Thursday, June 8, 2017

The Hellstrom Chronicle: Turning insects into monsters



With the 1971 Academy Award for Best Documentary, The Hellstrom Chronicle connects amazing micro-documentary footage with a horrific voice-over from fictional character, Dr. Hellstrom (Lawrence Pressman). The film’s faux documentary stance, however, is complicated by its confusing rhetorical message. It warns of mass elimination due to environmentally disastrous practices performed by insects at the micro-level. But it also suggests their survival will not be threatened. Such a complex perspective may draw on the expertise of the documentary’s filmmakers: Co-director and co-cinematographer Walon Green also co-wrote the screenplay for Sam Peckinpah’s hyper-violent The Wild Bunch (1969). The documentary’s screenwriter David Seltzer was also the author of The Omen (1976) and Prophecy (1979), and the producer, David L. Wolper, also produced Appointment with Destiny (1971), a pseudo-documentary television series. The series used grainy film stock and chiaroscuro lighting to simulate the appearance of actual documentary footage from pre-cinema eras to enhance episodes such as one highlighting the shootout at the O.K. Corral.



Reviews of Hellstrom were also mixed, primarily because the film combined a fictional narrator with authentic documentary footage. Roger Ebert states for example that the film “has hypnotically fascinating color photography of insects. The camera becomes so intimate with insects, indeed, that at times we are actually in bed with copulating spiders …. Precisely because the photography of insects is so astonishingly good, the narration is annoying.” DVD reviewer Glenn Erickson maintains that the film “has top-level docu credentials” and “uses excellent footage of insect life” but also thinks the voiceover weakens the film.



Perhaps in an attempt to warn humanity about the negative consequences of their own exploitation of the natural world, the film constructs insects as monsters first by highlighting characteristics that Stephen R. Kellert suggests promote fear in humans. But those traits may also draw on the qualities shared by the most horrific versions of ourselves. According to Kellert, insects have “vastly different ecological strategies, spatially and temporally.” They rely on an “extraordinary multiplicity” rather than “individual identity and selfhood,” and their “shapes and forms appear ‘monstrous’” (quoted in Brown xi). But insects are also “often associated with notions of mindlessness and an absence of feeling,” as with the link between insects and madness, a link that explicitly connects the insect and human worlds. And they also possess a radical “autonomy … from human will and control” (Kellert quoted in Brown xi), a disposition also associated with humans who resist subjugation. Their incredible fecundity seems to generate the most fear in humans, according to Kellert, a stereotype associated with some humans, as well.



By emphasizing these fear-inducing characteristics, the film seems not only to warn humanity about insects seeming invulnerability, but also to attribute their possible dominance on Earth to humanity’s own mistreatment of the natural world. If we continue to destroy our environment, the film suggests, our species will be usurped by the insect world. Despite the film’s attempts to separate humans and insects, however, its narrative and film footage suggest insects will inherit the earth not because they are superior to humans but because they are just like us.



Ultimately, insects become monstrous in The Hellstrom Chronicle because they resemble humans at their worst, as, what Eric C. Brown calls “humanity’s Other” (xi). Drawing on all levels of anthropomorphism proposed by Persson et al., the film constructs insects as monsters by highlighting their primitive psychological qualities, their connection to human folk-psychology, their traits and “dispositions,” the social roles they play, and the emotions they both display and produce.


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