Treeline (2021) is a collaged film, built from clips of mostly equal length, around 2-3 seconds. It moves from shot to shot, turning in the same direction. It is a rotary movement, from a still point turning on an axis. This directional turn sweeps, like an unstoppable force, across the regular chopping of footage. 

The footage Ruth Maclennan’s film is made up from is crowdsourced – shot and sent to the artist by many people around the world, largely during the extended period of various Covid lockdowns and travel restrictions. The clips have been cut and stitched into chapter-like chains, unruly groupings of weather conditions, natural elements and human endeavours – each relaying different formulations and kinds of human-forest relations. Amongst these course rivulets of visual qualities, overlapping and entwined flows of poetic, textural affinities.    

Stills from Treeline, 2021

Stills from Treeline, 2021

Close poring over individual trunks reveals scabrous, furred, glistening specificities. This intimate searching strays from the dominant directional turn: down to the floor and up to the sky, discovering insects, mushrooms, fruits and blossoms. Environs from the far ends of the earth are tied together by typologies like: mistiness, water’s edge, mode of travel, grassy borders, reflections and pathways. Vibrations and blurs belie footage shot from trains, lorries and motorboats. Here, the horizon line dances beautifully and strikingly. On the film charges, finding transitions and passages to thread and join. The inexhaustible patchwork of landscape is crossed by all kinds of lines – sight lines, power lines, water lines, desire lines.

A long chain shows humans, animals and machines at work. Snippets of construction, tools and techniques. Hands and feet tending, planting, cutting –- moving with elegance and skill. In a jolting shift of perspective and scale, a rising helicopter casts a birds-eye view of massive deforestation. As the film churns there is no time to latch on. Things and thoughts are turned over and kicked up like dust. Butterfly-like yellow leaves flutter tied, just, to their form. Remnants of devastation follow fire and storm. Cold testimonies hover over the aftermath of miserable loss. There is a directional change, as though a weathervane blown by the wind, and the camera rotates the opposite way as it sinks down into the grasses in the dying sunlight. 

Stills from Treeline, 2021

Still from Treeline, 2021.

There’s a saturation of longing and loneliness to the film, which seems partly to do with the remembered isolation and stretching separations of Covid, partly with the blindness of the participants to each other’s contributions, and partly with the working lens. Much of the footage is made by people whose access to and presence in the places they are filming is because it is their work, and this creates a strange haze of shifting intentions and understandings. These snippets of film seem to contemplate things that are part of the camera holder’s every day, familiar to them but looked at now slightly askance. As though previously homeless or needless thoughts have found a place to be expressed. The film glimmers with shy observations, half formed feelings, ventured with uncertainty, not knowing what will spark and catch when it joins with the others and what will die out.

Directions were offered by Maclennan to the participants, to find a horizontal compositional line and follow it slowly from left to right. Collective pursuit of a continuous line provides thrust and a thread for the composite film, but one eminently available for rearticulation. It is troubled by the reality of treescapes and their tangles, layers and stripes, easily overcome by the wandering curiosity of the its filmmaker or editor, or by a competing movement onscreen. It dies out, adapts, transforms. It follows the meaning of the term ‘treeline’, as the outer edge of a habitat beyond which trees cannot tolerate to live, to become understood as less a line than an expression of conditions. As it staggers and leaps between realms and dimensions, this limber, elusive line has a utopian charge. It gains momentum by buy-in to its form, but this seems to offer ever more freedom to encompass apprehension of tender, strange and vulnerable qualities as it goes.

Still from Treeline, 2021.