Resumo

In the “tiny” world of F. Percy Smith – the well-known naturalist of the 19th century – both cinema and nature play a key role in showing the intimate and “hidden life of insects and plants in a way that people have never seen before” (National Science and Media Museum). As a naturalist, F. Percy Smith was interested in exploring the many educational possibilities of cinema from the several landscapes he shot, creating an interesting combination of landscape and moving image. About a hundred years later, Stuart A. Staples, lead singer of Tindersticks, visits and revisits the cinematic world of F. Percy Smith by creating a film from the series Secrets of Nature (1922). With Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith (2017) Staples develops a cinematic montage based on Smith’s “pure cinema”. In it, Staples traverses Smith’s microscopic landscapes in an exercise that seeks to observe the wonder created in the naturalist’s first exhibitions, as well as the construction of a new landscape that points to an eternal and ethereal movement. As such, the purpose of this essay is twofold: firstly, to analyze F. Percy Smith’s intimate and microscopic landscapes and, secondly, to perceive Minute Bodies as a film that tries to recover this initial wonder of the moving images by creating new landscapes from the archives of Smith’s films.