InScience On Tour (links to Dutch content) is the programme with which the main festival – which is currently underway – is to tour the country after the festival ends. A small selection of the best films is to be screened in the movie theatres in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Tilburg, Breda, Eindhoven, Twente, Maastricht and Wageningen. Four films will be screened in the Heerenstraat Theatre next week Saturday and Sunday.
Birds
One of these four films is the documentary Birds of America by Jacques Leouille. The filmmaker retraced the travels undertaken by 19th-century nature historian and artist John James Audubon (1785-1851), who wrote the monumental book with the same title as the film. What remains of the landscapes and fauna he found and recorded?
Nature filmmaker Melchert Meijer zu Schlochtern and Anneke Groen, curator of the WUR library’s Special Collections, will comment on the film after the screening on Sunday afternoon. Meijer zu Schlochtern will show footage from the film Grutto! On which he is currently working. Groen will bring a number of extraordinary books by Dutch nature historians.
How the reference image of nature changes for each generation
Anneke Groen, curator Special Collections, WUR-library
‘No, no Audubon’, Green says. ‘Our collection does not contain this one. Those books were costly even at that time. In our country, there is only one institution that has these books, and that is the Teylers Museum in Haarlem. They currently have an Audubon exhibition where all five parts of Birds of America are on display, all of them from their own collection.’
Ornithologia
In her lecture, Groen will discuss landscape anamnesis, or ‘how the reference image of nature changes for each generation. This can be seen in the bird books from the different eras that I will bring: De Nederlandse vogels (Schlegel), Ornithologia Neerlandica (Van Oordt) and Het Vogeljaar (Thijsse).’
The films In Silico, Citizen Nobel and By the Throat feature on the programme. All four movies will be screened on both Saturday and Sunday. One of the two screenings has a side programme with speakers. InScience can be viewed live in Nijmegen this weekend. There is a special online version of the film festival until and including next weekend.
UPDATE: Due to the new corona measures, the side programme has been cancelled. There will be no commentaries. The screenings will, however, continue as planned.
