The Hellstrom Chronicle
The ants are under the sink, the trees of heaven have leafed out, and there are 10 classroom pet hissing cockroaches waiting out the break between school years on one of our bookshelves. It’s summer here at the From Below, and it’s time for Infestation Fest, our follow up to APE-ril, as we continue to explore the representations of the pre/non/post/anti-human with a month of feature films each paired with a surprise short.
To initiate Infest Fest we will be showing The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971) on Thursday, 7/2, at 8pm. Here is the link to RSVP. Doors are at 7:50 and we’re starting the movie at 8:10!
“Pest” is a flexible category that gets filled with whatever traits are associated with a threat to the stable, predictable reproduction of a form of life. Slimy, ancient, unruly, wet, tunneling destruction; far too many or far too few legs; faces that are difficult to project emotional content onto; stubborn unreason; short-life spans and no discernible nuclear family structure. A pest is a key term that tells us about time and space: they imply a theory of what is expected to be where and when. The pests’ too muchness of the bad kind of “nature” that infects, kills, spoils, and destroys, is an all-too-human fabrication.
In my efforts to trace out a loose genre of pest film, I see five general archetypical structures. First are creature feature size reversals, in which little things get big and the horror is in humans getting a little taste of their own medicine or realizing their dominion on Earth is as fragile as the luck of body size. Second, there are films where little things remain small but are granted new powers or urges. Third, films in which there are just simply too many little things. Fourth are films in which there is one profoundly pesky little thing that normally might be in a swarm but instead acts alone. Finally, there is the most abstracted, in which it is the imagined threat more so than the actual presence of the little thing that drives the narrative.
When selecting for Infest Fest, I skewed away from the fantasies about the newly giant to stay with the weird experiences that come with the interaction with the small and the swarming. All of the feature films (except for the incredible Phase IV) fall into my third category, the weird and inconvenient that is overlooked or would be preferred to just go away. How does something become inconvenient, revolting, a nuisance; and to whom is it a problem? How does one live with these figures?
This week’s pick, The Hellstrom Chronicle, is an experimental documentary in which a fictional entomologist spouts his paranoid, meta-historical grand theory of our essentially war-bound universe over the top of macrophotography of insect behavior. Hellstrom’s poetics are a delightful satire of human supremacy, and his syntax of pestilence and war that circumscribes the “real” footage and “true” facts calls us to attend to the metaphors we live by. The film renders the familiar–in this case bugs and so-called dispassionate non-fiction–strange in both form and content, something I hope this series will do for you all month long.
Swarmingly, Stefan, Charlie, and Stark