A herbarium of 8 films about spring
Here is a list of films to get you in the mood for the sunny days of spring.
Neighbours (dir. Norman McLaren, 1952)
An anti-war stop motion that has stood the test of time and would probably make it in space as well as a souvenir marking the typical ownership instinct of the human species for civilisations that might want to learn about us. Comic violence gradually shifts into present-day reality in McLaren’s parable and reminds us of the absurdity inherent in the fight over natural resources. The earth and its beauties don’t need people to keep breathing, it’s us who need them. (Aura Badea)
Magueyes (dir. Rubén Gámez, 1962)
Magueyes is one of the few short films left behind by Rubén Gámez, an experimental Mexican filmmaker who has gained mythical status in the local cinephile circles – a film that, although focused on a single visual subject, achieves through its analytical editing and dynamic image, guided by a symphony by Dimitri Shostakovich, all the force of a comprehensive political metaphor, with further implications that are most pressing. Agave americana (aka maguey or American aloe) is the second most important plant in Mesoamerican agriculture after corn, a succulent that dies if allowed to flower – with a wide use in Mexica civilisation: from fibres for making various textile items to the specific cuisine and alcoholic drinks (pulque, mezcal, tequila). Following the harvesting of an agave plantation and the violence that this process involves on the plant’s body, as well as the subsequent re-flowering (eternal metaphor of resilience) of this seemingly infinite field, Gámez hints at the bloody wars that ravaged the lands of Mexico – see the post-harvest scene, depicted like a massacre, recalling the masses of dead bodies scattered in the streets after the fall of Tenochtitlan – but above all the regenerative power of its people, eternal survivors. (Flavia Dima)
Special mentions: Wasteland (dir. Jodie Mack, 2017-2021), Inflorescence (dir. Nicolaas Schmidt, 2020), Flores (dir. Jorge Jacome, 2017).
Soylent Green (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1973)
I cheated a bit, obviously, but not out of pretentiousness. I turned the theme we’ve chosen for this month’s top over and over in my mind, and all I could think of was post-zombie apocalypse movies with nature “taking over”: lush vegetation slowly swallowing concrete behemoths and abandoned cars. That’s how I got to Soylent Green, a sci-fi eco-thriller at the opposite pole: concrete is the one that had swallowed nature (the usual suspects, even at that time: pollution, global warming, overpopulation). In the lead roles, we have Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson starring as a policeman and the old librarian who helps him with the cases. Not so popular upon release, Soylent Green quickly became a cult film – the inexhaustible figure of Edward G. Robinson must have played a massive role in that. For those who have seen it, it’s pretty clear where the story is going: there are a few precious minutes of spring in this film in the form of archival footage. Robinson’s character decides to end his life at an assisted suicide facility, which promises 20 minutes of visual ecstasy for volunteers who want to help with the overpopulation problem. Lying on a comfortable bed, with the lethal cocktail already coursing through his veins, the character marvels with teary eyes at the beauty of nature that he had known in his youth: flowery fields, deer, green mountains and waterfalls, sunset with birds crossing the horizon, and other such clichés. In another room, Heston’s character, arriving too late to save him, watches helplessly as his friend fades away. The images themselves are banal, but the emotion is more than real. Robinson died two months after the completion of filming; apparently, his good friend Heston knew that Robinson was dying and playing his own requiem and that that would indeed be his last scene. (Andrei Şendrea)
Butterfly (dir. David Cronenberg, 1993)
In the cyber-transgressive landscape that is the oeuvre of David Cronenberg, M. Butterfly constitutes an invaluable piece – and quite evident in the extent of the directorial effort – all the more so since it still remains too little known. Interrogated and turned upside down as it happens here, exoticism – the phantasm for a sexualized and seductive Orient – was the missing element in the cabinet of curiosities of this obsessive and coherent filmmaker to the point of self-parody. The 1960s depicted in the film is a realm created and brought to life through the always magical power of a lens, lighting, and some actors. Between two more or less metaphorical springs – the Cultural Revolution in China and May 68 in Paris – the film unfolds the immanent map of desire and illusion, mobilizing a frantic game of echoes between geopolitics, corporeality and psychoanalysis to trace the contours of a world that is wildly fluid and all the more penetrating. Looking at this sample of strange continuities between genres, images and incipient multiverses, M. Butterfly reaffirms the vision of a genius artist, for whom anomaly, contamination and deviance are the guarantee that the world around us can still surprise us.
Boyhood (dir. Richard Linklater, 2014)
The other day, I heard children shouting from the park outside my bedroom window, fighting on the swings. The sidewalks were coloured in all kinds of funny and animal shapes, and then a kid crying “Just a bit longer!” made me realise that spring is here, you can feel it in the air. A cliché picture, I know, but I still found it absolutely heartwarming that some things remain the same and are still so vivid to me. For a moment, I dove in with them, there, lying on the grass and looking up at the sky, contemplating who knows what, just like Mason Jr. in Boyhood. In the nearly three hours of the film, which captures 12 years of this young man’s life, Mason evolves from a six-year-old preoccupied with the fate of raccoons to a boy on his feet preparing for college and ready to face life, career and love. A coming of age that captures the passage of time in a unique way, which can work as a great and nostalgic (or very scary?) reflection exercise now that everything starts afresh and there’s drawing on the pavement again. (Anca Vancu)
Little Joe (dir. Jessica Hausner, 2019)
Here is a hybrid, lab-grown plant that feeds on attention – it’s lush, inviting and pungent; when it’s praised, it releases pheromones that paralyze the owners with pleasure. Over time, it propagates into tens, hundreds of specimens, which end up sitting on the scientists’ bedside tables. A picture of surpassing beauty – an intense red, a pigment impossible to find in nature. Meanwhile, the owners become more and more alienated, robotic and lacking in empathy (Hausner goes quite strongly into an Invasion of the Body Snatchers type of alienation – “my dog is not my dog!”, as well as an ectoplasmic area à la Vertigo), and the designer of this botanical Frankenstein, a flower herself (she’s a redhead with a tulip haircut), starts to have doubts. It is not at all clear whether these pheromones are in fact the product of autosuggestion – the idea that everything is a projection, a figment, is perfectly valid.
Bonus: the score by Maya Deren’s long-time collaborator Teiji Ito (it is no coincidence that Maya’s influence can be felt in Hausner’s film), an absolute delight. (Georgiana Mușat)
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
It would be impossible for me to nominate just one film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul when it comes to how important nature is for the Thai filmmaker. Of course, this is partly due to the fact that his films are starting to get mixed up in my head. But the main reason for my shortcoming is that, in his oeuvre, the vegetation simply becomes the space of all possibilities (it’s enough to recall the spirits in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives or the terrible ending of Memoria). The forest, with its mystery, is the gateway to the subconscious, in a state of semi-hypnosis that allows us to transcend reality. (Ionuţ Mareş)
Another Round (dir. Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)
For me, spring is, first and foremost, energy – a playful and hopeful energy, which, despite its frivolity, has the power to stir something inside. That’s how I would describe this film, which I also happened to see on a spring day. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Another Round is a wobbly dance of midlife crisis, abounding in the lack of satisfaction offered by a boring life, and feeding on an apparent curiosity to taste the pleasure, freedom and captivity coming from excess. And maybe also from friendship, since the precarious balance of drunkenness often comes in contexts of companionship.
In short, we have four friends, all high school teachers. They decide to put into practice the theory of a Norwegian psychiatrist – that humans are born with a deficiency of alcohol in the blood and that moderate consumption opens our minds and makes us more creative and relaxed. Each of them accepts the challenge with almost scientific rigour, hoping it will make their lives better. Although the results are encouraging at first, the situation quickly spirals out of control. Thus, the film dives into the alcohol culture of Denmark and translates it into a tragicomic choreography that pulsates between euphoria and helplessness, but above all in the emotions and dilemmas arising between the two. (Sabrina Canea)

An article written by the magazine's team