"Black Pond" dir. by Sarah Jessica Rinland (2018)

I have been thinking about Sarah Jessica Rinland's dreamlike 42-minute film chronicling the activity of the Elmbridge Natural History Society for six years (first watched it in the depths of pandemic isolation). It is a document of interaction: backs walking down paths, hands gentling bats and moths and insects (sometimes tucked into old cassette cases) for species checks and counts, the measurement of trees, the finding of mushrooms. They are caretakers for an ancient piece of common ground once claimed by the Diggers, 17th-century dissidents who believed the land belonged to all and that all were equal. It's essentially like watching a poem.

I haven't found much written about it, but here is a fragment of an essay written by José Sarmiento Hinojosa:

"The patient activity of measuring, recollection, analysis, cohabitation with the natural world by this group of people seems to be a vital impulse driven by the necessity of documentation, of engraving this particular moment in existence of the planet, on carefully written notes, books on flowers, maps, measuring tapes and test tubes. It’s a communal work of trying to keep a snapshot of a particular era, in a particular land where nature is free to dwell on its own. Humanity is in symbiosis with its surroundings, and the open wings of a moth rest in the open hand of its researcher, as if his body was an extension of the landscape; another cut down tree, or another boulder, maybe. This common effort is a testimony in itself, but combined with the oral narration of the film, it becomes a double strategy ... language is also the protagonist of the movie itself, rendering its condition of documentary in 16mm to a different piece of moving image akin to a pulsing metaphor ... a call to arms of sorts, the necessity of listening with our own eyes to achieve a further understanding."

The image here is a still from the film captured in a companion book, The Society.