Caroline Hovanec

I write from Tampa, Florida, where last year’s back-to-back hurricanes have subsided into this year’s drought, and where I have been thinking obsessively about the university as environmental infrastructure. Like Virginia Woolf’s narrator Mary Beton in A Room of One’s Own, I have “sat down on the banks of a river” on a university campus. I’ve thought about how this place “once… was marsh too” and still would be if not for the labor of previous generations “to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain.” I have “walk[ed] across a grass plot” on that campus, and there was no Beadle there to tell me women cannot walk on the turf. But when I began in 2024 to ask questions like, “Why are there so few native plants here?” and “Could we have a campus community garden?”, I was told only that decisions about landscaping are the purview of upper administration (and not, I inferred, English professors). And like Mary Beton, I felt abashed.

The London Film Society was founded in 1925 with a mission of bringing avant-garde and foreign films to British audiences. Its programming included a number of films that have gone down in history as landmarks of experimental cinema: Ballet mécanique and Entr’acte from France, the German expressionist classics The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and October from the Soviet Union. These selections gave the Film Society a certain modernist cachet, and its screenings attracted the likes of Roger Fry and Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Alongside these ambitious international films, however, the Film Society also had a curious liking for a humbler, more homegrown kind of programming: the natural history short. Film Society records show that they exhibited many short science and nature films. Laura Marcus attributes their “strong emphasis on scientific and nature films” to the predilections of Film Society co-founder Ivor Montagu, a former zoology student at Cambridge. These “bionomic” films included selections from the Secrets of Nature series. Produced by British Instructional Films between 1922 and 1933, Secrets of Nature aimed to entertain and educate the public with footage of plants, animals, and microorganisms, along with explanations of their life cycles. The series applied the latest cinematic techniques to an old-fashioned brand of natural history. Most of its stars were common, local British species, such as the barn owl, the raven, the ant, the scarlet runner bean, and even the myxomycetes, a slime mold the filmmakers rebrand under the much cuter term “myxies.” The Film Society screened several of the Secrets, among them The Comma Butterfly, Plants of the Pantry, The Frog, The Aphis, The Strangler, Down Under (a film on the growth of plant roots), Water Folk (on water fleas), Magic Myxies, and Gathering Moss.