By Adam Rabiner
Maurice Maggi spends his nights scattering and planting seeds from a brown paper bag onto the grassy medians, middle sections, traffic islands, and street niches of Zurich, like a somnambulant Johnny Appleseed or an overzealous municipal employee putting in overtime on a Million Trees campaign. His seeds, though, are low and high growing thistles, violets, rose hips, wild roses, squash, beans, leaks, and radishes. Maurice imagines a field of mauve, of wild flowers, which is the title of this 2016 German-Swiss film by Nicolas Humbert. He describes, in German, sowing seeds on his nightly sojourns as “very quiet and devotional,” which is also an accurate way of describing the style and substance of Wild Plants.
Like real life plants, Wild Plants takes its time. It opens with beautiful images and muted sounds but no language or dialogue. A baby bird, breathing deeply, is cupped by human hands; another holds up a tangle of worms. A lone dog meanders down a frozen lake of broken ice. People plant bulbs in the earth. A plane flies overhead. Birds waft in the wind. A bridge spans a river. There is a sense of place, but it’s not known.
Finally you are introduced, one by one, to the subjects of this film, rugged faces staring unsmilingly into the camera, grim and serious, grungy like Walker Evans’s depression era subjects in James Agee’s Let us now Praise Famous Men. Here are the nine young French speaking members of Geneva’s Jardin de Cocagne; Milo Yellow Hair, a Oglala Lakota Sioux actor, activist, tribal leader, historian - and in this film, a wise medicine man or chief, imparting traditional and spiritual native American philosophy - and others.
You don’t hear anyone speak until 11:16 when Andrew Kemp, a Detroit school teacher, and Malik, one of his students, finally break the silence. While shoveling compost Andrew tells Malik that for him gardening represents life cycle and regeneration. Knowing he will transform in a never ending process, be reborn as a peach, comforts him. Gardening is not just about food, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s about the sun, the seasons, the self, the earth, the community. Food is just the bonus. Young Malik gets where he’s coming from but is not yet a convert to this way of thinking.
But later in the film you meet someone who is, Andrew’s 36 year old Hungarian born artist wife, Kinga Osz, who lost her mother when she was eight and came to Detroit as an adult seeking solace. Like Andrew, Kinga is comforted by urban gardening. She points to a beautiful ripe eggplant at its peak of human desirability. In three weeks it will be rotting, no longer desirable to us. But to insects and microbes it will be vermin ambrosia. This cyclical and mystical world view, echoed by others in the film, particularly Milo Yellow Hair, allows Kinga to come to terms with her mother’s death as well as her own mortality and aging.
Yellow Hair also speaks movingly, in English, of the relationship between people, mother earth, and plants. “All sounds of nature, give us language. All things in nature give us form as a human being. My hair is the same as the grass that grows. My skin is like this earth that I am sitting on. My blood is like the water that flows. And my breath is like the wind that blows. We are plants too. Because it takes us 70 to 100 years of living, to become renewed, regenerated, reborn, and to be a human being on this world.” Yellow Hair also treats us to a traditional Lakota prayer and song.
A remarkable quality of Wild Plants, revealed particularly in the interview with Kinga, is its comfort with quiescence. Seated outdoors on the ground she finishes a thought, stops talking, bows her head and looks down, as if in meditation. Humbert keeps the camera rolling, not following up with another question or editing out the pause in conversation. After a full minute and twenty seconds - which seems like an eternity, so uncomfortable have we become with “awkward” silences or stillness – Kinga looks up and resumes speaking.
As this scene demonstrates, Wild Plants, a polygot film featuring several human tongues, is also about other forms of communication. It dares the viewer to pause, reflect, concentrate, and relax, to be intentional and not always fill the air or our thoughts with idle chat or unnecessary sounds. In this day and age of instant gratification, 140 character tweets, 24 hour radio and TV channels, non-existent attention spans, the advice to take a deep breath, keep one’s mouth shut, listen and hear, and yes to “slow down and smell the roses,” can seem a call to revolution.
True to the theme of cyclicality, the film ends where it began, back on the icy meadow of the first scenes. There’s the bridge again. There are the trees whose branches are covered in snow. More planes. More birds. And a hauntingly beautiful last image of a small child carrying a tiny bird’s nest across the field and walking towards the slowly receding camera. It’s a finale, but not and end.
Maurice Maggi spends his nights scattering and planting seeds from a brown paper bag onto the grassy medians, middle sections, traffic islands, and street niches of Zurich, like a somnambulant Johnny Appleseed or an overzealous municipal employee putting in overtime on a Million Trees campaign. His seeds, though, are low and high growing thistles, violets, rose hips, wild roses, squash, beans, leaks, and radishes. Maurice imagines a field of mauve, of wild flowers, which is the title of this 2016 German-Swiss film by Nicolas Humbert. He describes, in German, sowing seeds on his nightly sojourns as “very quiet and devotional,” which is also an accurate way of describing the style and substance of Wild Plants.
Like real life plants, Wild Plants takes its time. It opens with beautiful images and muted sounds but no language or dialogue. A baby bird, breathing deeply, is cupped by human hands; another holds up a tangle of worms. A lone dog meanders down a frozen lake of broken ice. People plant bulbs in the earth. A plane flies overhead. Birds waft in the wind. A bridge spans a river. There is a sense of place, but it’s not known.
Finally you are introduced, one by one, to the subjects of this film, rugged faces staring unsmilingly into the camera, grim and serious, grungy like Walker Evans’s depression era subjects in James Agee’s Let us now Praise Famous Men. Here are the nine young French speaking members of Geneva’s Jardin de Cocagne; Milo Yellow Hair, a Oglala Lakota Sioux actor, activist, tribal leader, historian - and in this film, a wise medicine man or chief, imparting traditional and spiritual native American philosophy - and others.
You don’t hear anyone speak until 11:16 when Andrew Kemp, a Detroit school teacher, and Malik, one of his students, finally break the silence. While shoveling compost Andrew tells Malik that for him gardening represents life cycle and regeneration. Knowing he will transform in a never ending process, be reborn as a peach, comforts him. Gardening is not just about food, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s about the sun, the seasons, the self, the earth, the community. Food is just the bonus. Young Malik gets where he’s coming from but is not yet a convert to this way of thinking.
But later in the film you meet someone who is, Andrew’s 36 year old Hungarian born artist wife, Kinga Osz, who lost her mother when she was eight and came to Detroit as an adult seeking solace. Like Andrew, Kinga is comforted by urban gardening. She points to a beautiful ripe eggplant at its peak of human desirability. In three weeks it will be rotting, no longer desirable to us. But to insects and microbes it will be vermin ambrosia. This cyclical and mystical world view, echoed by others in the film, particularly Milo Yellow Hair, allows Kinga to come to terms with her mother’s death as well as her own mortality and aging.
Yellow Hair also speaks movingly, in English, of the relationship between people, mother earth, and plants. “All sounds of nature, give us language. All things in nature give us form as a human being. My hair is the same as the grass that grows. My skin is like this earth that I am sitting on. My blood is like the water that flows. And my breath is like the wind that blows. We are plants too. Because it takes us 70 to 100 years of living, to become renewed, regenerated, reborn, and to be a human being on this world.” Yellow Hair also treats us to a traditional Lakota prayer and song.
A remarkable quality of Wild Plants, revealed particularly in the interview with Kinga, is its comfort with quiescence. Seated outdoors on the ground she finishes a thought, stops talking, bows her head and looks down, as if in meditation. Humbert keeps the camera rolling, not following up with another question or editing out the pause in conversation. After a full minute and twenty seconds - which seems like an eternity, so uncomfortable have we become with “awkward” silences or stillness – Kinga looks up and resumes speaking.
As this scene demonstrates, Wild Plants, a polygot film featuring several human tongues, is also about other forms of communication. It dares the viewer to pause, reflect, concentrate, and relax, to be intentional and not always fill the air or our thoughts with idle chat or unnecessary sounds. In this day and age of instant gratification, 140 character tweets, 24 hour radio and TV channels, non-existent attention spans, the advice to take a deep breath, keep one’s mouth shut, listen and hear, and yes to “slow down and smell the roses,” can seem a call to revolution.
True to the theme of cyclicality, the film ends where it began, back on the icy meadow of the first scenes. There’s the bridge again. There are the trees whose branches are covered in snow. More planes. More birds. And a hauntingly beautiful last image of a small child carrying a tiny bird’s nest across the field and walking towards the slowly receding camera. It’s a finale, but not and end.