Collections/December 2023

Mark Lewis’s Unnatural Histories

Mark Lewis makes nature films like you’ve never seen before. In their strangeness, all the sublimity, absurdity, and incomprehensibility of the animal world—especially where it intersects with human society—comes into fascinating and wryly humorous focus. It’s little wonder that Werner Herzog is a big fan. Whether chronicling the ecological folly that unleashed a plague of biblical proportions upon Australia ( Cane Toads: An Unnatural History ) or the frequently strange relationships between people and fowl ( The Natural History of the Chicken ), these films reveal as much about the mysteries of the animal kingdom as they do about the endless oddities of human nature.

5 films