Date of Award
Spring 5-2-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Film and Media Studies
First Advisor
Kelly Anderson
Second Advisor
Sean Hanley
Academic Program Adviser
Andrew Demirjian
Abstract
As Above So Below is a short experimental documentary film that reveals an unexpected world of entanglements connecting life, death, and fungi in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Fungi are nature’s decomposers, turning dead trees into soil so new trees can grow, for example. Mycorrhizal fungi perform acts of collaboration and mutualism, delivering water and nutrients to roots of plants through their underground networks of mycelium. As we struggle to find ways of living in and beyond this time of planetary crisis, rife with loneliness and grief, what can we learn from fungi and their entanglements? How can we move beyond dominant and anthropocentric ways of observing and telling stories to even find out? The film does not offer concrete answers, but it does attempt to assemble these questions and offer viewers a tranquil space of reflection to wonder about them.
The film positions the more-than-human—mushrooms, birds, a rain storm, and soil strata—in the foreground of the place, while their human collaborators and the environment they’ve built—gravestones, monuments, memories, and traffic—are in the background, though their presence is clearly audible, and occasionally visible. Motivated by a belief that there are many different ways to imagine and assemble worlds and tell stories outside dominant narratives, and that film is a particularly well-suited medium to organize these ideas, As Above So Below is an immersive and deeply meditative journey into the heart of a contaminated landscape, guided by the fruiting bodies of otherwise underground fungi that are anything but dead, and deeply valuable whether a human notices them or not.
Recommended Citation
Fedock, Robin Smith, "As Above So Below" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1393
