True-Life Adventures I, II, & III
Erin Espelie, 17mins, 2014
Using found sound from Disney's 1940-50s nature documentaries, this trilogy creates a mismatch between the digital image and historic/histrionic voiceover. It confounds traditional nature documentaries by adhering to strict time and spatial limits, and ratchets up false expectations about wildlife; continuity editing begins to break down to reveal a necessarily condensed representation of the natural world.
Erin Espelie
Erin Espelie is a writer, editor, and filmmaker, with degrees in molecular and cellular biology from Cornell University and the experimental and documentary arts from Duke University. Her poetic, nonfiction films have shown around the world at the New York Film Festival, the British Film Institute's London Film Festival, the Whitechapel Gallery, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, Imagine Science Film Festival, and more.
Espelie holds an associate professorship in Cinema Studies and the Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she co-founded and co-directs NEST (Nature, Environment, Science & Technology) Studio for the Arts. Espelie has published in TiltWest, Leonardo, the Brooklyn Rail, and has co-edited Deep Horizons: A Multisensory Archive of Ecological Affects & Prospects (Amherst College Press, 2023).
​
Artist page: ​ https://erinespelie.com/
​
​
