viz.

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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.

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Smith’s insect represented a natural capacity for labor and an innate mode of creativity. On one hand, satirical prints from the era adopted his insect as an embodied metaphor for conservative politicians. On the other, Jussi Parikka has suggested links between Smith’s insects and post-Gilded Age discourses that run “parallel to the logic of inventive capitalism and the production of novelty” (31). Parikka argues that the optimized productive labor of insect communities offered an emblem, which fused concepts of intelligent and corporate design. As Giorgio Agamben has suggested in his theoretical reading of Jakob von Uexküll’s “Tick,” scientific reflection on insects during this era generated some of newest paradigms post-humanist and inter-species philosophy. 

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Smith’s films were part of a larger visual and intellectual culture in the early twentieth-century entomology, which stands out for its incorporation of insect and human worlds. Some of these films explicitly foreground the social and cultural contexts of the insect. For instance, Wladyslaw Starewicz’s The Insect’s Christmas (1913) begins when an ornamental “Father Christmas” falls off of a tree, eludes a sleeping porcelain doll, and escapes into the forest, where he invites the critters to a celebration and introduces a tree. As Christmas visits bugs and frogs, they perform acrobatic tricks in stop-motion time, and engage in quaintly surreal feats of skiing and ice-skating. After his nighttime adventure into the forest, Father Christmas returns home, sneaks past his owner, and reassumes his place on the Christmas tree. As much as this film might suggest pastoral irony or social critique, I am most struck by Starewicz’s sympathetic portrayal of insect forms.

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From Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) to Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), scientists and writers have introduced insects into their speculation on human existence. Conversely, there has been a dearth of interest in the actual preservation of such creatures. Our society has come little closer to appreciating (if not sympathizing) with the existence and importance of insect life. Over the past summer, Channel 4 (UK) ran a fascinating exposé, entitled “Conservation’s Dirty Secrets.” The documentary focused on the tendency for corporate conservation firms to promote large, fluffy, marketable animals, when less aesthetically-pleasing ones offer greater potential for scientific and sustainability benefits. Not only does the documentary critique the visual rhetoric of sentimental and fluffy creatures, but it also investigates the impact of such policies on the human populations who live alongside the animals. The film shifts emphasis away from the large animals themselves, and toward their participation in human ecologies of neoliberal ecological imperialism. While the slogan, “Corporations are people, my friend,” finds few sympathizers, many are susceptible to corporations who employ the sentimental appeal of large animals. “Conservation’s Dirty Secrets” concludes by investigating new models of sustainable conservation, but it does not explore persuasive strategies for attracting interest and sympathy for beings remote from our own existence. 

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On BBC Radio 4, one can find a thirty-minute vignette on Percy Smith’s career. The part of this broadcast that I find most compelling is the legend concerning the disappearance of his house. While filming his “Secrets of Nature” series, the newts, moss, mold, and insects proliferated throughout a series of rooms equipped with stop-motion cameras and elaborate set designs. After Smith’s death, the curious creatures are said to have overtaken the house of this innovator of the natural history documentary. While Smith’s unique insect films crossed into spheres of human life and society, they also attracted surprising attention to classes of creatures difficult to promote in persuasive rhetoric.

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Works Cited

Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010).

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, Trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2004).