Around the world, we see filmmakers chasing gorillas, reindeer, kangaroos, butterflies, snakes and dolphins across glorious rainforests, Arctic tundras, and scorched deserts, clutching their Super 8 film cameras as they patiently wait for the perfect moment to expend their limited film stock. Meanwhile, filmmaker Ed Sayers stalks snails in the small green spaces around his London home and notices little eyes on the end of their antennas that he’d never noticed before.
Sayers is the creator of the Straight 8 film challenge, a celebration of super 8mm film and all the spontaneity, chaos, and charm that comes with the format. With Super Nature, he once again honours his beloved film stock by sending cameras around the world, urging contributors to film scenes of nature however and wherever they can. He also invited them to record their thoughts about the process and their relationship with the natural world, all woven together through Sayers’ guiding voiceover.
That voiceover lays out the method and intent of the film quite plainly at the outset, circling back again at the end to surmise and conclude. Some viewers might wish for something more purely expressive from such a film, perhaps an unnarrated montage film where the images are joined only by a score or just the simple whir of the projector. But the narration, both from Sayers and the participants, is uniquely affecting. They speak candidly about their connection to nature and how this process has challenged or reinforced their practices when it comes to preservation, restoration or simply being present.
If there is sentimentality in the opening and closing narration, it feels like Sayers extending a hand to the audience, welcoming perhaps those who are yet to be converted to the beautiful texture and warmth of film as a format. Shooting on film was once standard practice, and the 8mm format made the medium accessible to amateurs. Since digital became de rigueur, film has gained a kind of reverence precisely because of its cost in terms of money, time and technique. With Super Nature, as with Straight 8, Sayers earnestly invites the audience, including the filmmakers among them, to reconsider analogue filmmaking and the possibilities it still offers. These are beautiful images but they aren’t to be confined to art spaces. They belong to everyone and you can capture your natural world in this format too. It just takes patience.
In this sense, the film is a sublime marriage of subject and form. The process is so time-consuming and deliberate that the filmmakers’ reflections on capturing their subjects prompt us to consider the habits and rhythms of the animals themselves. The filmmakers are forced to mirror the natural rhythms of their subjects. The textured grain of the film is nostalgic and evocative of a slower pace of life. We are invited to consider not only the reality being captured, but the means of capturing it, and our own role as viewers. How far is the nearest green space from the screen you’re watching? And when was the last time you paused long enough to notice the nature within it? This is film as a hyper-mediated artform; a deceptively simple premise that explores the act of capture and viewing.
Naturally, so to speak, Super Nature celebrates biodiversity and the breadth of experience across Sayers’s global network of filmmakers. Every sequence is an exhilarating trip to a new biome, not to mention a new filmmaking style care of Sayers’ desperate collaborators. There is a powerful sense of connection and restoration from every participant; a reminder of the vital relationship between people and the environment, without neglecting humanity’s place within the animal kingdom. The human beings holding the cameras are just a part of the landscape and the environment as the animals they pursue. It’s a powerful environmentalist message about humanities inseverable relationship with the natural world.
Super Nature is, above all, an invitation: to reconsider your assumptions about Super 8 film as a medium, about the kinds of stories it can tell and who might tell them, and about your own relationship with the natural world. It’s about the animals and the cameras and the people behind those cameras.
Five Stars