When asked by a director for an authentic-looking location in which to film, early twentieth century American film producer Abe Stern (co-founder of Universal Studios) responded: “A rock is a rock, and a tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park!” (the park was a 10 minute drive from the studio). See King Vidor, A Tree is a Tree (Hollywood, CA: S. French, 1989). Ronald Reagan, as governor of California (after a career in Hollywood), is also said to have remarked: “A tree’s a tree. How many more {redwoods} do you need to look at? If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.’ See Martin H. Kriefer, “What’s Wrong with Plastic Trees?” Science 179, no. 4072, 1973.
Michael Marder, “For a Phytocentrism to Come” Environmental Philosophy 11, no. 2 (Fall 2014), 244. The word “radical” comes from Latin radicalis "of or having roots," from Latin radix (genitive radicis) “root.” To be radical is ultimately to be vegetal.
Recent publications in response to the “vegetal turn” are rapidly expanding thinking on the relations between cinema and plant life. See Sarah Cooper, “Introduction: Thinking Cinema—With Plants,” Philosophies 8, 20 (2023); Teresa Castro, “The Mediated Plant,” e-flux Journal 102, (September 2019).
Plant awareness disparity (PAD) describes the cognitive bias or tendency to ignore plant life in one’s environment—a widespread and problematic phenomena that entrenches anthropocentric or zoocentric worldviews in research and society. I avoid the more ubiquitous term “plant blindness” given the ableism associated with it as a disability metaphor. See Kathryn M. Parsley, “Plant awareness disparity: A case for renaming plant blindness,” Plants, People, Planet 2, Issue 6 (2020): 598-601.
After decamping to England in 1969, Kubrick rarely flew anywhere (ostensibly as a result of a fear of flying), so the majority of his films had to be shot in the UK. It meant that for Kubrick the problem of needing certain UK locations to stand in for other places regularly reappeared. During pre-production for Eyes Wide Shut (1999), significant work was undertaken to find streets in London that would serve as convincing imposters of New York City (Commercial Road in East London, for example, was photographically surveyed in extensive detail).
Marder, 436.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947); Marder, 12.
Antónia Szabari and Natania Meeker, Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 26. Plants occupy a place on screen which is not “perfectly and precisely clear;” their meanings are hidden, obscured, not expressed within the films themselves. The pro-filmic event (containing plants) engendered by the camera can often only be understood through the analysis of extra-textual information (plans, written accounts etc.). To understand plants on film, we do, pace British film critic Victor Perkins, have to “attempt to clarify what the picture has obscured.” See Victor F. Perkins, “Must we say what they mean,” Movie 34 (Oct. 1990).
See Robert Ito, “It’s Not Easy Being Greenspeople,” New York Times, June 29, 2021.
“It is hardly too much to say that the Green {People} of {Hollywood} have produced, or are {now} rapidly creating, a new and most interesting American art form.” C. H. Larmore, “Gambol on the Green,” New York Times, December 29, 1940.
“Landscapes From The Screen,” Landscape Architecture Magazine 27, no. 3 (April, 1937): 146.
Barbara Baker, Let the Credits Roll: Interviews with Film Crew (McFarland & Company, 2004): 192.
Siegfried Kracauer, “Calico-World: The UFA City in Neubabelsberg,” The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, edited and translated by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 285.
Jin Veltruský, “Man and Object in the Theater,” A Prague School Reader in Esthetics, Literary Structure, and Style translated by Paul L. Garvin (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1964), 90.
Ibid., 88.
Ibid., 91. See also Andrew Sofer, The Stage Life of Props (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
Stanley Cavell, Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1984), 173-174.
Film sets have historically been fertile spaces for material reuse. They are environments that anticipate the future use/life of objects, where “nothing is meant to last; the most grandiose creation is built with an eye to its demolition.” Kracauer, 283. See Aude-Line Duliere, “The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Stories on Dismantling and Reuse,” Wheelwright Prize Lecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, accessed April 14, 2023, ➝. Although it is precisely this material ingenuity that others have disparaged: “High on the list of irritating services are the purveyors of artificial foliage to the theatre. They subscribe to the limited view that nature is stamped out of old window shades.” Howard Bay, Stage Design (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1974), 124.
Raymond Malewitz, The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 4-7.
A tree from the Warner Bros. Ranch which dozens of sets were built around (the last for the 1938 film Jezebel) was lost in a storm in 1938. See “Oft-Filmed Tree is Gone; Hollywood Oak, in Many Love Scenes, Is Blown Down,” New York Times, March 27, 1938. Also the “Witness Tree” at Paramount Ranch, which burnt down in the 2018 Woolsey Fire. See “Paramount Ranch’s majestic Witness Tree to be cut down, a victim of Woolsey fire,” Los Angeles Times, February 8, 2020.
H. Hopper, “Hollywood Sets Would Fool Mother Nature,” Los Angeles Times, November 26, 1939.
Kracauer, 281. What makes prop trees notable in this regard is that they are traditionally made from timber in multiple different guises (which is what makes them “double” agents): sawn wood, paper, even plastic, for ‘what are fossil fuels and plastics but the petrified bodies of once-living photosynthetic creatures.’ See Natasha Myers, “Photosynthesis,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, January 21, 2016. See ➝.
Hopper.
Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 43.
Bill Brown, “How to Do Things with Things (A Toy Story),” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 4 (1998): 964.
Ito.
A phenomenon familiar to anybody who has seen Salomé Jashi’s devastating documentary Taming the Garden (2021). As Toby Kiers reminds us, “for hundreds of years, these ancient trees have been cultivating their unique underground ecosystems, including vast fungal networks supporting the tree since it was a tiny sapling… When a tree is uprooted, that life support system gets ripped from the soil, leaving behind a barren wasteland.” Ivan Nechepurenko, “A Love of Trees or a Display of Power? The Odd Park of an Oligarch,” New York Times, January 17, 2022.
I. J. Keen, “An Unusual Contract or How to Approach Heaven’s Gate,” Arboricultural Journal 4, no. 2 (1980): 141.
Ibid., 144.
Thomas Elsaesser, “Simulation and the Labour of Invisibility: Harun Farocki’s Life Manuals,” Animation 12, no. 3 (2017): 218.
Marder, 9.
Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 95.