Caryn Cline’s Botanicollage Films

For over twenty years, Caryn Cline has handcrafted intimate films that reframe the familiar through experiments in scale and context. Cline coined the term “botanicollage” to describe the technique pioneered by Stan Brakhage (Mothlight, Garden of Earthly Delights) in which flowers, leaves, and other organic matter are fused directly onto celluloid. Once small and overlooked, her weedy subjects demand the full cinematic frame, revealing often astonishingly beautiful qualities. By placing plants in an unfamiliar context, the filmmaker aims to “transform reality utterly”* and, in so doing, invite us to reflect on our own relationships with the botanical world.

All Flesh is Grass

Director: Caryn Cline
USA, 2017, 12', color
no dialogue

All Flesh is Grass experimentally documents a prairie restoration site in rural Missouri.

Lost Winds

Director: Caryn Cline 
USA, 2017, 3', color
no dialogue

A site-specific botanicollage film from San Clemente, CA, containing both planned and "chance" animation.

Butterfly Disaster

Director: Caryn Cline
USA, 2019, 6', color
no dialogue

Extinction of monarch butterflies in the US became a topic of a film based on manipulation of found footage. The director adjusts archival recordings of butterflies or planes spreading fertilizers through double exposure, scratching, colouring and so don, coming up with a purely visual micro-essay asking who is really the pest and who is the infested in this ecosystem.