16/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Eva C Heldmann returns with an essay film about 18th-century botanist Catharina Helena Dörrien

“Is it possible, one might ask, to change the air of a country?” A mannered male voice narrates in long, informative sentences and sleek rhetorical questions the climate of Europe in 1781. Today’s Germany was, at that time, a patchwork of kingdoms called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and while the Enlightenment boasted figures such as Leibniz, Kant, Goethe and Bach, the 18th century already marked a steep decline of the old ways in favour of a new order. It seems that a country’s air changes as buildings and the population rise: it becomes warmer as the environment transforms.

This and many other facts one learns from Well Ordered Nature, German documentarian Eva C Heldmann’s newest film, which has premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum section. Heldmann, a mainstay in this sidebar, is known for her experimental approach to documentaries, but the ways in which this essay film probes conventions are provocative in a subtle, elegant way. Stitching together paper archives (18th-century prints of decrees and newspapers, such as the Dillenburg Intelligence News) and digital footage of Dillenburg today taken in its streets, parks and houses, the film pulls off a clever, anti-historiographical move. Guided by the narrator reading these texts aloud, the audience will be able to track the gradual fragmentation of society under a changing regime of governance. The twilight of monarchy and the regulations of employment, rent, idleness and city planning haunt the images of a verdant spring and a blooming summer in a rather empty town today.

However, the original German title, Ihre ergebenste Fräulein (lit. “Your Most Devoted Miss”) alludes to the film’s more personal and endearing undercurrents. There is another, much more prominent voice in the film: that of Catharina Helena Dörrien, a largely forgotten botanist and crucial figure of the 18th century. In this way, the picture recounts her biography based on letters (diary-style) and texts of hers. Dörrien, home-schooled and an autodidact, devoted her life to research and education while remaining unmarried – in a way, she embodied some of the Enlightenment ideals that were never associated with women to begin with. Kant, for example, famously considered women innately morally deficient. But what Heldmann does with her film is not simply making herstory; it’s a tender, but assertive, look back at a possible resistance to the supremacy of reason (understood in strictly patriarchal terms).

As the film intermittently cuts to (perhaps the only) portrait of Ms Dörrien, the female voice-over (courtesy of Elisabeth Gugel) speaks in neatly composed, but rather soft, German sentences, relaying not only the findings of the botanical research, but also the learning process that led to them. Curiosity, diligence and devotion emerge as virtues in her writing, but none of it has even the slightest tinge of didacticism. Eva C Heldmann, as director, cinematographer and editor, captures a certain aspect of her hometown’s past by keeping a decisive distance. In Well Ordered Nature, it’s the poetic language and the unembellished imagery that pave the way for alternative forms of political criticism: contemplative, meditative and impossible to ignore, just like the birds and the bees.

Well Ordered Nature is a German production by eva c heldmann films, while Loco Films handles its world sales.