Carnations (Martijn Van de Wiele, 2021)

The Returning Flower

Martijn Van de Wiele’s Carnations

essay by

Boet Meijers

16.11.2024

“What a joy, what a bliss, what a delightful, noble, and meaningful deed it would be if a man could succeed in creating even a single such flower! But no one could do it, no hero, no emperor, no pope, and no saint.” — Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

Martijn van de Wiele’s Carnations is, in his own words, a meditation. In about fifteen minutes, this KASK-graduation film documents the growth and harvest of carnations in a greenhouse, from their trembling beginnings to their deep orange, dark-rimmed fates. Van de Wiele shows these movements in a detached way: they are allowed to exist without the filmmaker interrupting. With precise framing and a musing montage, van de Wiele places himself close to the temporal experience of the flowers. This creates a distance between the filmmaker’s slow contemplation, which focuses on the development of the plants, and the mechanical speed that comes with this scale of flower cultivation. The carnation becomes twofold: a multifaceted symbol and artistic object on the one hand, and a product of commerce on the other.

Delicate close-ups of flowers are anchored in Carnations; excluded from their context of cultivation, the flowers are rendered self-contained. Other scenes, in which children whiz by on rollerblades or industrious workers keep busy, seem to come from another world. The unbridgeable gap in time lapse between them and the flowers places them on a plane of existence where the film cannot follow them. During their lifetimes, humans will see many generations of carnations passing through; during those of the plants, human growth will be barely noticeable—one’s eternity is but the summer of the other. Almost effortlessly, the editing meanders between these two planes, positioning the film on the cutting edge.

There is a certain solemnity in this portrayal of nature: as a camera operator, Van de Wiele gets down on his knees in some of the images, filming the plants from below and letting their crowns stand out against a bright blue sky to which they stretch their fingers, as if—if left unpruned—they would continue to grow into eternity, closer and closer to their nourishing sun. A favour is done to the carnations here; framed individually, they are momentarily freed from mass production, a space in which a flower becomes the flower. Here, sublimation applies as a consequence of isolation; when viewed up close for long periods, the flowers become signs that interact with the imaginations, willingness to rapture, and perils of those who look at them. Carnations’ great asset is the ability to remain open-minded, trusting that by carefully choosing what to show, something will grow on the fertile soil of the viewer’s eyes.

Carnations

Martijn Van de Wiele, Belgium, 2021, 16’

An artificial summer rules the greenhouse. Workers tend to carnations. In a multitude of splendid colours, they grow towards the sun until they’re ready to fulfill their cut-flower destiny. Carnations is an audiovisual meditation on movements within a carnation nursery close to filmmaker Martijn van de Wiele’s home.

Within the greenhouse, there is an ecosystem, one where man is at the service of the plant, guiding it in growth and multiplication, and the plant, in turn, is at the service of man, to be shared with loved ones or flaunted on a prince’s lapel.

Boet Meijers

The mysticism surrounding the carnations in the film is at odds with the industrial reality. In a grid of about ten to fifteen square inches, bulbs are planted in the ground with the same routine speed and precision you see along assembly lines, albeit in this case, with a tenderness not accorded to car parts. The spacing between each carnation compromises maximum occupancy and minimum growing space.

Their habitat is carefully designed to support and protect the carnations as fully as possible. There are no threats here; it is just an excellently irrigated incubator to mature. Skilled workers, through cosmetic surgery, strip the plants of leaves that grow too close to the bud: the carnations are modeled after the ideal dictated by the market. Within the greenhouse, there is an ecosystem, one where man is at the service of the plant, guiding it in growth and multiplication, and the plant, in turn, is at the service of man, to be shared with loved ones or flaunted on a prince’s lapel. Once mature and picked, they are selected and arranged into bouquets. The floor is littered with rejected specimens: too small, too pale, or with some other genetic flaw that can only be labeled ugly by those who have just granted the carnation its beauty.

Where it is impossible—as sung by Goldmund in the quote above—to match the elusive splendour of the flower, all that remains is to try to capture it, hold it, and then unfold your hand and show what you have found. In the end, Carnations is just that: a retelling of a meditative making process—a chronicle of stillness at knee height, animated by the images and thoughts whispered by the crop.