Herbaria

Plants and films have much in common, as the Argentine filmmaker Leandro Listorti convincingly shows. Both owe their existence to a photochemical reaction, and just like the roughly 500 plant species that have gone extinct over the past centuries, celluloid film is also transitory. Plants and films come to life under the right conditions, but they can also simply disappear.

In this film, made with a love for the craft of archiving and restoration, Listorti, himself a projectionist and film archivist, draws further parallels between film material and organic matter. The work of botanists who preserve dried plants and that of film archivists who restore old films turns out to have much in common. The filmmaker records their careful labor with equal precision on 16mm and 35mm.

Fragments of films unearthed from archives, including a stunning and remarkably well-preserved early botanical film, turn Herbaria into a lyrical ode to both the diversity and vulnerability of plant world and film culture.