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Five years in the making, Ed Sayers’ feature debut brings together 40 people across 25 countries, each armed with a Super 8 camera to film the natural world on their doorstep. The result is like a lo-fi remix of Godfrey Reggio’s epic Koyaanisqatsi – both a celebration of nature and environmental omen, albeit minus the tribal warbling.
Thanks to those goliath, bombastic BBC productions, nowadays we consume nature as a hyperreal hi-def event, so obsessed with spectacle there’s little space for reflection. There’s no to-the-death battles here or exotic mating rituals. Accompanied by Alexandra Hamilton-Ayres’s spectral score, this is nature, up close and often very personal.
The spark for Sayers’ experiment was French filmmaker Roger Batteault, whose footage of flamingos included an eerie shot of a lone bird flying to catch up with the flock, like a broken spear gliding through a wide expanse of sky. Inspiring him to film grey seals near his Norfolk home, Sayers rallied a community of Super 8 enthusiasts and conservationists to share the world around them.
The sheer variety of life is astounding. We see octopus in Patagonia; silkworms in London; water buffalo in Assam; reindeer in the Arctic Circle; fin whales in Thailand; rattlesnakes in the Mojave Desert; the puffins of Skomer Island in Wales… Inevitably, man’s impact crashes the party with footage of glaciers reduced to puddles, Kenya’s two last surviving northern white rhinos and a haunting vignette in the sunken human sculpture park off the coast of Grenada. The installation was created as a home for marine life after Hurricane Ivan wrecked the reefs. Now those crumbling figures are acidifying in a slowly warming ocean.
This is nature, up close and often very personal
Given the film cartridges are limited to two minutes and unable to capture sound, why shoot on Super 8? Even for those who weren’t born during its ‘70s heyday, the flutter and jerk of Super 8 instantly evokes nostalgia. In a sense, the format is the message. Super Nature feels like it was shot in another era, and there lies the warning. The natural world is alive and very present. Let’s not make it a memory.
At times, Sayers’ voice-over is a little new age-y and on-the-nose (‘When we get close to nature, we discover a feeling deep within us’), but he’s edited the footage with great sensitivity and purpose. If, as the Gaia theory claims, our planet is a single self-regulating organism, Sayers makes a convincing case for reconnection through the simple act of observation.
Admittedly, it seems odd to recommend Super Nature as a big screen experience given its boxy aspect ratio, but its magic deserves to be shared with an audience. The film is touring London cinemas before going nationwide. Catch it while you can.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Sep 4.