Program 9: Nature and Nonhuman Animals

Here at the Water’s Edge
Leo Hurwitz, Charles Pratt, 1962, 60m

Excursion
Marie Menken, 1968, 16mm, 5m

City Wildlife: Mice, Rats, Roaches
Christy Rupp, 1980, 16m

The rise of New York as a major urban center since its colonization has seen a number of animals play significant roles in tandem with the expansion of the city, conventionally framed as pests and hindrances to sanitary living environments. Christy Rupp’s video City Wildlife: Mice, Rats, Roaches is a playful essay on our most common nonhuman animal friends. Produced by Chris Post and Peter Von Zeigesar, the film advocates a more ecology-centric vision of city-dwelling animals, seeing them as intrinsic to the function of the natural world of New York. “Rats are not terrorists,” Rupp told the New York Post, “[they] are not inherently evil. They’re just animals like any other animals. They don’t come into the world meaning to harm man. I see them as part of the history of ecology, in the whole chain of things. It’s just that they’re out of control in the cities.” The video is composed of a number of short, tableau-like vignettes charting historical and biological facts through voice-over while we observe mice and rats chowing down on Big Macs, rats posed in front of outraged Post headlines, and the training of rats in bomb detection.

Complementing Rupp’s video essay are two contrasting visions of Manhattan as a geographic and topological form, as an island and as a natural harbor. The waterfronts of New York are toured at breakneck speed through Marie Menken’s short Excursions, while its beachfronts and shorelines get a poetic and decidedly political treatment in Here at the Water’s Edge, an exploration of Manhattan’s man-made and natural relation to the great waters that border it. Leo Hurwitz’s collaboration with photographer Charles Pratt offers a collage of sights and sounds, a richly textured evocation of the city’s past and present where the impact of the human hand is rendered both audible and visible.
Sunday, May 5 at 6:30pm