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Signatures of Earth

Signatures of Earth is an experiment in repositioning documentary narrative hierarchies in the space age. The film aggregates fragmentary encounters from varying points of view, encountering cuttlefish and quasars, and much else in between, happened upon during a transcontinental journey to film the shadow of the moon.

Challenging, in the tradition of Brechtian distanciation, the film is also poetic, ethereal, roving, contemplative, richly cinematic and empathetically engaged. Signatures of Earth presents a fractured vision of the cognitive and sensory muddle that is an antipodean road trip through the Anthropocene. It all makes sense as long as long as you don’t want it too.

  • Robert Nugent
    Director
    End of the Rainbow, Memoirs of a Plague, Night Parrot Stories
  • Robert Nugent
    Producer
  • Roy Montgomery
    Music
  • Project Type:
    Documentary
  • Runtime:
    1 hour 19 minutes
  • Production Budget:
    200,000 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    Australia
  • Country of Filming:
    Australia
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital 4K
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • Digital Cinema Package:
    Unavailable
Director Biography - Robert Nugent

Robert Nugent’s films grapple with entanglements, mainly between human and nonhuman places and situations. His films are sojourns, employing various documentary forms and perspectives. They have arisen from purposefully taking a camera on speculative expeditions to remote locations in Indonesia, Guinea, Iraq, Ethiopia, Egypt, Tanzania and Australia. 'End of the Rainbow' was the story of an eternal gold mine, wandering from one place to another on planet earth. It won international film awards and screened in Europe, the US and Australia. ‘Memoirs of a Plague’, tackled the Locust story, heretically proposing that these Biblically imagined insects actually don’t cause famine. His last film, ‘Night Parrot Stories’, sought to reconcile western perspectives on a rare bird with other ways of knowing and thinking about Australian geographies.

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Director Statement

Signatures of Earth is framed by a journey to observe a total eclipse of the sun. To make the film I meandered 15,000 kilometres across an unnamed island continent located in the southern hemisphere of Planet Earth, all the while listening to an audio book narrated by the spirit of Neil Armstrong. Weaving quotidian Earth-bound situations with the human obsession with planetary measurement, the film is a response to western, neoliberal documentary narrative hierarchies in the space age. While the film is peculiar to the Antipodes, it is an object of post-colonial planetary times. It was made under an Anthropocene sky and just happens to be set in Australia.