Naturales Historiae (2019)

• 81%
• 2019
• Documentary
• Pauline Julier

The film begins with a volcanic eruption that stranded the director, Pauline Julier, in a foreign city, among strangers. In turns, these strangers evoke legends about the formation of the continents, the blooming of the tectonic plates or the explosion of ash that provoked summers without sun. Beginning with this event, Julier decides to challenge the concept, as vast as it is thorny, of the representation of nature. Separated by different thematic areas such as landscape, the notion of sublime, the conquest of space or even the deception around natural catastrophes, the film insightfully retraces a critical history of nature. Going from the mythological notions of a world dominated by natural forces to the paradigm of the Anthropocene in which we find ourselves today, NATURALES HISTORIAE does not treat nature as a universal and objective notion, but as a pure discursive construction, a fiction. In the absence of certainty, nature may perhaps only be the incomprehensible, the untamed, all that we could never lock up in the frame of a landscape.