Natural Wonders
In Jessica Sarah Rinland’s 2016 short The Flight of an Ostrich (Schools Interior), a shy, studious eight-year-old becomes transfixed by a nature documentary while her more rambunctious classmates whisper and pass notes around her. “The ostrich is incapable of doing the one thing birds are famous for: they cannot fly,” the documentary’s narrator intones with BBC-inflected authority. Rinland registers the young girl’s enthusiasm in extreme close-ups, first focusing on her eyes and then the corner of her mouth, suggesting a secret smile. The other kids are all framed in wider shots, bored and antsy like the schoolboys in Le quatre cents coups (1959). When discussion turns to the ostrich’s defence mechanisms—its uncommon speed, strength, stride, and agility—Rinland cuts to a close-up of the girl’s ear, underlining the message of the film: “If you’re a bird that can’t fly, you have to find other ways of surviving.” The girl picks up a note from the floor, folds it into an airplane, stands, and tosses it towards a window while everyone around her looks on in silence. It’s a small but significant moment of self-actualization.
In most respects, is an outlier among the 20 films Rinland has made since 2008. Commissioned by Channel 4’s short-film program , it’s a crowd-pleasing, inspirational, on-the-nose story told effectively and efficiently in just is a useful point of entry into Rinland’s practice because it expresses so matter-of-factly many of her preoccupations and stylistic habits: playfully poking at traditional documentary tropes; mixing classical narrative montage and scripted performances with more experimental strategies; collecting visual material with the curiosity of an archivist (the ostrich footage, which Rinland shot herself in Esteros del Iberá in Argentina, is used in a previous film as well); and precisely modulating the affective experience of viewers, primarily through her dedication to 16mm film and her reliance on formal techniques that verge on ASMR. More simply, the young girl in is a convenient personification of the authorial voice that guides much of Rinland’s work, which is full of wonder and open to epiphany.
