EXPANDED NATURE SERIES AT THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY

In the presence of Elio Della Noce and Anne Simon, director of research in literature at the CNRS, initiator of research in "zoopoetics."

This first screening is based on our most familiar experience of animal worlds. Cats and dogs, cows and horses get to know humans in an intimate relationship whose origin is the gaze. Through the decentered camera of experimental filmmakers, we discover what our pets see: shadows and reflections, the texture and granularity of objects, wild desires and memories, contained feelings and dreams, turning us towards the richness and depth of an "animal being." These films are as much "filmed diaries" by the filmmakers in their close and socio-natural environment: starting in their apartment, the park where a filmmaker brings their dog to play, their confrontation with a cow ruminating in the field, their exchange with two crows nesting in front of the window, all the way to the fortuitous encounter with a doe at the edge of the farm. To see the animal is not - a game of cat and mouse - to be seen by it?

Free admission subject to availability (reservations recommended on this link). Doors open at 2:45 pm.

In the presence of Elio Della Noce and Benoît Grison, biologist and sociologist of science, specialist in behavioral neuroscience, ethnozoology and epistemology of life sciences.

After having explored the intimacy of the gaze of familiar animals, the filmmakers turn here to the complexity of insect perception. Experimental cinema and its "synaesthetic" tendency offer the opportunity to play with a vast perceptive repertoire: shooting devices (homemade pinhole cameras, magnifying glasses), "camera-less" animation techniques (silver collages, "phytography"), environmental sound recordings, etc. This set of techniques conceived by the filmmakers touches on the wide perceptive field of insects and expresses their strange way of creating a compound of the living. These films thus translate, through their own craft, the frequencies, shapes and colors of images perceived by a bee, the electromagnetic radiation captured by the oculars of a caterpillar, the photoluminescence of fireflies and the dream cosmology of a moth. Of special note, Karel Doing's The Mulch Spider’s Dream (2018) breaks out of the exclusive reign of insects and opens up to the molecular perception of a "mulch spider."

Free admission subject to availability (reservations recommended on this link). Doors open at 2:45 pm.

In the presence of Elio Della Noce and Emmanuel Lefrant.

For this third and last screening, we will leave the animal world and turn to the sentience of plants. From the seed, the petiole, the petals and the leaves, how do filmmakers disseminate this "plant intelligence" that is embodied in a variety of perceptive senses? For this, experimental cinema offers surprising correspondences between the biochemical processes of the plant and the technical processes of film medium. From the photosynthesis of a leaf to the "phytogram" that prints it in negative on celluloid, from the "collage-herbarium" to the in-camera animation techniques of "cinematographic bouquets," from the "photograms" of petals to the photosynthetic properties that preside over the perception of their colors. This program calls for a meditation on our interrelation with plants, while trying not to offend their sensibilities!

Free admission subject to availability (reservations recommended on this link). Doors open at 2:45 pm.