In his 2024 book Ruins and Resilience: The Longevity of Experimental Film, the Dutch filmmaker, artist, and researcher Karel Doing explores how the practices of experimental filmmakers persist amidst the near demise of their medium, analog motion picture film. Active since the dawn of the 1990s, Doing has dedicated much of his career to the execution and promotion of experimental film and filmmaking. He co-founded the DIY-film laboratory Studio één in 1990 and, in 2001, co-founded Filmbank, a foundation committed to the distribution of experimental film and video in the Netherlands. Much of his own practice has focused on the use of analog techniques with 16mm film, but Doing also brings nature and organic processes into his work as co-creators, namely through “phytography,” a system he developed that combines organic materials, like plants, with photochemical emulsion directly on film. If analog film is a ruin, as his book suggests, then the processes Doing has developed are like nature’s reclamation of man-made structures that have been abandoned.
In Wilderness Series (2016), for instance, Doing employs a process he calls the “organigram”—a technique similar to the photogram that, like phytography, is designed to imprint organic matter directly onto film. Unlike filmic predecessors like Stan Brakhage’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), in which the legendary filmmaker pasted vegetation to clear film leader and create a visual record of leaves, grasses, and petals, here Doing is going a step beyond. Rather than recording what was—presenting the shadows of once living organic matter—Doing instead mixes plant matter, mud, and salt with a blend of photochemicals to develop organic processes and their resulting images right on recuperated 35mm black-and-white film stock. In lieu of normal exposure, the artist waits for a period of days or weeks as biochemical changes occur in the film emulsion in full daylight and create his images. He then scans the film, ordering, cropping, and layering the images produced during the organic process. This artistic intervention, however, seems secondary to what is most interesting about the film’s image-making process—its visual ontology. In Doing’s words, these are “images made by nature, not of nature.”
Along with his more elemental collaborations with nature, Doing’s recent films seem to meditate on it as well. The 16mm Babbler, Fairy and Thrush (2022) and Agapanthus (2024) are more conventional works of photographic poetry wherein the artist uses representational images of plants and the natural world, along with what appear to be light leaks and in-camera superimpositions, to create a reverential ode to flora on its own scale. With The Mulch Spider’s Dream (2018), like Wilderness Series, Doing once again takes the film strip as the site of creation, using the internal chemistry of plants interacting with film emulsion to create his inky, organic images. In Oxygen (2023), which feels like a stylistic homage to Brakhage’s aforementioned Garden, Doing implements his phytography process with blades of grass, their linear forms whizzing across the screen like the lines on a freeway seen at high velocity. Doing refers to this film as “a roadmovie beyond the human.”
If this all begins to sound too scientific to be art, one need only hear the evocative scores Doing uses to accompany his images to understand these films' dual purposes. The droning and undulating sounds that fill the soundtracks of many of these films is purely expressive, adding another dimension to them, helping to emphasize their living character. Doing’s films are attempts to create new epistemological approaches to the organic world, but they are also celebrations of its mystery and sovereignty.
Ruins & Resilience: Films by Karel Doing includes nine films, mostly on 16mm, with Doing in person, on Friday, March 14, at Shapeshifters Cinema. Co-presented with SF Cinematheque. Doing also leads a workshop on phytography on Sunday, March 16.
