Field Resistance

USA | 2020 | 16 min | 16mm 

Charging scenes of the present with dystopian speculation, Field Resistance blurs the boundaries between documentary filmmaking and science fiction to investigate overlooked environmental devastation in the state of Iowa. Footage collected from disparate locations—a university herbarium, karst sinkholes inhabited by primordial flora and fauna, a telecommunication tower job site, a decaying grain silo, among others—interlocks to evoke a narrative of present danger and future disaster, of plant expansion and humanity’s retreat. The film rejects the human individual as the focus of narrative cinema, and, instead, adopts the perspective of a symbiotic “implosive whole” in which humans and nonhumans are related in an overlapping, non-total way.

“Both a wordless B-movie thriller and filmic speculation on climate destruction. Emily Drummer’s high concept compositions, uncanny recyclings of science fiction motif, feel heavy with the menace of human meddling (hands poised to fuss at peripheries; breaths weighted through respirators lowering throughout) but the film’s organic matter, a thriving plant life, exists between and beyond each of these interventions, proposing the order and inevitability of a post-human future.”

— London Short Film Festival

“Our ecologically fraught present gives way to dystopian visions in Emily Drummer’s documentary-cum-science-fiction, which examines environmental devastation in Iowa as a means of thinking through the antagonism between nature and humanity.”

— Art of the Real, Film at Lincoln Center