What has soil got to do with film? The obvious answer is nothing. Soil makes us think of nature, deep time, the ground beneath us. Film, by contrast, is urban, a modern art form, something to be looked at on a big screen. Soil may be present in movies, but it’s mostly unseen: a drive-by landscape, a backdrop in a Western, an establishing shot that tells us we’re in the countryside.
Exceptions? In Eraserhead (1977), David Lynch shows his tilted, off-rational way of looking at the world by having lead character Henry live in an apartment piled up with soil. Stadt in Flammen (1984), made by the German experimental trio Schmelzdahin, involved burying a Super-8 B-movie in a wet garden so that it could be decomposed—or, to their minds, re-photographed—by bacteria.
Much has changed. Politicians cry out, “Drill, baby, drill!” With the world increasingly fracked, artists and filmmakers choose to look down—at plants, weeds, mushrooms, fungi, rift systems. And soil. London’s Somerset House is currently staging an exhibition, SOIL: The World at Our Feet, whose ambition and passion is best captured in a catalogue essay by Jennifer Kabat: “humus and human share a root, and adam, which originally was a Hebrew word for man rather than a specific person, comes from adamah meaning earth. We are earth and rocks and soil.”
Film is an important element of the show. Sam Williams’s Wormshine (2024) is a seven-channel piece which treats with curiosity, respect and even a hint of kinship that lowly thing—the worm. These “night crawlers” are toilers, fugitive entities, able to use their slipperiness as a means of survival. Their wetness and sliminess, far from being gross, is posited as sensual. Without worms, humans are doomed; reads one screen, “They are quiet, quietly turning and turning their soft bodies to make our bodies possible.”
Shot in Burkino Faso, Maeve Brennan’s With Horses (2023) is altogether more sombre. Two films are projected back to back: on one screen, rather sweet, a horse tends to a foal; on the second is another horse, lying on its side and croaking, struggling to breathe. Look again at the first screen: it’s a field littered with plastics and tarpaulin. Soil’s nutrients—its vitalism and biodiversity—are losing out to the toxic junkspace that modern economic systems have created.
Also featured in the show is an extract from Ge (2020–), an ongoing work by American artist Asad Raza that gets its title from the original name for Gaia, the ancient Greek word for Earth, chosen by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis to illustrate their belief in planetary life as a self-regulating system. This segment shows Raza in his Berlin flat teaching his daughter how to make “neo-soil” from everyday ingredients such as playground sand, kitchen sugar, his own hair. (I was reminded of a scene in Dirt, David Heyward Evans’s 1998 film about New York community gardens, in which self-composting activist Adam Purple declares, “Nobody can make me shit in a toilet! I can make earth. I have a right to make earth!”)
Not in the show, but very much worth tracking down is Portuguese filmmaker Filipa César’s Mined Soil (2012–14). It’s an eye-opening video essay about the theoretical writings and revolutionary activities of Amílcar Cabral. Born in 1924 in what was then Portuguese Guinea, he later moved to Lisbon to study agronomics, returning to Africa in 1953 to carry out an agricultural census for the colonial state. He used the post to help the cause of Lusophone counterinsurgency, travelling to countries such as Angola and Mozambique and, in the process, gaining near-unrivalled knowledge of African land and agriculture.
Soil, Cabral learned, was as much about politics and economics as about science. He began to make connections between imperialism and soil degradation, soil erosion, food security. Later, when anti-colonial war broke out in 1963, and in what proved to be a canny example of crafting solidarity, he had troops teach farmers better cropping techniques. He himself talked about the people of what is now Guinea-Bissau in the language of landscape (“Our people are our mountains”).
César, in one of her many astute and eloquent commentaries, observes that “The soil was the blackboard of the guerilla, where the tactics of the mission would be drawn and easily wiped out.” Looking at soil—then, now—always involves imagining tomorrow.
