All Her Beautiful Green Remains in Tears

Cutler’s film All Her Beautiful Green Remains in Tears consists of re-edited footage from Walt Disney's Nature's Half Acre (1951), with its sexist parables about domesticated post-war suburbia: nest building, chick rearing, mother love, industrious insects, and traditional gender roles. In this case, the new voiceover - replacing the paternal voice of Winston Hibler - also focuses on romantic anthropomorphism. The difference is this voiceover has been generated by a neural network in collaboration with filmmaker Amy Cutler, using an A.I. which has learned its existence entirely from reading the female protagonist voice in 14 million passages of romance novels. Using image recognition/ closed captioning, it tells an entirely different story of the “birds and the bees” of nature documentary: one of female desire, trauma, masochism, and emotional fantasy.