John Burroughs On Film
Thursday, March 31, 8 pm
Proteus: A Film about Ernst Haeckel by David LeBrun
Friday, April 1, 7 pm and 9 pm
$5 admission for both
Proteus Gowanus co-hosts two events this week with their projects-in-residence, Observatory and Morbid Anatomy Library. On Thursday and Friday evenings, they will show films featuring two 19th C naturalists who dedicated their art to the mission of revealing the scientific secrets of nature.
On Thursday, March 31, 8 pm,
John Burroughs will be featured in an evening of images from the American Museum of Natural History. Barbara Mathe, archivist at AMNH, will show a six-minute very early color film of John Burroughs at his summer home, Woodchuck Lodge. Also, James Walsh will then show his 24 minute video, Burroughs(2008), shot from hand-colored lantern slides from the AMNH archive.
The evening will conclude with a reading from Burroughs essays on birdsong.
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On Friday, April 1 in two screenings, 7 pm and 9 pm,
Morbid Anatomy Library will screen the film, Proteus,
followed by a Q and A with Director David Lebrun.
The central figure of the film is biologist and artist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). As a young man, Haeckel found himself torn between seeming irreconcilables: science and art, materialism and religion, rationality and passion, outer and inner worlds. Through his discoveries beneath the sea, Haeckel would eventually reconcile these dualities, bringing science and art together in a unitary, almost mystical vision.
DAVID LEBRUN has served as producer, director, writer, cinematographer, animator and/or editor of more than sixty films, among them films on the Mazatec Indians of Oaxaca, a 1960s traveling commune, Tibetan mythology and a year in the life of a Maya village.