Field Resistance

Charging scenes of the present with dystopian speculation, Emily Drummer’s latest film Field Resistance blurs the boundaries between documentary filmmaking and science fiction to investigate overlooked environmental devastation in the overlooked state of Iowa. The film rejects the human individual as the focus of narrative cinema, and, instead, adopts the perspective of a symbiotic “implosive whole” in which human and nonhumans are related in an overlapping, non-total way.

Emily Drummer is a film and video artist who uses immersive research as a starting point to investigate the dynamic between technology and the natural world. Her sensory essay films blur common distinctions between art and scholarship to produce meditative worlds at the intersection of poetry and documentary. She received her MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa and her BA from Hampshire College. She was awarded a 2017 Princess Grace Film Honoraria and a 2015 Flaherty Film Seminar Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited in galleries, festivals, and microcinemas such as Antimatter, Experiments in Cinema, Alchemy Film Festival, Milwaukee Underground Film Festival, and the Nightingale.