The Animal in Film 1: Sub/Super Aqua The Animal in Film 2: Dog, Cat, Mouse The Animal in Film 3: Zoo and so

 

Some say that the first precursor of a moving picture is the cave painting of a wild boar in northern Spain, which was painted about 32000 years ago. In order to illustrate the animal’s movement, the boar had been depicted with eight legs. This early ancestor of both animated and animal films illustrates the importance assigned to animals by human beings.

 

The fact that man is descended from animals profoundly influences their relationship. Essentially this relation is defined by our attempts to distinguish ourselves from other animals and by our efforts at anthropomorphising them. In this sense, religion and science serve as a medium just like art does. When the methods of picturing were mechanized in the 19th and 20th century, animals were present on photos and film from the beginning onwards. Today, animals are ubiquitous on television and on the Internet. They also make appearances in all genres of film.

It would be presumptuous to claim an adequate representation of the complex and manifold depiction of animals and their relations with humans in the three blocks of this special programme. Instead I am presenting a cinematic bestiary shaped by a small budget, the availability of films and the curator’s likes and dislikes. This goes a long way in explaining the many regrettable omissions.

 

The Latin adjective ›animalis‹ means alive or animate while the noun ›animal‹ means ›living, being‹ and, indeed, ›animal‹. So obviously there is an etymological as well as evolutionary connection between animals, humans and film. After all, in creating an animated film, you give life and motion to something normally inanimate. Sometimes, there is even an element of resuscitation, as in ›Mothlight‹ by Stan Brakhage. This film was made ca. 32000 years after the above-mentioned cave painting and it essentially consists of moth wings, other insect parts and leaves that had been glued to perforated scotch tape or transparent film. Their resuscitation takes place in two stages. First, they are photographed on an optical bank. Then the filmmaker reanimates them by sequentially projecting the pictures onto a screen. This classic short shows »what a moth might see from birth to death if black were white and white were black« (Stan Brakhage). This act of reanimation by projection is as powerfully attractive to the viewer as light is to a moth.

 

›Mothlight‹ is part of the block ›Sub/Super Aqua‹ which is as much about animals under and on the water as about those high above. Animal love (›Les Amours de la Pieuvre‹, ›The Owl Who Married a Goose‹), blood (›Le vampire‹), desperation and stubbornness (›Labut‹), death (›Death of an Insect‹), as well as the becoming of an animal (›Taubentag‹, ›La peine du Talion‹) and swarms of birds in black and white and colour (›Stare‹, ›Weltempfänger‹) are featured as well.

 

The ability to set pictures in motion, to give them the kiss of life, is the power inherent to film, no matter what genre a film is attributed to. While an inanimate picture or a photo will always point to the past and invoke memories, the film is always happening right now. It reanimates the pictures and their content. At the same time, every film is an act of dressing and fitting. By creating montages and selecting images the filmmaker can force his human will on even the wildest of animals, just like the animal tamer does to his animals by breaking and training them.

 

The cinematographer is able to confine animals into pictures similar to their confinement to cages in a zoo. That is where early on the first films of exotic animals in what looked like natural surroundings were made. A local example from Hamburg is a newsreel clip from 1910 that shows ›Emperor Wilhelm at Hagenbeck Zoo‹ (›Kaiser Wilhelm im Tierpark Hagenbeck‹). About 50 years later Bert Haanstra addressed the process of viewing and being viewed in his film ›Zoo‹ to the point where the audience might believe themselves to be under scrutiny behind bars.

 

These and other films can be found in the block ›zoo-and-so‹, which is about specific forms of relations between humans and animals. For instance, in one of the first films ever, from the 1895 ›Wintergarten‹ programme by the Skladanowsky brothers, ›The Boxing Kangaroo‹ takes on a human opponent. In the beautifully coloured ›La chassee à la Panthère‹ (1909) a leopard is hunted to death and Thierry Knauff’s ›Abattoirs‹ deals with industrialized butchering. Sexual attraction to worms (›Wormcharmer‹) finds its cinematic expression as well as the reconquest of human abodes by animals, captured in a 360 degree angle camera sweep (›Once Upon a Time‹).

 

Finally, the block ›Dog, Cat, Mouse‹ is predominantly about these species of domestic animals. After the subject of their deep rooted differences is addressed (›Dogs and Cats‹) a dog objects towards being exploited as a sheep dog in an almost cat like manner (›Useless Dog‹). Memories (›Mechanical Memory‹), great emotions between humans and cats (›Rudeboy‹) and between animals (›Große Gefühle‹) play a major part as well. The questions who trains whom and who domesticates whom are answered in ›The Poodle Trainer‹, ›Dog Duett‹ and ›Tchika‹.

 

All selected films stem from the tensions between proximity and distance, the known and the unknown, of fear and hope, of devouring and beeing devoured: Theme and variations of humans and animals, cooperating and competing.

 

Film selection: Klaas Dierks

 

The programme ›The Animal in Film‹ is accompagnied by a photo exhibition by Hyeyeon Park and Alexandra Heneka.