Arty yet scientific, Lost For Words – inspired by The Lost Words, the Hay Literary Festival book of the year for 2017 by Robert Macfarlane and illustrator Jackie Morris – is an appeal both to save nature and save our words for it.
In the book, Macfarlane writes that «there are words disappearing from children’s lives. These are the words for the natural world: Dandelion, Otter, Bramble, and Acorn. The rich landscape of wild imagination and wild play is rapidly fading from our children’s minds.»
The natural world
Harper’s film attempts to address that through #music, #poetry, #art, and observation. This is a film of sweeping geological vistas, brooding mountains swept by Scottish rains, ragged coastlines walked by artists, and corridors of scientific institutes holding records of the natural world dating back centuries.
The images swoon around one, enticing viewers into a dream-like experience, where half-remembered stories from childhood resurface. Picking blackberries in the fields and woods around my childhood home, the aroma of my mother’s freshly-baked apple and blackberry crumble – it is all there in the neural networks.
Flocks of geese coming across our skies in squadrons, the summer screeching of swallows, the dawn song of a lark…. The sounds and words of nature were once all around us, until the digital age came upon us.
This is a film to savour, to watch in one go, or to partake of in small bites, its beauty redolent of what we are so rapidly losing.
This is a film to savour
The film has a vast scope – revolving back through geological ages and looking forward. Would the earth care if humans became the extinct species? Probably not. But as one artist observes, «Maybe one day we will be gone and the world will do without us. I hope it does not come to that, because there is so much that is beautiful to understand.»
Evocative imagery
Its erudition is striking, combining insights from botanists, paleobotanists, researchers and the residents of an elderly care home, for whom words are not always there anymore, but the beautiful images of The Lost Words bring their childhood memories flooding back.
Images are evocative, and in Lost For Words, they speak volumes.
