Countless places across the U.S. bear the name of Alexander von Humboldt. In fact, the German naturalist and polymath has been described as the person with more species – from penguins and monkeys to an orchid – and places named after him than any other human. And at the beginning of the 19th century, he proposed a radical idea that has also been popular in the context of climate change: to consider nature as a “network of interconnected lives.”
Humboldt USA, the feature film debut from G. Anthony Svatek, follows in his footsteps, traveling across the U.S., from ancient redwood forests to a parkway in New York state and the bright lights of Nevada, to explore our evolving relationship with nature. Weaving together the stories of people in those locations, Humboldt’s own words and thoughts from the filmmaker, the kaleidoscopic result is a playful, but also fraught, love letter to the naturalist.
Humboldt USA world premieres in the international feature film competition of the 57th edition of the Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel in Nyon, near Geneva, on Wednesday, April 22. After that, the film will get its U.S. and North American premiere on May 2 at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look, its festival focused on “adventurous new cinema.”
“Countless places across the United States still bear the name of Alexander von Humboldt — queer naturalist, visionary ecologist, now largely forgotten,” highlight the press notes for the movie. “The longing filmmaker uses three of them as unlikely common ground, weaving through present-day lives: urban activists greening neglected neighborhoods, scientists scanning redwood forests, hunters returning bighorn sheep to protected land. Across generations and landscapes, Humboldt USA asks what remains of a vision of ‘interconnectedness’.”
Humboldt USA was produced by Svatek and Elijah Stevens of Space Time Films, which is also handling sales. Svatek wrote and directed the doc, with Sean Hanley and the filmmaker handling the film’s cinematography. The editing was done by Kaija Siirala and Svatek.
Brooklyn-based Svatek, whose shorts have included the 2023 Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, a “cine-collage manifesto in defense of beauty amidst political cynicism and environmental alienation” based on an essay by George Orwell and narrated by Tilda Swinton, was raised in the Austrian Alps. And as you can probably already tell, his work has probed humans’ fractured relationship with the natural world.
Ahead of the film’s world premiere, Svatek talked to THR about Humboldt USA, humans’ relationship with nature and what elements of his personal experience mirror Humboldt’s life.
Why did you decide to make a film about Humboldt? What spoke to you about his life? I was aware of some of his work, but didn’t realize how big a mark he left in the U.S.
I also knew him as a name and as a figure, but not much more than that. In 2015, a best-selling book came out, The Invention of Nature [by Andrea Wulf], which was a very gripping biography that I read. It made him out to be this gay proto-environmentalist who predicted man-made climate change 200 years ago, which was a very appealing story.
I identified with him in some way, because there were these biographical parallels between him and me. He called himself half-American, half-German, and I am half-Austrian, half-American. We have the same birthday. We’re both queer. These biographical parallels got me hooked on this personal level, but the pervasiveness and fame that he had at the time, and how it showed itself in the landscape all across the United States, were also really interesting to me.
He became the anchor, an interesting figure, to think about how environmentalism and our relationship to the natural world have changed over the past 200 years. His approach to the natural world was either this romanticized approach or a very scientific one. And he encapsulates both of those.
Can you tell me a bit more about those two approaches?
I feel that within the Western paradigm, we’re still struggling with these two opposites. Nature’s either fenced in at a national park or it is the domain of science. Both of them are very abstract visions and understandings of the natural world. But then Humboldt talked about how everything was interconnected. Given that I’m interested in the way that technology has changed our relationship to the natural world, he was a really interesting anchor to talk about what interconnectedness means nowadays.
I didn’t want to make a biographical film, but I saw his name all over the country, and that felt like an invitation to explore this idea of interconnectedness 200 years later and how it manifests itself.
I often try to look for how things are connected and how a cause over here may have an effect over there. But while watching Humboldt USA, I caught myself realizing that there may also be problems with that thinking. How early did you know that you would touch on these pros and cons?
I’m so glad you picked up on that, because I wanted the film to reflect that complexity. Humboldt, as a person, is also a very complicated, complex figure, so I wanted the subjects and the people I was filming to reflect that as well, both in their personal stories, but also as a conceptual thing.
Yes, nowadays, this idea of everything being interconnected is very popular again, both in the ecological sense and in the technological sense. I’m very much a techno-skeptic, and so a lot of my previous work is about the way that technological progress changes our relationship with the natural world. I’ve made a number of shorts about that topic. Nature is a very abstract, mediated experience for many people living in cities, like myself.
How did you pick the locations and find the characters we see in Humboldt USA?
I started to pick Humboldt place names and tried to keep in mind the spectrum of environments, both social and landscape-wise, to represent the U.S. So I wanted something that felt very urban, I wanted something that felt very rural, and I wanted something that felt very techno utopia with AI people in California.
I just started spending time in these places, talking to people and trying to connect with them. It became this very intuitive process of casting, so to speak. In the case of California, for example, a fellow filmmaker said: “There’s this group of people who call themselves ecological archivists, and they try to scan redwoods and bring all this gear into nature to try and make organic algorithms.”
I heard you worked on this film for several years.
Yeah, it has taken a while. I started my first research shoot at the end of 2019, so it’s been almost seven years. I started in Nevada with this sheep relocation shoot, and then, of course, COVID hit. And then there was a period of a year or two of not much happening.
We hear your voice in Humboldt USA in what feels like a conversation with or a love letter to Humboldt. But you’re also sharing disappointments and concerns. How early did you decide to record this voiceover as a narrative device?
That was the hardest element, writing the voiceover. Anybody who’s ever made a film that includes voiceover knows how difficult it is. I kept coming back to this original feeling that I had when I first learned more about Humboldt. I really did feel like I was falling in love with him over time. But then, as it happens when you fall in love or have a crush on someone, eventually, there is some disappointment. And the more time you spend with them, the more nuanced they become, the more complex they become. That’s what makes a person, right?
People are complex. People aren’t these heroified figures the way that Humboldt has often been made out to be, or the villain, as he has sometimes also been cast. He’s just this complicated, complex figure. And I felt this form of a love letter or speaking to him was also a good device to underline the rapid changes over the past 200 years. “This is what interconnectedness looks like now. And you embodied this, too! You would have been enthusiastic about the technological advances in infrastructure and all this stuff. But look at the consequences of that now!”
AI has become such a big, timely topic of debate. How did AI make its way into Humboldt USA as a topic?
The California AI storyline I started working on in 2021, 2022, so pre-ChatGPT. I was at times thinking: “What are these people talking about?! I don’t understand this at all.” And then ChatGPT came out, and AI exploded. It just underscored the relevance of all these storylines.
Do you know what you are doing next?
I’ve lately been commissioned to do work that has all had to do with the New York art world, which is a very different topic and environment from what I’m used to. But it came at an opportune moment, because for the past year or two, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the topic of climate change and the climate crisis has disappeared so much, and in what ways it has broken through.
I’m working on a narrative, or maybe hybrid, project that goes into the strategy of direct action in art museums by environmental activists. They use the strategy of attacking public art to draw attention to the climate crisis. That is something that I’m circling around, but I don’t know what shape that’s going to take.
In our media landscape, scandal and outrage are modes through which we get attention. So, I think their tactic is super interesting. I don’t necessarily agree with everything they’re doing, but I think this idea of intentional provocation, and then turning it around to talk about a topic, is interesting. Throwing a can of soup against a protected Van Gogh painting is a really desperate tactic, but also radical. It’s totally polarizing, and I think that’s interesting. I don’t think my film would say this is good or bad, but it would go into the complexities.
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