Monumental grandeur, green density, heterogenous ecosystem, leafy maze: forests are a world beyond ours, a support for the imagination, full of enigmas and mysteries. In his study of the history of forests in the Western civilisation, Robert Harrison states that

Movies often give forests limited roles; they are spectacular settings, full of symbolic protections, or inhabited by hostile or fantastic creatures. In the Hollywood blockbuster Avatar, James Cameron shows forests as a green, mystic, synthetic and obscure beauty, as an eerie environment where stories of futuristic myths are told. The movie borrows from countless other films, and so forests appear as nothing more than lush scenic ornamentations, a (super)natural, hyperbolic backdrop in which men and giant humanoids fight.

There are others, like Philippe Grandrieux, Naomi Kawase, Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, or Lisandro Alonso, who look more humbly on the wooded world, in a more frontal and dualistic way; they remind us of the sensory power of the vegetal environment, they are aware of life’s quivering reality. In their films, forests are an affirmation of a vigorous yet discreet strength; they are a place for the living, rather than a space for the recluse. Therefore, they appear in the pictures as something other than a simple decoration, a temporary and evasive participant. The camera occupies the undergrowth, feels its texture, hooks on to the plants’ arteries, cuts into the bark of the trees: it proclaims that the forest’s nature is to be lived in, to be explored. These filmmakers create narratives that connect the body to its organic environment, whose monumentality overwhelms and dominates us; they weave tactile poetry. Forests, in their films, are no longer a space to contemplate and become instead a place where one can put down roots, even if only for a time. They are no longer a landscape in which to get lost, and become an integral, macrocosmic foundation, where forces can be replenished.