The Audubon Trilogy (2010)

Featuring the short films Cairo, New Madrid, and West Point, The Audubon Trilogy draws upon the writings of the 19th century artist and ornithologist John James Audubon, renowned for his epic publication The Birds of America (1838). Filmed by artists Cartwright and Jordan along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, the works connect and contrast Audubon's vivid tales of Frontier America with their present day locations: an expansive, cinematic landscape of frozen rivers, backwoods, highways, bluffs, farmland, hunting reserves, factories, freight trains and small towns. In combining footage of the contemporary American landscape with Audubon's dramatic observations from the early 19th century, the films reference themes of human exploration and romanticism, our relationship to a disappearing wilderness, species extinction, social change and economic rise and fall.