2033 – The Spine of Night (2021 animation)

timespace coordinates: an imaginary mythical time on a violent forlorn planet, not very unlike our own.

“The Spine of Night is a 2021 adult animated dark fantasy horror film written and directed by Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King.^[1] It stars Richard E. Grant, Lucy Lawless, Patton Oswalt, Betty Gabriel, and Joe Manganiello.

The film was completed using rotoscoped animation, and traces the centuries long journey of a magical plant that bestows terrible power upon the user, as it inspires despots, empires, and black magic.” (wiki)

This has to be one of the highlights of animation in recent years – but not if one dreams for a more peaceful, pacifist or a non-violent (better) world. Ripping hearts out, dissolving meat off the bones, cutting people in half or dismemberment – a recurrent and very common characteristic of Spine of the Night. Lots of eerie blue phosphorescent flowers and lots of gaping skulls projected on starry skies. Heroic fantasy or sword & sorcery (especially the work of REH/R.E. Howard) was big bang moment for me and it was always pretty bloody and tactless. Altough, I must say it came with its own culturally specific ‘mirth’ – for these imaginary worlds were concocted by REH, and distributed by (Marvel) comics before the books came around (few of those in my collection too). Worlds I briefly inhabited got poached from smuggled comic books (Savage Sword of Conan, King Conan, Conan the Barbarian) arriving in ‘aid packages’ from my aunt in the US across the Iron Curtain to a kid in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Conan the Barbarian and King Kull of Valusia happen to overlap with my 1980s high school surroundings or my sporadic countryside haunts. Below the Carpathian mountains, around Prahova County, a wild distant hilly forested area, that I entered only much later was just behind the village of my childhood summer vacations. Let’s get this straight I wasn’t a country side kid, more of a city bookworm/documentary geek. Altough from that moment on the hills of Prahova became the realm of Cimmeria – the mythical land of Conan, a place based on a vague Black Sea region during the Greek antiquity.

“CIMMERIA (cca 1932)

by REH

I remember
The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;
The grey clouds’ leaden everlasting arch;
The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,
And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.

Vista upon vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista–hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.

It was a gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are like shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills, To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,

How many deaths shall serve to break at last

This heritage which wraps me in the grey Apparel of ghosts?  I search my heart and find Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night”

The gravel on top of the gymnastics/sports hall next to my Bucharest school was strewn with small bones of dead animals. This made a perfect substrate for our Hyborian immersion. To that place where nobody could follow us, we arrived climbing up on a creaky rusty metal ladder – and in the distance we started seeing the rooftops shapes and church towers that would transform into temples of Mitra…

Conan, King Kull, Valeria, Thulsa Doom, Red Sonja (Brigitte Nielsen), Grace Jones playing Zula (all pulled from a growing comic book pantheon enlarged by Roy Thomas & Barry-Windsor Smith and others) ended up bringing havoc to an old and corrupt world, swept by sinister cults and pre-human civilisations with walled crumbling cities. These were all heroines and heroes that made civilized life into a sham, never adopting the mores for civilized men and women for long. All thieves, all brigands, tomb raiders, all hailing from the borderlands, the steppes and the forests, all former slaves, orphans or members of a barbarian hinterland that got raided as labor force pool or got sacrificed in the name of unknown gods or blood-thirsty cults. A pean to a neo- barbarian ethos born out of modern Fantasy that did not exist outside the invented Hyborian Age conjured up by that suicidal pulp fiction-writing Texan obsessed with physical culture called Robert E. Howard. There is much to be critical about it now – including a certain Social Darwinist bent – and a kind of might is right. At the same time there’s a sort of materialist common sense attitude of swords that make Gods or tyrants bleed, of sorcery or supernatural or Lovecraftian entities that are not invincible. So there’s always the risk of maybe too much sword and too little sorcery. On the scala of toxic masculinity many abcelebrated Frank Frazetta cover would score pretty high and come across as just reinforcing gender stereotypes, seemingly promoting those undultared, manly, virile, battle-scarred bodies forged in cosmic foundries – at the time of great changes of Fordism labor rights struggles and post-Fordist malaise. Those sweaty – sword wielding (working man) recently unemployed bodies that are so easy to ridicule in movies, as in the recent lumberjack character played with gusto by Nicholas Cage in Mandy. Work and virility was somehow on the go – labor was not only outsourced to a feminized Asia, but the whole regime of formerly unwaged labour, care work included more and more men – a feminization of work that started seeping into what had been once a working class industrial preserve.

Even with the heroic fantasy glorification of berserk battles, heavy metal/doom metal soundtrack & general mayhem, let’s also consider Conan the Barbarian mostly a kind of modern scavenger, a sort of Spartacus outsider that never accepted a warrior lifestyle and that was forced into it. From his initial peaceful village life Conan (in one account) was taken prisoner with other children, was pushed and had to adopt a slave – warrior livelihood, not because he was born into it. Conan used all his anger to mostly strike down civilized lords, power hungry priests and cruel rulers.

Now to this recent animation and how it departs from previous models even if stylistically has much in common with a whole genre of pulp. First in the Conan comics there’s is a certain class and even racial division amongst these pulp savages and barbarians. This is a recognizable colonial (Euro-American) separation of good barbarians vs bad barbarians – even in Conan THE Barbarian. There is the ‘noble savage’ and the rest, an Enlightment era division that has brought much misery and death to countless living native indigenous peoples. So in the comics there is “the Cimmerians” and there is “the Picts” of the Pictish Wilderland (usually a swamp or a jungle rainforest) as par of an extended REH universe. Classified as ‘primitive’, truly vicious they are almost like living examples of Darwinian evolutionary atavism. They are the remains of pulp racist pseudo science, representatives of the irrational primitive archetype, described in dehumanizing terms, as an animal-like – superstitious horde. I think The Spine of Night – even if at the surface tributary to REH universe does a benefic move towards foregrounding these reclusive swamp ‘savages’, their cause, the quest not of warriors or swordsmen but of witches, of pantheist and animist rituals. It also makes explicit the predatory relation of much of these civilisations & cities on this sparsely populated, un-cultivated, yet fertile hinterland. This I consider quite a big departure that puts to shame simplistic pulp comic divisions with a colonial inheritance. The Swamp is finally not a place of unnamed horrors like in Conan the Barbarian, but a place of various forms of life and where a very powerful plant thrives, a plant that is part of the ethno-botanical lore of these human groups. The horror is most likely to arrive with new intrusions, clearings, enclosures and with militaristic ecocidal ideology of brutal conquerors and their henchmen. I sense there’s a possible Bachofenian critique of patriarchy as a historical process, the arrival of a patriarchal order that took pride in treating both nature and women with the same brutality & rapacity. There’s also no passivity here – the swamp people don’t just dissappear and the witch is always coming back and ready to counter the worst of them.

Beside the knowledge vs power narrative there is something else in the Spine of Night – a way in which the great Swamp – is the first to disappear or to fall victim to the empires or to fires, and expansive drives for domination.

Another thing is the dependency of civilization, of the mighty on someone else, even on rare irretrievably lost knowledge, or on something that is non-human (or pre-human) or not recognized any longer as human. Rulers are always dependent on inhuman energies and entities. Or even better – in all their might they show a dependence and encourage the exploitation of a complex – nexus of other humans, their lore and practices and plants (magic flower) & biodiverse environments (swamp, wetlands, marshes). There is no development or spells or even warfare without these (one might recall here Londa S. studies of abortificient plants known to indigenous peoples as well as slaves) ‘political plants’ that are an integral lore of these swamp people in The Spine of Night.

It is the first epic time the actual heroine is a swamp witch, her quest is not the quest of the mercenary barbarian but of a revived cosmic witch queen that makes the last stand against a technologically- empowered, resource-hungry, and knowledge thirsty imperial power represented by a man, a former scholar. I am not going into details – and I think the images telling the mythical story of this bloody world are pretty telling because they include the killing of the gods in its cosmogony.

Knowledge or – ancient libraries and scholars are not all evil and corrupt, there is actually a few idealists left and a few dedicated to saving the plebs outside the gate. Yet it is clear that this kind of disdain combined with hoarding of knowledge in search of power brings only doom & destruction. There is also a knowledge that is non-literary, transmitted by oral cultures, what we might call oral/aural culture – so-called illiterate knowledge, one that does not get recorded so easily in the pages of grimoires. Besides the pungent mythical undertones in Spine of the Night – there is also the sense that a lot of specialized, ‘written’ knowledge is definitely growing in complete disregard for its human (humanistic) usage.

Apart of all these brief notes – the Spine of Night animation conveys the best cosmic dark epic doom entertainment since Ralph Bakshi’s collaboration with Frank Frazetta – on Ice and Fire, the 1983 dark epic fantasy rotoscoping masterpiece. Yet, I repeat I do not consider it a mere piece of geek nostalgia per se – but a powerful new and welcome turn of an old animation technique (to be enjoyed and practiced). Visually it is not so much – like a lot of recent animation – one technique, but a kaleidoscope of techniques and technologies both digital & analog, hand-drawn & CGI, combining ‘realist’ rotoscoping style with abstract – dark silhouettes with blazing eyes and patches of ‘bioluminescent’ parafernalia (like characters in the cosmogonic/Titanomachy scenes). Instead of just images of decay, or constant dissolution of forms – animation in Spine of Night is mostly about metamorphoses (like Levitt puts it in her Animatic Apparatus), morphing and melting the boundaries of usual anthropomorphic – figurative shapes. The background art is very effective and stands on its own even without the action – because all the environmental elements are unstable, lines tremble, the sky/cosmos constantly is prone to paraeidolia – skulls get distended & extended into galaxies. One could say in the Titanomachy – god killing scenes, what we see is a cosmogony of the animation process itself, the unseen acts (techniques, technologies, rotoscoping etc) enacting the ani-motion principle, “the artificing of man” (Cholodenko) – the dreams of silent creators, lively nightmarish creations that overtake and revert the roles, rob their creators special effects & take on a life of their own.

imdb

2032 – The Green Planet BBC (documentary 2022)

timespace coordinates: I feel like we can speak as of 2022 about multi-temporal documentary making, especially regarding the lives of plants. Basically a camera shot that can fly in and out at many different temporal scales, induces the feeling of moving around microscopic objects and records microscopic movements imperceptible (to humans) at 3 years intervals (the saguaro cactus ridges extending during eet seasons for example).

Nature documentaries have been transforming and evolving their own technologies in order to track a changing evolving world – engaging and mediating the width and thickness of NOW. These documentaries are not just simply recordings of what’s out there – of some external reality. New visualization technologies, rigs and post production is developed in conjunction with gene editing (CRISPR) so that we can watch under UV light how a transgenic tobacco flares up, becoming “aware” (in the words of D. Attenborough) of an outside attack simulated by a pair of scissors ‘nibbling’ on its leaves. We can see it how a plant ‘anticipates’ or speculates about – further attacks and warns other distant parts indirectly affected. Because such newly mastered gene splitting technologies acquired from bacteria/bacteriophage co-evolution, one can insert genes from a distantly related phylum, a bioluminescent animal – a jellyfish probably into a plant. We can trace out a distress signal circulating inside the leaves of the plant in a laboratory setting. Such fluorescence markers dramatize how similar nerve endings and nervous systems are to vascular plant systems and how a signal can be carried and used as an early warning system in case of predator attack (caterpillar). The inner lives of plants are made visible akin to brain scan imagery – we don’t know what it is like to be a tobacco under attack, or how it prepares a chemical protection strategy, but we can watch and imagine life in a multi-processual way, a life not defined just by nervous systems.

It is only recently that one could track an interior activity that is completly below our radar – even if most of our ‘normal’ experience of breathing, walking, car driving lies at the same threshold of un-cognized activity. This is not just capturing the vector movement of a single plant or vine climbing, a plant activity noted by many observant naturalists in nature or a subject of process philosophy (Bergson, Whitehead), but a bundling of vectorial movements, of tropisms.

Take the example of plants moving and growing in the search of light(phototropism). We do not have here just the level of the leaf or vine, but of the parts inside the single cell (Chroloplasts) of one such leaf. There’s constant molecular activity, all under quantum mechanics rules – that powers up the cell during photosynthesis. This is mostly invisible activity. Most such energy harvesting by Chroloplasts is invisible, imperceptible. Such technologically mediated perception of invisible vector activities and micro-‘societies’ all happening simultaneously inside a plant is portrayed as a grandiose unseen choreography, jumping from level to level or switching scales.

The Green Planet encourages us to be a witness from our couch of the synchronous bloom (filmed with a drone) not only of two-winged flying seeds of gigantic Dipterocarpacae trees in Malayan archipelago (forests with the tallest angiosperms in the world), but also follow the migration of tiny Chloroplasts herds inside a single plant cell towards the light source. This involves making visible the cellular movements typical of daily photosynthesi, hidden movements that subtend all other movements (animal metabolism) and permit most primary biomass to multiply and replicate on Earth. It is important and a bit scary to imagine this biomass (80%) as active, sentient and not indifferent to what is happening all around and even chemically and termodynamically involved. This invisible world also includes the movement of life-sustaining gases and humidity that pass trough invisible mouth-like structures, the result of an invisible “breathing process”, of countless closing and opening stomata on a single leaf surface, on every leaf, all over the world each day.

For this to be possible, there is a combination of live field recordings (from the Pantanal – the world’s largest tropical wetland area) and filming inside a careful reconstruction of the Pantanal watery ecosystem. This reconstructed ecosystem (a large aquarium basically) in a small corner of Devon UK is place where the largest water lily Victoria amazonica traveled from the Kew Gardens in the hope it would play its part. That is why you have to watch at the end of every eps of The Green Planet HOW it was done. Lots of things came together from new lenses to skills aquired during competition drone piloting (First Person View drones, also called Stunt or Racing Drones). This does not dispell the magic of the series – but makes it even more graspable and adds matter to our imagination, fills in the gaps with the missing time that got edited out and that joint effort that went into it.

What a monstrous and prickly lilypad – to emerge and spring out of this Devon garage pool under the lense of photographer Tim Shepherd wading the depths of his small hot spring!

in a corner of Devon

More horrific in its way than all the natural horror movies – because its claims of staunch evolutionary storytelling of a “Tyrant” takes shape front of you. But hey, let’s not forget that it is also about sensitivity of such a huge aquatic plant that needs all extra care, the perfect conditions, artificial warmth and nurture – in order to perform. To see it in action, one needs the helping hand of many and lots and lots of kg of compost to be drowned regularly in order to match all the fertilizers of a South American river.

The water lily is a “Tyrant” only under these specific and unstable temporary conditions. So this is what it takes to be able to entice it to grow, emerge and rotate like a lasso under the eye of the cameras. It is also a fairly (pardon the pun) willful plant with a mind-of-its-own, that is never there for us or to satisfies our curiosity or the calibrated expection of the camera eye. It goes down into its depth and only unfurls at its own pace.

remote controlled filming and swooping along branches and rainforest terrain like never before

Also (for me) there is this important idea that the water lily only takes over at the end of a temporal-seasonal sequence. It closes down an ecological cycle of sorts, but is not at all there from the very start. There is a before and after. It needs particular conditions and before these conditions are met, there are other goings on happening. Some ‘winner’ plant is never there from the beginning or center of attention, and it might feel like it is always there. There is a set of events and various actors. This ecological succesion becomes visible in the Green Planet documentary because we can follow various species each having their own moment and strange mobility techniques, each its (Andy Warholas) ‘5 minutes’ of glory, each (buyoant water hyacinth and others) having a go at the sun rays in a situation of almost preemptive growth and resplandance as if anticipanting the coming of the waterlily giant.

The universe felt like a small and unchanging place even a few generations ago. There was only the Milky Way (still a huge place) rotating above, but no myriad galaxies in an ever-more rapidly expanding, all part of red-shifting spacetime continuum. On Earth there are all these unseen movments and animated sequences – all dramatized and as much part of what Deborah Levitt calls The Animatic Apparatus. We have to see these documentaries as part of a bigger continuum that comprises post-continuity cinema as well as a specific time of the 3D CGi effects world where one can watch rivers of leaves cut by leaf-cutter ants or think about the deep time history of patch of seagrass, that is basically one organism derived from a 80.000-200.000 year old clone.

What seemed like the domain of science fiction and materialist aesthetics – is now a living example of the history of science visualisation: a move away from the stained tissues, ‘dead’ 19th century outlook of wet collections, taxidermy and type specimens towards a dynamic and dramatized feature of life under various modified lenses, microcinematography, time-lapse camera, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) – under diverse set of laboratory and field conditions. This animating and dynamic recording characterizes what Hannah Landecker has termed the new “molecular vitalism”. This vitalism is not concerned with identifying the old Bergsonian élan vital, the vain search for an invisible lifeforce or one single majestic structure but with tracing, tracking with the aid of moving, living images the very activities that have escaped us. This time-based medium went from recording the machinations of the gene replicators but finished registering the protean proteinic 3D movability of these microscopic happenings, a window into their (ceasless) molecular activities.

All this existed till now, including the Scanning Electron Microscopy – yet it was still too static, too one-dimensional and static. This is why in 2022 and for The Green Planet BBC has hired an expert (Stefan Diller) that used a custom-made 8-axes electron microscope to ‘fly trough’ like a drone in a shot that can track around a mushroom spore, one thirtieth the width of a human hair. New light microsocopy techniques subtend this ‘indepedent’ imaginary flight around such plant microscopic worlds – with impossible clarity and depth by “holding focus all the way while also moving around the subject. “

electron microscope with 8 axes to be able to fly around tiny subjects

There has been a constant effort to make visibile the hidden life of plants available to the human sensorium. Plants are the most obvious yet the most ellusive of beings (of course if we ignore mushrooms). With their slow movements and apparent immobility, plants have been tricking us. It is as if they played dead-alive all this time, fooling us with their organic-anorganic liminal positions, mimicking their surrounding so well that so as not to attract undue attention. Plants do remember our touch and communicate with pheromones or using the mushroom enabled wood wide web. This is all very late observation, since they existed well before human minds or cameras eyes started following their secretive lives. They are waving in the wind or in the water following currents we have never been adapt at following. Already Charles Darwin become intersted in the way plants move, or how to record the speed of transformations that do not happen at human scale. The “view from nowhere” – or that unwated scientific attention made it certain that so much espaced our attention and perception. There is this entire realm of happenings and performativity of (especially) plant behaviour that makes them agents, forces and powers on their own terms. Darwin’s empirical experiments concering the movement and behaviour of carnivorous plants or the steady growth of humus via accumulated worm casting investigated such changes.

This apparent stillness and passivity (in comparision with animals) is something that David Attenborough BBC documentaries strived to demistfy or debunk since 1995’s The Private Life of Plants. The private life is not private at all, and has become very public. This new dynamism of the botanical world has since become public knowledge. Therefore during COVID years we the social animals are staying cooped up in our private homes, more immobile than usual, and more boring than usual while plants are being plants – taking animatedness and mobility as their own. Flights are going down and so they should in an era that realized how much global tourism is adding to the overall pollution. If you get bored with animal docus – you always have plants (said one commenter on YT). So The Green Planet is (also) about facilitating an impossible flying perspective, something typical to digital CGI effects to enliven, intensify a more and more (bored) ‘vegetating’ animal life with shorter attention spans. While the temporality of climate change is non-linear we still continue to hang onto a linear clock-time of calender COP26 deadlines. It is instructive to see this in contrast with the dramatized heightened attention and sensitivity necessary in order to percieve and experience such larger webs of invisible interaction and interdepedence.

2029 – Green Animal/La vie secrète des plantes (2015 documentary series)

South Korean nature documentary directed by Seung-woo Son 

“With 4K UHD quality, EBS Docuprime ‘Green Animal’ is a documentary of plants’ life stories by looking for wonderful plants on the Earth by visiting five major oceans and six major continents for about two years. It shows nature’s beautiful scenes with a secret of primal, and illuminates plants that were discounted as static existences with a new point of view. It follows plants’ lives with the actor Sung-hwa Jung’s narration.

As plants cannot move, they couldn’t choose good land by themselves. The program reveals plants’ dynamic movements and strategies for survival and their unimaginable life stories. It lively describes images of plants moving for survival by fair means or foul through interval filming, micrography, and electron microscope. With a high-speed camera, it also captured even a hundredth of a second movement created by plants.” (here is more about the documentary from the press conference launch)

Here is a French/ARTE version of it in three parts: