Amy Cutler
Directing
Biography
Amy is an artist, cultural geographer, and live cinema artist who works with ideas of geography and nonhuman others. In her career in the GeoHumanities she has completed a PhD, a post-doc, and an ECR fellowship, and she has exhibited her work or run live events with organisations including the BBC, Somerset House, The Exploratorium San Francisco, Glastonbury Festival, Sheffield Doc Fest, the Wellcome Trust, the Horniman Museum, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Late Junction, Tate Modern, the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, the Horse Hospital, San Francisco Green Film Festival, the Natural History Museum, and Kew Gardens. Her geography training impacts her work as a musician, performer, and designer, and she works frequently on the production of immersive and live cinema and exhibition events provoking and changing the public conversation around ideas of space, geography, and nature-cultures. She is also a cross-disciplinary lecturer and teaches more publicly too, often developing unusual live sessions and fieldtrips for museums, festivals, and galleries.
Known For
Inspired by the poetry of Edwin Morgan where natural and domestic worlds collide and the hidden animal instincts of humans rise to the surface, this poetic visual narrative features voices from interviews recorded around the UK, woven into an evocative soundtrack. Stop motion puppets and live action footage combine to tell a dark love story.
O, Hunter Heart
In early 2020, MUTA - International Festival of Audiovisual Appropriation and Cine Íntimo rescued and digitised a Peruvian archive of orphaned 8mm and Super 8 home movies. With the aim of restoring these lost memories, we sent the images around the world. This omnibus film is the result of the intervention of this material, by 14 experimental filmmakers. Fourteen perspectives and ways of experiencing appropriation. Fourteen variations on the intimate.
Fourteen variations on the intimate
In Amy Cutler’s "Supermoon Variations", a red super-moon is evocatively refracted through lenses and 35mm nature slides. Filmed during lockdown from Cutler’s London balcony, the film captures a night-time performance in which shapes are barely visible, with an immersive soundtrack intensifying glimmers of detail and illusionary perspectives of human scale.
Supermoon Variations
All Her Beautiful Green Remains In Tears (2018) consists of re-purposed footage from Walt Disney's Nature's Half Acre (1951), with its parables about domesticated postwar suburbia: nest building, chick rearing, mother love, industrious insects, and traditional gender roles. In this case, the new voiceover - replacing Winston Hibler - also focuses on romantic anthropomorphism. The difference is this voiceover has been generated by a neural network which has learned its existence entirely from reading the female protagonist voice in romance novels. Using image recognition/ closed captioning, it tells an entirely different story of the birds and the bees of nature documentary: one of female desire, trauma, masochism, and emotional fantasy. Commissioned by Live Cinema UK.