Available now on dual-format Blu-Ray/ DVD
“We now move on from science to what looks like science fiction,” intones a local news broadcaster back in 1973, introducing a segment on some ‘blobs’ discovered by a local man. We now know these strange organisms to be plasmodial slime molds. Occupying some curious biological hinterland between fungi and animal, slime molds display instinctive intelligence and will congregate and spread to locate food sources.
Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp’s documentary examines these bizarre creatures and the enthusiasts who study and utilise them. These include scientists, mycologists, artists, and even musicians. As they respond to stimuli, these molds can power the movements of robotic heads, be used as organic sensors, as art projects, as players in an avant-grade jam session.
The film uses time-lapse photography to startling effect. The problem-solving capabilities of the slime mold matches their strange, pulsing beauty, and the filmmakers have strived to make the experience as cinematic as possible. The Creeping Garden is presented very much like a pulp sci-fi classic such as The Blob and Phase IV, highlighting the links between the hive-mind behaviour of these molds and these movies. Even today, a film like The Girl With All the Gifts plays with a zombie plague caused by intelligent spores. Jim O’Rourke of veteran US experimentalists Sonic Youth provides a suitably sparse and dissonant retro-futuristic score.
Even with such impeccable presentation it is hard to stretch this subject to feature length, so thankfully some of the talking heads in The Creeping Garden are as eccentric as the strange beasts about which they are so enthused. One artist in particular creates chintzy wallpaper patterned with the cellular view of her cervical smear, calling it ‘interior design’. However, there’s no mockery implied by the filmmakers, or cynicism; they just want to talk to people as full of wonder about this weird avenue of the natural world as they are.
The Creeping Garden is surely something of a niche release, for all its handsome production values and its loving movie nods. Even for those with a taste for documentaries about nature in all its mad, hallucinatory glory, it’s unlikely to become habitual viewing. It is well worth seeing however, and in a month that’s seen the passing of Jack H. Harris, producer of The Blob, among many others, it’s something of an unlikely tribute.