"de rerum natura" is a three-part meditation on beauty in the natural world that both embraces and interrogates our knee-jerk response to the glories of nature. The structure of the film stages a conversation between black-and-white 16mm film and iPhone images as ways of representing that beauty. The film concludes with a coda in the form of a half-roll of film shot on my camera by Robert Todd that, in many ways, responds to the hand-wringing in the previous three sections.