Field Resistance
ABOUT
Charging scenes of the present with dystopian speculation, Field Resistance teases the boundaries between documentary and science fiction to investigate overlooked environmental devastation in the flyover state of Iowa. Observational documentary-style footage collected from disparate locations – a university herbarium, karst sinkholes inhabited by primordial flora and fauna, a telecommunication tower job-site, among others – is used to evoke a fictional, dystopian narrative of plant ascension and humanity’s retreat. Rejecting the human individual as the focus of narrative cinema, the film adopts the perspective of a symbiotic “implosive whole” in which humans and nonhumans are related in an overlapping, non-total way.
Emily Drummer (b. 1990) is a filmmaker who uses immersive research as a starting point to investigate the dynamic between technology and the natural world. She received her MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa and her BA from Hampshire College. She is a Princess Grace Film Honoraria recipient and a Flaherty Film Seminar fellow. Drummer’s work has been showcased by venues including Art of the Real at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Black Box at Edinburgh International Film Festival, London Short Film Festival, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, and Camden International Film Festival. An article about her work was recently published in the Brooklyn Rail.