viz.

 Video Credit: youtube.com

Percy Smith’s The Acrobatic Fly (1910) offers a time capsule into a genre of nature documentary that may seem unfamiliar to many of us today. In contemporary media, bugs are often mobilized for their visceral shock value. In the early-twentieth century, Smith’s singular flies compelled sentimental and conceptual interest. Upon the initial release of his film, The Strength and Agility of Insects (1911), audiences were repelled by its seeming cruelty toward the blue bottle fly. Thankfully, Smith only secured his protagonist with a thread of silk, and no animals were harmed in the making of his film. Audiences were also struck by the uncanny anthropomorphism of Smith’s portrayal of insects’ performances with wood-chips, lint-balls, and dumbbells. His anthropomorphic irony is even more striking in his Romance in a Pond (1932), a nature film tracing the aristocratic courtships and unhappy marriages of “gentlemen newts.” What is so interesting about Smith’s creatures is that they conform to an older natural history in which curious and exemplary specimens played a role in social thought.