2019 Orientation/Disorientation Orientation/Disorientation
Animal Film
Recent studies by the CNRS and the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle demonstrate that birds of the French countryside are disappearing at a dizzying rate. On average, their populations have diminished by a third over fifteen years. On the edge of disappearance, has the animal become its own archive?
At the time of the Anthropocene and mass extinction of species, it is difficult not to confront ecological issues without questioning the animal on an ethical and philosophical level since the pioneering work of Peter Singer. The presence of an “Animal Rights” Party in the European elections testifies to a genuine shift in our perception of the animal cause. The animal has become a “being endowed with sensibility” in the French Civil Code since 2015, and the actions of the collective L214 continuously draw our attention to conditions within the meat raising and slaughtering industries. Concerning cognitive processes, scientists are discovering at the same time unsuspected powers of animal intelligence. Think of the neuronic plasticity of the chickadee when it acquires new songs, or the sense of direction displayed by birds based on the earth’s magnetic field, or of their musical and aesthetic sensibilities which shake to the foundations the separation between the human and the animal.
So many questions that encounter the powers of cinema. Undoubtedly, the close relation between the cinema and the animal is connected to the principle of cinema based on the connection of images, already pointed out by Eisenstein in his comments on Walt Disney’s films, noting the dialectics between animation and the animal. The passage from one shot to the next, from one frame to the next, precipitates the appearance of the animal. The animal has long been a theme in cinema since the first films of Lumière or Edison. But the success of titles like Seasons (Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, 2016) or March of the Penguins 2: The Next Step (Luc Jacquet, 2017) as well as works by artists such as Marcus Coates, David Claerbout and Ana Vaz which question the separation between species invite us to rethink the critical categories of cinema. What can we now say about point of view, direction, editing and the photogenic from the perspective of the animal? What is the connection between animation (the illusion of movement, the demonstration of life) and reanimation (the return to life, the re-establishment of homeostasis)? After having been the favourite theme of animated cartoons, has the animal also become, in its digital avatar, the object of a re-animation?
These are so many questions that will be addressed during these États généraux du film documentaire through the presentation of a film in progress entitled Langue des oiseaux, which probes the powers of translation and the frontiers between species. Do bird songs reflect an artistic intention? Beyond their territorial functions (mark out a perimeter) and reproductive functions (attract and seduce the female), do they express an aesthetic pleasure, indeed a musical sense, which overflows the strict field of communication, at the intersection of language and music? Why do the songs persist when surrounding partners are absent? Is the song in itself its own reward? Characterised by their incredible powers of imitation (the bird is a fantastic imitator), their sense of rhythm and melody, their improvisations, themes and variations, birds certainly demonstrate musical sensibility. Langue des oiseaux proposes to take stock of the different operations of translation (imitate, transcribe songs onto a musical stave, record the ambiance of the undergrowth, speak and sing in bird language) as so many promises of a possible or imaginary communication between different species.
In the form of an illustrated conference, close to a performance, preparatory elements for the film to come will be presented: archives, readings from scholarly literature, sound recordings, curious anecdotes, enquiries, encounters, scouting shoots, filmed tests. The research process sometimes becomes a substitute for the film itself. Where lies the limit between preparing and directing a film? Where lie henceforth the boundaries of the living?
Érik Bullot
Cinema is an experience of orientation
When I started watching Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts, I immediately knew that it would linger for a long time, move within me and touch something hidden, deep down, something that slips away even if I do nothing to keep it out of reach. I thought then that it was about my animal archive. I found no other words for it, but I wrote a book, En regardant le sang des bêtes. Of course it wasn’t about speaking from the zone of my bestiality, the place where I would have capitalised my basest and most instinctive impulses, but from that side of ourselves that nothing can tame, our being in permanent flight. The experience of this film was not only disturbing, it was an experience of total disorientation, Franju never ceasing in addition to raise questions about our markers and limits: he films the outskirts of the city, questions the borders, non-places, the wastelands. He wanders outside and penetrates inside the slaughterhouses. The voice over is sometimes male, sometimes female, constantly changing gender. The men who work there are also animals, and the animals are also men as it is obvious that the film works also on a comparison which was topical in 1949 between slaughterhouses and concentration camps. In the post-war landscape, the film was connected to recent facts so traumatising that they put into question the very idea of humanity.
This experience of disorientation led me to question how Franju could have made such a film, the first documentary on slaughterhouses. What on earth could have pushed him to go in there with his entire crew on a wintry day after having failed to obtain the slightest authorisation? I needed signposts. That’s how I started working on the archives of the film: the two versions of the script, the texts by Jean Painlevé for the commentary, the photographs taken by Patrice Molinard during the scouting phase and shooting. In an interview, Franju confessed that it was during the shoot of this first film that he became an alcoholic. One might hypothesize that this was also when he put his finger on his own animal archive and understood what being a victim meant.
But I also realised that making a film was above all, precisely, an experience of orienting images. The whole question of montage is there, in cinema as well as in literature moreover. Franju cuts alternatively between exterior and interior scenes, associates the most objective and frontal shots of animals being put to death with visions of a happy life in spite of everything, a round of children, a kiss shared by lovers, a flea market with broken or roughly repaired objects, he manages to hold together the fragility of the world which survives and its power of destruction. His film is then resolutely oriented towards a documentary lyricism that can be defined in two movements. First, he consciously follows a lyrical thread by editing together two orders of neighbouring but contrary reality – outside, human life, made up of desires, losses, feelings, and inside, the death of animals, mechanical and emotionless. Second, he unconsciously follows the documentary thread which, at the moment of the shoot, can in no way foresee the steam that escapes from the corpses and invades the film, or the arrival of a white horse. These unplanned elements introduce the concrete magic of the surrealists’ objective chance into the film, an animal magic.
Our animal archive then could be expressed as sentio ergo sum, “I feel therefore I am”, which was rejected long ago into an incomprehensible and primitive past by cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am”, enunciated by Descartes and his rationalism. Although the natural distinction between humanity and the rest of the living sphere has been established since the origins of scientific and philosophical thought, and the hegemony of reason has been continuously reaffirmed to the point of characterising modern times, the birth of cinema has managed to re-establish our relationship to sensory perception. Why? Or rather, how? By addressing above all the spectators’ aptitude to orient themselves, this primeval, animal form of intelligence, existing prior to all practice of knowledge or erudition, so that they can orient themselves in the darkened room and find their own paths of thoughts through the images.
We will test this hypothesis of cinema as an experience of disorientation starting with the archives of Franju used in the book, but also using other filmic experiences which show how cinema has been able to reconnect with our most animal intelligence: that of orientation.
Muriel Pic
With Érik Bullot and Muriel Pic.
In partnership with the Film Heritage Service of the CNC.