Jodie Mack
Excerpt: LOVER, LOVERS, LOVING, LOVE: LOVE (12m, forthcoming in 2023, color, silent)
From Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794) by Erasmus Darwin:
The whole of nature may be supposed to consist of two essences or substances; one of which may be termed spirit, and the other matter. The former of these possesses the power to commence or produce motion, and the latter to receive and communicate it. So that motion, considered as a cause, immediately precedes every effect; and, considered as an effect, it immediately succeeds every cause.
LOVER, LOVERS, LOVING, LOVE (2023) is similar to some of my other recent works, like the three films in the Wasteland series (2017-2021) and M*U*S*H (2022), in that it uses plants from my garden and nearby surroundings to excavate a multiplicity of themes: life/death reciprocity, fertility, climate destruction, and geologic time. LOVER, LOVERS, LOVING, LOVE concentrates mostly on the idea of plant sex, mating, plant love, and reproduction to foreground the making of life as the inevitable making of death. The film will mix live action as well as continuous and discontinuous stroboscopic techniques.
From Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life (1794) by Erasmus Darwin:
The whole of nature may be supposed to consist of two essences or substances; one of which may be termed spirit, and the other matter. The former of these possesses the power to commence or produce motion, and the latter to receive and communicate it. So that motion, considered as a cause, immediately precedes every effect; and, considered as an effect, it immediately succeeds every cause.
LOVER, LOVERS, LOVING, LOVE (2023) is similar to some of my other recent works, like the three films in the Wasteland series (2017-2021) and M*U*S*H (2022), in that it uses plants from my garden and nearby surroundings to excavate a multiplicity of themes: life/death reciprocity, fertility, climate destruction, and geologic time. LOVER, LOVERS, LOVING, LOVE concentrates mostly on the idea of plant sex, mating, plant love, and reproduction to foreground the making of life as the inevitable making of death. The film will mix live action as well as continuous and discontinuous stroboscopic techniques.
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator. Her films unleash the kinetic energy of material remnants of domestic and institutional knowledge to illuminate the relationship between decoration and utility. Straddling the boundary between rigor and accessibility, her cinema questions how we ascribe value to things. Mack's 16mm films have screened at a variety of venues including the Locarno Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Jeonju International Film Festival, and the Viennale. She has presented solo programs at the 25FPS Festival, Anthology Film Archives, BFI London Film Festival, Harvard Film Archive, National Gallery of Art, REDCAT, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, and Wexner Center for the Arts among others. Her work has been featured in publications including Artforum, Cinema Scope, The New York Times, and Senses of Cinema. She was a 2017/18 Radcliffe Fellow; a 2019 Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts; a 2021 MacDowell Fellow; and a 2022 Visual Studies Center Fellow. She is a Professor of Animation at Dartmouth College.