to the horizon.” For Jarman, the air is a canvas — as is the screen. A current ripples across both surfaces, light transmuting into feeling, feeling transmuting into light. So we have found the forest as we enter into a new kind of nature. The earth bristles in anticipation. The projector stutters, and turns.