Humans

By Simon Ings

National Library of Scotland
Film
Living Proof: A climate story Emily Munro
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An era-defining investigation of how growth occurs in nature and society, from tiny organisms to empires and civilisations, exploring the pitfalls of the drive to go big.
MOST environmental documentaries concentrate on the environment. Most films about climate change focus on people tackling the crisis. Living Proof, assembled and edited by Emily Munro, a curator of the moving image at the National Library of Scotland, is different.
It is a film about working people and their employers, about people whose day-to-day actions have contributed to Scotland’s industrialisation, its export of materials and methods (particularly in the field of offshore oil and gas) and the associated environmental impact.
Collated from an array of public information films and promotional videos from the 1940s onwards, and set to a contemporary soundtrack, Living Proof is an archival history of what Scotland has told itself about itself. It also explores the local and global repercussions of those stories, ambitions and visions.
Munro is in thrall to the changing Scottish industrial landscape, from its herring fisheries to its dams, from its slums and derelict mine-heads to the high modernism of its motorways and strip malls.
Living Proof is also – and this is more important – a film that respects its subjects’ changing aspirations. It tells the story of a nation that is trying to do right by its people.
It will come as no surprise, as Glasgow prepares to host the COP26 global climate conference, to hear that the consequences of those efforts haven’t been uniformly good. Powered by offshore oil and gas, and a redundancy-haunted grave for a dozen heavy industries, from coal mining and shipbuilding to steel manufacture, Scotland has a somewhat chequered environmental history.
“Much harm has been done to the planet in the name of doing what is best for the people”
As Munro’s film shows, however, the environment has always been a central plank of arguments both for and against industrial development in Scotland. The idea that people in Scotland (and elsewhere) have only now considered the environment is nonsense.
Only towards the end of Munro’s film do we meet protesters of any kind, deploring the construction in 1980 of a nuclear power plant at Torness, about 50 kilometres east of Edinburgh. Munro is less interested in the protest itself than in one impassioned speech that completes the argument begun in the first reel (via a public information film from the mid-1940s): that much harm has been done to the planet in the name of what is best for the people who depend on it, both as a home and a source of income.
This, indeed, is where we began: with a vision of a nation that, if it cannot support its own people, will go to rack and ruin, with (to quote that 1943 information film) “only the old people and a few children left in the glen”.
Living Proof critiques an economic system that, whatever its promises, cannot help but denude the planet of its resources, often at the expense of its people. It is all the more powerful for being articulated through real things: schools and pharmaceuticals, earth movers and oil rigs, washing machines and gas boilers.
Reasonable aspirations have done unreasonable harm to the planet. That is the real crisis elucidated by Living Proof. It is a point too easily lost in all the shouting. And it has rarely been made so well.
Simon also recommends…
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Bodysong
Simon Pummell
This BAFTA award-winning documentary about the human condition is woven from a dizzying array of archive resources.
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Growth
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By Krista Charles

Alto Paraná Atlantic forests, BrazilLuiz Alves/EyeEm/Getty Images
The Tupi people, who originated in what is now Brazil, probably spread out from this ancestral location following climatic change.
The language they speak, also called Tupi, is one of the most widespread language families among the Indigenous peoples of South America, and emerged about 5000 years ago in the south-west Amazon.
Jonas Gregorio de Souza at the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and his colleagues explored just how it came to be so widespread by simulating different scenarios for human expansion in South … More

By Michael Marshall

The lake inside the collapsed caldera of Corvo Island in the AzoresSantiago Giralt
One of history’s greatest journeys has been uncovered. People arrived on the islands of the Azores, in the central Atlantic, about 700 years earlier than thought.
“We can clearly identify evidence of early human impact on the islands before the official colonisation by the Portuguese,” says Pedro Raposeiro at the Research Centre in Biodiversity and Genetic Resources in Ponta Delgada on São Miguel Island in the Azores.
It isn’t certain who the first colonists were, but there is evidence that it was … More

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

A letter from Marie Antoinette to Axel von Fersen, dated 4 January 1792, that has been partially redactedCRC
During the throes of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette expressed her love for Swedish count Axel von Fersen through words that are finally readable 230 years later.
Modern scanning technology has successfully distinguished the ill-fated French queen’s ink from that of von Fersen, who scribbled over her text in what was probably an effort to protect his close friend and probable lover, says Anne Michelin at Sorbonne University in Paris.
She and her colleagues recently investigated 15 letters exchanged between Antoinette and von Fersen from 1791 to 1792 at the request of the French National Archives. While the majority of each letter was readable, certain words or sections had been hidden under heavily penned loops and random letters – Js, Ls, and Ts mostly – intended to censor the document. Forensic units of the French National Police made an unsuccessful attempt to uncover the hidden words in the 1990s, but the technology of the time was lacking, says Michelin.Advertisement
This year, Michelin’s team used X-ray fluorescence scanning to hone in on the compositions of metallic elements like copper, iron and zinc in the letters’ ink. Because the various inks used in the letters contained different ratios of these elements, the researchers were able to customise their scanning techniques to decipher original words buried under the layers of looping ink – sometimes needing to adjust their methods even for a single word, which could take several hours to scan.

Their analyses also resolved the mystery of who had censored the letters. By comparing the compositions of the ink used for scribbling out words and that used for von Forsen’s own writing, the researchers confirmed that von Fersen himself had done the redacting.
“There were probably political reasons for keeping the letters,” says Michelin, adding that they might have been intended to present a more favourable public image of the queen, who was ultimately beheaded by guillotine in 1793. “But von Fersen could have just been very attached to these letters, as well.”
Marie Antoinette wrote to von Fersen at lengths about political concerns of the time, including how the royal family was coping with the revolution, says Michelin. Her censored writing, however, featured more romantic vocabulary – terms like “beloved” and “adore” and intimate phrases like “No, not without you” and “you, whom I love and will continue to love until my…”.
Extramarital relationships were commonplace throughout the history of French royalty, so a romance between Marie Antoinette and von Fersen wouldn’t be surprising, says Michelin. Even so, the newly discovered words don’t confirm that they were lovers.
“Correspondence is always just one part of the whole story,” she says. “We write, but we don’t necessarily write what we think. And what we write can be exacerbated by dramatic situations, like a revolution. The queen was no longer free to move around, so of course that would exacerbate her emotions. You can really feel that in her writing.”
Unfortunately, the researchers’ scanning techniques still weren’t advanced enough to discriminate the buried words in seven of the letters, which remain a mystery, says Michelin.
Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg4266

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Three decades spent working as a psychotherapist with the most violent offenders has convinced Gwen Adshead that they aren’t the monsters we portray them as

Humans

29 September 2021

By Rowan Hooper

Jennie Edwards
HOW do people come to commit violent and life-threatening acts? Some think such people are innately bad, calling them “monsters” or “evil”. It is a view that William Shakespeare encapsulated in The Tempest when Prospero says of Caliban that he is “a born devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”. But Gwen Adshead doesn’t accept that view. She has spent her career working as a psychotherapist with offenders in prisons and secure psychiatric hospitals, including Broadmoor Hospital, where some of the UK’s most notorious criminals are detained. Rather than seeing violent offenders as being innately evil, she thinks of her patients as survivors … More

By Annalee Newitz

traveler111/iStockphoto
LAST year, High Country News published an online, interactive map that helped me understand 200 years of US history in about 10 minutes. At first glance, it looks like one of those airline maps that show flight paths: blue and red lines arc over the nation, linking east to west. But when the map is fully loaded, there are so many lines that they blur into a cocoon swaddling the skies over North America. This isn’t a map of connection after all, it is a chronicle of property theft, done in the name of education.
Anyone familiar with the … More

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Latitude is geographer Nicholas Crane’s account of the first international scientific expedition, in 1735, to discover the planet’s shape, a journey beset by egos, disease, mutiny and murder.
Anti-Body by Alexander Whiteley Dance Company, Photo by Sodium
Visit
Anti-Body on 8 October at DanceEast in Ipswich, UK, sees dancers reacting to motion-responsive visuals in Alexander Whitley’s latest experiment in performance and new media. A tour follows.Advertisement

Watch
Five Patterns That Explain the Universe are explored by Brian Clegg on 7 October at 18.00 BST. This New Scientist event unpacks the shapes, from Feynman diagrams to the DNA double helix, on which reality depends. More

By Davide Abbatescianni

Inheriting mining rights on Arrakis is a poisoned chalice for Paul (right)Chiabella James/Warner Bros
FilmDuneIn UK cinemas from 22 October

ONE of the most anticipated flicks at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is the first chapter of a new two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel.
The story begins in AD 10,191 in a universe ruled by an interstellar empire in which noble houses fight to control planetary fiefs.Advertisement
The Atreides family, led by Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is tasked with administering Arrakis, an inhospitable desert planet abundant in “spice”, a mind-altering substance that is crucial for interstellar travel. Neither the planet’s previous rulers, the Harkonnens, nor its hardy citizens, the Fremen, are pleased to see them – and mining spice is made treacherous by the presence of gigantic, territorial sandworms.
The first part of the film depicts the transition of power after the family’s arrival on Arrakis, and establishes the relationships that the Duke’s son Paul (Timothée Chalamet) has with his mother, the mystical Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and his two mentors, weapons master Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) and swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa).
This set-up is effective: we learn that Paul fears his future as the next Duke, that he dedicates himself to intellectual and physical training and that he can count on his parents who, despite their institutional roles, are generally supportive.
As Dune progresses, however, the focus shifts from family drama towards politics and the turbulent relations with the Fremen. This transforms the remaining two-thirds of the film into a dull space opera, where the serious and the overly solemn tone starts to impinge on the excitement and mystery. Meanwhile, the story descends into cliché-filled dialogues about strength, courage and honour, the likes of which are all too common in the sci-fi and superhero genres.
Villeneuve takes spectacular visuals to the next level – the Harkonnens’ attack on Arrakis is a prime example, as is the scene in which Idaho manages to dispatch half a dozen enemies with relative ease despite a serious stab wound to the chest.
While the movie is packed with tension, majestic heroism and countless mortal dangers, it is sadly let down by the mediocre quality of the writing and the varying levels of performance among the cast.
Chalamet successfully embodies a young man hesitantly embracing the perils and the responsibilities of adulthood. Stellan Skarsgård brilliantly portrays Baron Vladimir Harkonnen’s greed and pure evil, and it is a shame that his character wasn’t more present throughout. Ferguson, however, fails to provide the complexity of her tripartite role of wife, mystic and mother. She opts for a strange neutrality of expression that struggles to prompt any particular sympathy or antipathy.
Chani, the Fremen warrior portrayed by Zendaya, is reduced to someone bathed by the setting sun, and who occasionally shows up in Paul’s visions. Later, she makes a short, clichéd “tough-girl” appearance, before taking part in one of the most banal endings in the history of sci-fi.
Overall, the adrenaline-filled scenes teamed with Hans Zimmer’s omnipresent, bombastic score make the 155-minute viewing time a rather tiring experience. Unfortunately, the visually astonishing cinematography by Greig Fraser, the star-studded cast and the industrial quantities of special effects don’t save the day.
Dune fails to deliver the ecological, anti-colonialist spirit of the original novel, nor does it provide an urgent, fresh take that would justify retelling its epic vicissitudes. In short: too much action, not nearly enough heart. More