Dorion Sagan: Dear Erin Espelie, Your beautiful short film Inside the Shared Life seems to me both a meditation and a provocative study in contrasts – motion and stillness, color and darkness, words and what lies beyond words. You have degrees in molecular and cell biology, yet now you seem to work mostly in art and film. While mindful that an artist's work is often itself the most concise and useful “explanation” – that the best interpretation of a poem is another poem – I wonder if you might say a few words about what this film tells about the relationship between science and art.

Erin Espelie: Both scientists and artists ask questions for which no answers yet exist, thus attempting to fathom the unknown in shared pursuit. “Fathom” once meant, in its Old English iteration, to embrace or encircle with one’s outstretched arms. The word then morphed into a unit of measure, equivalent to an arm-span, or six feet, primarily for nautical use to plumb the vertical ocean. From this etymological richness, an image surfaces in my mind of a woman approaching the water’s edge. She finds the water carpeted with thick, green algae, plunges in her arms, and wrests free a prize: the scientist pulls forth a new species of bryozoan; the artist raises her arms, now coated in slime, and spreads her fingers wide. Who knows? The acts, inherently vulnerable, oppose predictive certainty or self-congratulation.

DS: This film combines sounds of marine life with moving images of the circulatory system, life at different scales, and Lynn Margulis's words on accepted versus iconoclastic science. She talks also about time, how the new is privileged over the true. This film has a captivating slowness. Among other things, it seems to be about epistemology, how we know or don't know. Was epistemology a conscious concern of yours in making this film?

EE: Cinema presents an ideal tool for dissecting epistemologies, yet rarely do filmmakers deploy it as such. Like you, both of my parents were scientists; in my case, a virologist and a biochemist. Thus, I am acutely, dare I say existentially, aware of how science and, by extension, research funding emphasizes the new and belittles the historical and the humanities. In our culture, value goes to art and history that advocates for trendy action, takes a journalistic stance on current events, or attempts a prophetic view. Leaving out other forms of examination would be a loss.

We cannot discern our surroundings if our hubris, greed, and solipsism disavow the various and valid ways in which we can seek truths. In challenging our touchstones or blind acceptances we may remove obstructions to make way for new flashes of perception, be those genetic or cosmic, poetic or prosaic.

DS: Would you agree that perspectivalism – the realization that there is no single “objective” viewpoint, because perception always comes from a discrete place, whether of a human or other being – gives film a certain advantage over science, if only because the camera underscores that we are in a particular place?

EE: Standard-practice cinema often works to make the camera invisible. Since all human endeavors bear the weight of subjectivity, in my own work I do attempt to underscore the position of the camera’s location. I have often sought ways to create alternatives, such as, following documentarian Jill Godmilow’s directive “don’t shoot documentary footage at all,” using archival footage as a kind of proxy or misdirection, thus transposing time and place, or at least prying up a corner of the foundation of fixity. I suppose one other distinction to make is that film has a clear ability to engage in play; science often gets denied that mode of exploration.

DS: You do play with scale in a dramatic way, and shape; we do not recognize things immediately as they are out of our usual context. The close-up curve of the belly with its tiny hairs might be cilia, which the voice of the evolutionary biologist reminds us may also be the result of “community ecology” – of separate things coming together. For me, the juxtaposition of circles and semi-spherical shapes made me think of planetary horizons and celestial bodies. I am reminded of Pablo Neruda's poems comparing landscapes to women's bodies. Can you tell me if and how you think about the estrangement of the familiar, or how art can show what science imagines?

EE: Like Neruda, Willard Maas and Marie Menken’s Geography of a Body (1943) abstracts the human body to suggest untraversed landscapes, with the voice-over of a fictionalized explorer. There exists a cinematic tradition, a poetic tradition. And I had the same thought about the planetary horizons. I’m reminded of the photo, now known as Earthrise, taken by William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. The astronauts actually saw Earth off to the left of a vertical Moon rather than “rising” in a landscape perspective. Yet NASA and Life magazine edited the image, flipping it to a more recognizable, less disorienting horizontal view, and also cropped it to make the Earth appear bigger.

I see a parallel in that example of popularization as to how birth so often plays out onscreen. Birthing becomes reduced to recognizable dramatizations (“Push!” followed by heavy grunting). In the case of avant-garde filmmakers, like in Stan Brakhage’s film Window Water Baby Moving (1959), a more unusual paean to female strength and participatory engagement was made, or in Gunvor Nelson’s Kirsa Nicholina (1969), which includes holistic thinking about familial support.

Neither sentimentality or clinicality enters into Inside the Shared Life, by my reckoning. In filming my own labor, from the earliest controlled stages to the monitoring of contractions by a nurse, what I found was a near-absolute inward turning. My sense of sound was numbed, as if I really was submerged. What I experienced, at some level, in the extrusion of another living entity to fend independently, foils the ethos of endosymbiosis. The “shared” aspect shifted.

DS: There's a philosophical debate between the namers and the non-namers, Vladimir Nabokov for example, a naturalist who scoffs at those who don't know species names compared to a certain strain the poets, for example Ranier Maria Rilke, who in his eighth letter to a young poet advises, “One must be so careful with names anyway; it is so often the name of an offense that a life shatters upon, not the nameless and personal action itself...” Nietzsche too discusses how the word “leaf” obscures the radiant diversity of individual leaves. My mother seemed to embrace both these tendencies, both reveling in taxonomic distinctions but also contesting them, and proposing more accurate names. In Inside the Shared Life I detect the poetic impulse to show rather than tell, cutting through labels to encounter things, lives as if for the first time. Can you tell me what drew you to the work of Lynn Margulis, how it interacts with your artistic vision?

EE: I, too, revel in the poetry and constraints of names, of language itself, testing the tension between the precision of words and images and their incumbent limitations. Your references conjure for me Brakhage’s most famous lines in Metaphors on Vision (1963): “Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’?”

Not coincidentally, Inside the Shared Life runs in the palette of green; on a couple of levels, I felt myself to be in conversation with Brakhage. This particular film is built around green’s
weighty burden of all things ecological, ecotopian, growth-oriented, life-promoting, and ineffable. This film, I should say, is part of a larger color-coded series, RGB+K, the first being the “blue” retinal film (A Net to Catch the Light, 2016) and the most recent being the “black” film (Tenebrio molitor, 2020).

Of course, Lynn Margulis is the true nucleus here. She has long inspired me. I envy her undaunted aspect, her frankness, her gift for words, and her brilliance as a scientist and polymath. I cannot deny that she reminds me of my mother. She speaks, we lean in to listen. Everyone should see John Feldman’s Symbiotic Earth (2017) and read your biography Lynn Margulis: The Life and Legacy of a Scientific Rebel (2012). I never had the privilege of meeting her, but she’s one of those people with whom I find kinship beyond life, one of those sages whose wisdom reverberates beyond her generation, whose absence yawns up as a societal loss – all those unanswered questions that only she would have known to ask.

DS: Writer Eileen McGinness wrote a blog entry entitled Lynn Margulis and the Murky Boundaries of the Parental Self in which she explored the relationship of symbiosis in cells to the experience of motherhood, where one's idea of self undergoes a metamorphosis. McGinness even admitted that she was wrong in her initial thought that Margulis's own experience of being a mother triggered her ideas of the divided and joining selves of the microcosm. You seem also to associate the presence of a baby inside to the entanglements of symbiosis. Were those two semantic fields – motherhood and cell symbiosis – in your mind?

EE: I was thinking specifically of mitochondria, ancestral symbionts that live on within us and pass matrilineally. I am comforted to know that I have my mother’s and my mother’s mother’s mitochondria. What an intriguing thought to consider, how those organelles continue to be passed along, inside of us yet not of us. To quote you, Dorion, “We are crisscrossed and cohabited by stranger beings, intimate visitors who affect our behavior, appreciate our warmth, and are in no rush to leave. Like all visible life forms, we are composites.”

I am fascinated by the ongoing discoveries around our microbiomes and our viral-packed DNA. Any idea of being human, singularly “individual,” has been demolished in my lifetime. The title, as revealed in the film, comes from the Mandarin for endosymbiosis (内共生); “inside the shared life” is my own translation, taken with liberality from the characters, which could skew in various other directions. Motherhood fits this communal modality, too, on the cellular and genetic level with nucleic acids and proteins crossing placental and blood-brain barriers, and then the collective relationship venturing beyond into the home terrain, too.

DS: With very simple images and sounds you mix different worlds – the ocean, the laboratory, the hospital. The simplicity reminds me of haiku, or a Chinese painting, and the phrases – language expelling history, logograms “hold[ing] their heredity” suggest a dominance of the thing over the concept, the real over its interpretation. Can you say something about your aesthetic, or the philosophical stance pointed to by this powerful film?

EE: Cinema had its start in a search for an empirical answer: Do all four of a horse’s feet leave the ground when it runs? The animal-locomotion work of Muybridge, bird flight for Marey, insect studies for Percy Smith, and actuality films by the Lumière brothers. That empiricism was followed quickly by narrative, typified by D.W. Griffith and Méliès. Yet cinema arose out of the science of looking, to know in the empirical fashion. In short, these references boil down to the thing vs the idea or description of the thing. I like to look at the former and roll around formulations of the latter. I am interested in creating a sensorial thought experience, finding novel passages for navigating the density of life.

DS: In the middle of the film we are plunged into the maternity ward, the strange is rendered more familiar; the voice describes the origin of green animals; and the text tells us that autonomy was relinquished for possibility. Do you see a link here between the present state of nations instituting controls on mobility in the wake of the coronavirus? Do you see that opening up possibilities similar to those of endosymbionts, once free-living but now “trapped” – sometimes hereditarily – inside bigger collectives?

EE: Given Lynn Margulis’ central role in the articulation of the Gaia theory, I would love to hear her reformulation of it in the wake of our current viral pandemic. What we’re witnessing affirms her ontological formulation decades ago. We are viruses, we are bacteria, we are multitudes of different cells, of different species, of the same cells, of the same species, as part of a shared planet. We cannot escape our interconnectedness. If we explore the imposed biological, ecological, and astral strictures, then we open ourselves up for new prospects and more possibilities than can be perceived at present. Right now, that’s certainly a lot to fathom.

Credits

Voice: Lynn Margulis, 2003

16-MM Footage: How Your Blood Circulates, 1963 (Courtesy of A/V Geeks)

Underwater Sounds: Snapping Shrimp, Weddell Seal, Bearded Seal, Sperm Whale, Blue Whale, Boat Motor, Offshore Wind Turbine (Courtesy of Ocean Conservation Research)

Sound Mix: Hunter Ewen

Director, Camera, Sound Design, Edit: Erin Espelie