Near the end of Canadian filmmaker Jacquelyn Mills’ second feature, GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE, we hear naturalist Zoe Lucas ruminating offscreen as the frame fills with impossibly sparkling starlight. “We’re part of the ebb and flow of all of the materials that connect us all,” she says. Lucas is describing a dead horse on the sands of Sable Island, the remote and narrow 42km strip southeast of the Nova Scotia mainland, where she has lived and worked for over 40 years—sometimes as the island’s sole inhabitant. She observes how the animal’s decomposing body provides succour to the beetles and invertebrates that burrow into its flesh, as well as to the grasses and goldenrod that will spring from the nutrients it confers in its passing, which will in turn generate the oxygen and perfume the island’s air. The impromptu eulogy serves as a de facto thesis statement for Mills’ film, a portrait of Lucas at work but also and equally a portrait of all of the non-human subjects that animate her vocation, and, as we come to understand, the film itself.
Mills’ process sets aside goals of controlling or taming nature in order to pursue a documentary practice that decentres the human while increasing our sensitivity toward—and potentially reframes our co-existence with—the animals, insects, plants, and matter that constitute our shared world.
GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE is an examination of how organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman processes, can not only affect and inform one another, but also contribute to a creative method. Mills’ process sets aside goals of controlling or taming nature in order to pursue a documentary practice that decentres the human while increasing our sensitivity toward—and potentially reframes our co-existence with—the animals, insects, plants, and matter that constitute our shared world.
The Home and the world
Mills illustrates all the ways that Lucas acts as a caretaker and custodian (in many senses of the word) of life on the island, and all that goes along with it. Lucas shares the island with bevy of non-human others: beetles, spiders, goldenrod, yarrow, the snorting and singing seals whose heads bob in the water like a bunch of kids at a community pool, the magnificent wild horses that have called the island home since the 18th century. We see her constantly recording GPS coordinates, updating Excel spreadsheets, and writing in notebooks—the analog and digital tools she uses to catalogue and categorize everything around her with a Lamarckian sense of dedication. Moments of natural beauty are balanced by shots of Lucas digging sandy graves for dead sea birds, carefully sifting microplastics, and hanging found, ripped plastic sheeting on the line like distressed wash.
While we learn that Lucas was an art student in Halifax in the mid-1970s when she joined a Sable Island research project on seals led by psychology professor Henry James—first as a cook, then as James’ research assistant, before gradually taking on more and more responsibility—Mills eschews biographical details in order to privilege images and sounds of Lucas at work. The solitude of the title is reinforced by Mills’ choice to repeatedly highlight Lucas’ presence as the only human in the frame. Save for one brief shot of her bright blue eyes as she gazes out across the grey surf, with her face otherwise obscured by a thick black beanie and a grey hoodie, a ribbed turtleneck muffler pulled up to her nose, we are rarely granted intimate audience with this central figure. Instead, Mills either offers close ups of Lucas’s hands engaged in various tasks, or follows her in long and medium shots as she strides across the billowing sands and thrashing grasses of the island, wades into freshwater ponds, and gathers up plastic refuse from the beach.
Guided by touch
Mills buttresses her approach with select archival footage as well as thrilling experimentation with materials from the island. She buries her 35mm film in horse dung, horse hair, sand, and seawater, exposes it to the night sky, and develops it in yarrow. Mills rhymes the many shots of Lucas laying her hand on the grass or sun-bleached horse skeletons with her own handmade and hand-processed techniques, thereby amplifying the sense of kinship that Lucas models with the nonhuman inhabitants of the island. Through these chance-based collaborations, which yield startlingly varied abstractions, Mills models a documentary practice that practices ego sublimation through a kind of shared authorship with Sable Island. The result is a documentary encounter with the natural world that doesn’t just mediate one’s relation to the environment, but allows the nonhuman to literally imprint itself on film, granting otherwise unattainable cinematic perspectives.
Mills rhymes the many shots of Lucas laying her hand on the grass or sun-bleached horse skeletons with her own handmade and hand-processed techniques, thereby amplifying the sense of kinship that Lucas models with the nonhuman inhabitants of the island.
Perhaps ironically, those perspectives are made possible through analogue film stock’s own combination of mineral and animal byproducts. Film is made from plastics and emulsion, the latter of which is made of gelatin, extracted, in part, from animal bones. Film’s grain is made up of silver salts, which become metallic when exposed to a light source. In GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE elements of the island are reflected in their capture on film: metal, plastic, animal, and the slightest human touch: “Whichever side your lips stick to is the emulsion,” Mills explains to Lucas at one point in the film as they prepare to lay the film in beach grass.
GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE is a film about immersive process. Lucas says that as a child, she was drawn to “wild and messy places”. Her meticulous, relentless efforts to make sense of Sable Island by recording the behaviours of its occupants and its pollutants are embraced and echoed in Mills’ decision to show us the flares and handwritten characters at the end of her films reels, as well as by announcing, both in voiceover and in onscreen titles, what she has done to the celluloid itself at various junctures. Such interventions range from Mills encouraging Lucas to bring a contact mic into the island’s sunken, dilapidated A-frame that once served as James’ research headquarters, beetle rustlings converted into music, or the off-screen voice of the filmmaker proclaiming “this is roll 41, 35mm buried in juniper roots,” as the attendant imagery lights up the screen, its material pulse reminiscent of silvery ice floes.
Second lives
We learn Lucas has spent the last 15 of her 40 dedicated years collecting thousands of burst helium balloons from bars, hotels, birthday parties and political campaigns that have floated their way to Sable Island from all over North America, attempting to identify and record (of course) their origins, and even writing letters to their previous owners and celebrants to inform them of the environmental toll their revelry produces. She also stretches their slogans over cardboard as a reclaimed art project, a form of recycling that Mills extends and incorporates into her practice, giving would-be trash a second life as cinematic attractions. In the sequence labeled “Sable Island Balloon Ribbon Spliced to 35mm Film” we see dancing shards of orange, anchored by a blue strip occupying the frame’s centre; the referent may be obscured, but the effect is delightful. Similarly, “Microscopic Sable Island Balloon Litter with Atlantic Ocean Water” produces a host of crystalline forms surrounded by swimming paramecium.
GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE presents the conundrum of being alone as simultaneously a series of absences and opportunities for staunchly admirable independence, tempered by an awareness of existence as a part of and participant in wildly diverse and complex systems.
These twinned efforts by the naturalist and the filmmaker reveal happy accidents in terms of imagery and soundtrack, but also serve to demonstrate how devotion to such efforts can result in tough decisions and even missed opportunities. GEOGRAPHIES OF SOLITUDE presents the conundrum of being alone as simultaneously a series of absences and opportunities for staunchly admirable independence, tempered by an awareness of existence as a part of and participant in wildly diverse and complex systems. It’s not that the human perspective can be completely eradicated, but Lucas and Mills’ shared approach is one of openness to notions of alterity and the aleatory, and to how caring for the nonhuman broadens and enriches our understanding of our own subject positioning with respect to the planet at large.
Gregory Zinman is an associate professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the author of “Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts” (University of California Press).
