“With full gaze, the creature sees into the Open. Our eyes alone are as if inverted, set like traps around it, encircling its free momentum.”
“Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Die achte Elegie, In Duineser Elegien (Eighth Duino Elegy, 1923)
“With full gaze, the creature sees into the Open. Our eyes alone are as if inverted, set like traps around it, encircling its free momentum.” “Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Die achte Elegie, In Duineser Elegien (Eighth Duino Elegy, 1923) The animal in Rilke remains within space. Here I will designate the Open as a lived field, a world that has been neither cut off from the one who moves through it, nor annulled into an object by a gaze that turns back on itself. Humans, by contrast, are a reflection of the world, a world itself under the reverse of a monotheistic god turning the human back toward himself. This human gaze slides over things, then returns to itself, as if every thing seen had to be transcribed into a sign of a sign, or into an image, within what he calls the world.
Thus, it is not that the animal sees nothing of its body; rather, our perception adds to this relation a symbolic interval, a reflexive return that transforms space into scene. This obviously concerns every work of art that claims to film an animal body, for the hand that holds the camera is human, anesthetized, the eye that turns back on itself, in search of an articulation and, thus, of signs. Filming an eye in the beast amounts either to capturing that whole tissue, in search of its own mor phology so that it may be absorbed into our register (its affects are legible; one enters it through tropes), or, decisively, to defying every instinct, letting something of the animal appear before our language turns it into a problem or a question. It is then that I think of Jean Painlevé pouring gelatin over a sea urchin, immobilizing it, all while demanding that its flesh speak and respond beyond its skin.
And this, in turn, solidifies the gelatin and cools it, revealing the internal architecture that allows us to detach the covering from the organs without damaging them. The camera is not set up to film the image of a sea urchin, but the sea urchin itself, com pelled to reveal a logic within what must be five hundred million years of life (out there), in abyssal habi tats shaped by selective pressures that never had to reckon with us, even if we should not too hastily trans late such strangeness into a mere evoltionary split. The sea urchin has no large frontal eyes, and there is no face onto which we could insert our own image; but, above all, it is the contemporary imagination that so rarly places itself on the drooping appendages of the unthought and the unnamed. The film thus alters the stakes of mimesis, for it does not imitate what the human already recognizes, but instead gives visibility to a reality whose forms, through human history, it didnot naturally possess.
One thus discovers, within the totality of structured being, lines that have rarely summoned us, which should already worry us, for when Étienne-Jules Marey began chronophotographing the four hooves lifting off the ground in one single instant, he was searching for a
through movement (a matter of improvement through biomechanical description). Painlevé, on the contrary, treats the animal neither as a mechanism nor as a behavior, for he seeks, within the organism, a multitude of lines that had been homogenized by objectifying it; he had locked the window that was Jean Painlevé’s own. Of 4 he had made 1, whereas Painlevé had made 4 of 1; he had specified the sea urchins, restoring to them their parti ularity, and thus restoring the opening to man. Yet, before it was ever a ques tion of us, before everything became a matter of overcoming a mere survival impulse, animal form already exceeded the demands of pure survival. How to explain that peacock feathers evolved as elements and effects capable of being appreciated by other peacocks solely through representation, if they transcend our gaze (strangely focused through the cliché of “look at this,” the very definition of the excess that has haunt ed history, but not us.
This brings me, thanks to a coincidence between the formulation of the preceding sentence and what I had been reflecting on, in sentences that had fed my thinking, to wanting to speak of the same effect produced by bats: the links between Pain levé and genre cinema One is the vampire diving-beetle; the other, duly titled Son of Dracula, Dracula himself in effect. The diving-beetle is an insect that, instead of feeding on its prey whole, siphons and sucks it, hence Painlevé’s epithet designating it as a “vampire,” an association also found in Murnau, with Nosferatu. But whereas Orlock (Nosferatu) is driven by the desire for a new European union, by class psy chology, and by the fear of contamination (he who desires our teror, demands that we avoid it, and builds his horror to align with our narrative grid), he is nothing next to the diving-beetle, for the latter means nothing at all!
The vampire’s blood flows without consequence, it passes through threats without ever eroding them (and in this it irrigates them). The way this blood flows is a sign that the manner in which its body reacts to stimuli… is an active response to the way it is configured by chemistry, which can be related to the Open, given that, since the animal reacts first through its body, it therefore has no mediation in its “own” reflection. Which is not so much a threat as a mechanism infinitely worse than Nosferatu, because this animal was not made for us and did not need our terror to function at full capacity. The diving-beetle was never a threat to us any more than to its own mechanism; it was there outside of us, outside our refletion, and above all, outside the modern horror created by vampires. Niko Tinbergen showed this in his work on reflex arcs (a rapid, involuntary path followed by the nerve impulse during a reflexive action) of pecking (the near self-mutilation of a living creature, or toward its own kind, caused by a behavioral disorder) in the greylag goose: an egg pulled away without the ani mal’s knowledge, whereupon it continues to act as though there were still an egg on the ground.
A journey through space toward the world of man, where every route and every method by which he solves the same problem in re verse; this is how Walt Disney does it, giving an animal the forms of a man… so as not to bring us back to that monster. Bambi loses his moth er along with the whole set of reactions modeled on human grief, whose stages and pace are determined by the affective customs of our culture, where all are affective characteristics rather than any emotional physiology of a doe. If there is, in the living sense, a thing that has sub jectivity, an interior point of view on the world, then this thing is graspable irreducibly by no other thought, but first because, in order to exist as hav ing subjectivity (according to what it means to have it), it is always for someone else, or rather embodied in someone-in-theworld. Wittgenstein had said it from the other side: “Even if a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” In Stroheim’s Greed, the dog makes an incursion, just as it also does within the story itself, indifferent to human language.
Dogs are wonderful and adorable (even the one in White Dog), but at bottom the only thing we love is our own capacity to love the earth; we love ourselves, reflected back. That said, not everything is black or white: in Au hasard Balthazar, the contours of the donkey correspond to the violence of the substitution that they refuse elsewhere; beyond the shots, there is none expressive on the donkey’s face, nor is there music at the moment of its death. The donkey is just far enough that we cannot recognize it, yet far enough to keep the donkey opaque in itself, before we make the decision of who/what it was. In a certain way, Balthazar is an agony that escapes the abyss lying, on the one hand, in making mirrors of our souls, and, on the other, in living with the guilt of their presence with out thereby abolishing it. For many filmmakers, more than anything else, it is a limit that emerges from the very monster of the frame, but first and foremost the body, a constraint that comes from the animal.
The body does not seriously take on its share as image, not so much “the actor” in a role as em bodied space, yet accomplished hesitantly, functioning as absent, performing no calculation regarding a relation to the camera, and giving no iterative account of how meaning traces itself from its gestures. It is simply there, weighed down by what was already there before the film and by what will still be there after. Probably less interesting than the diminished stimulus, but it has its own carcinoma, so to speak an external governor, less subject to the sensation of a felt experience than to a muffled signal. Even the political gesture (and not only, of course, the scientific gesture) has always been the same in ethology since Uexküll: it ensured that the biological coherence of species remains self-sufficient, irreducible to our categories. This must be central to it, because cinema has already sown them all (King Kong screams, Frankenstein extends his arms, and Dracula weeps).
This otherness vanishes into that return to the human which we send back in the face of the strangeness of a being that wants nothing to do with you, for whom we are otherwise useless from without, subsisting entirely within pure immanence (indifferent to our gaze), which sends us back once more toward humanity, already aware of this problem, its integrity will weigh upon its image.
Ford, for example, sees animals as bodies in motion that serve to swell the ranks of the living community (not because this might have any dramatic value, but because it brought into the frame neither air nor shadow), even beneath humans, for these two forms of life contribute together to a shared living community through bodies occupying that space in those instants; like a “making-one” of nature and already established hierar chies, a reminder, then, by definition, that real space has mass, and thus that art must signify. As for narra tive, this weight inscribes itself in the place of the set (the assessment of the animal and of ethnology). Scars on bark (The Leopard Man), olfactory marks (Wingseed), footprints in the snow (La Bête Errante), which show only one form of direct writing, gathered around this single idea: that each is a successive production of bodies accomplishing what falls to them and responding to their own physicality, under the effect of forces and movements that call forth its form while ignoring its end, and without intentionally offering anything at all.
This was illustrated for the digger wasp by Tinbergen, who showed that it apparently memorizes the visual landmarks surrounding its nest before setting out to hunt: move those landmarks a few meters while it is away, and, when it returns, it will search where they now are, rather than where the entrance to its bur row actually is. Whether due to the high prerogative it holds over absolute loca ization, the body has swept (sweeps) space; yet such a cartography is also potentially duplicitous, when I think of Love Torn in a Dream and its assertion that mapmaking claims a porosity, one that is paradoxical, but described through the prism of invagination rather than through that of topography, nonetheless allowing a non-reflexive engagement with its own context, the inverse of which Grizzly Man performs. Timothy Treadwell walks in the mud of the earth with two bodies destined to meet, because they had to (or should one simply say that they happened to cross paths) by pure chance, yet against this, the bear does not know that Treadwell lives.
These traces attest to the evolution of two bodies through con comitant spaces in time, according to logics that make no sense to one another; and it is within this mutual ignorance that the bear does not replay the solitude which man has once again occupied, that its dignity is at stake. The logic of a trainable body, already tamed like a dog and interrupted even down to its remains, where it disintegrates and is absorbed into reflexes refracted by race, such that racism itself becomes an indicator of aggression at the mere sight of a Black embodiment without reflection (White Dog) (the condensation sequence when Keys reconditions the dog with the reward system, attributed to the slaves of the period). In Schastye (1934), Aleksandr Medvedkin, I was able to find a major difference from the two afore mentioned examples: the animal is neither an irrevocably Other being, objectified from without (Painlevé), nor the animal as our own psychic reflection (Disney), but a subject that works under shared material con ditions, taking part in the same world, cohabiting within it, all while not sharing the consciousness of that world.
Just like the peasant himself, Khmyr’s horse in the collectivized village suffers the same privations, whether the harsh winter or the economy. With the burlesque precision of a director who knows that if com edy becomes possible everywhere, then unequal bodies are subjected to the same thing and rendered inca pable of ever fully freeing themselves from one another, these monsters will have to be paraded among each other as in a confused circus. The horse is worn out and oppressed by a history vaster than itself, just as it is vaster than Khmyr. This means that one stands only at a physically Apollonian apogee of a crystallized thought, and if this formulation makes its way into the fabrication of the cop machinery (White Dog), theoretical constructions, or rather movements (even more radical!), the most explicitly neuro-linguistic one. So bodies (rejected and pushed aside like things) persist at the heart of ambivalence, inflecting something like an inn’s quotation, delivered aloud with arrogance (La Bête Errante), delimited by a body facing labels, affixed in any case onto the skin (without any marrow referring back to a label where it is destined to be located by this characteristic, invoked as meat).
This is largely atypical, between the two, for in their shared shots (close-up shots between Schastye and White Dog), bodies suffer together along the continuum of space toward the camera, equally vulnerable and wounded, like stars drawing energy from one another without any one of them burning in tensely in order to become more luminous.
Jean Renoir does something similar in La Règle du jeu (1939), barely a few weeks before the out break of the war. The hunting scene films the rabbits and pheasants being shot down with the same serene rhythm as the ascent, as the dance; the killers, in their château, share exactly the incommensurable pre cision of the method, rhyming brutality with leisurely weekends. The blood of the hunt cohabits with the blood on a waltzing ballroom floor (even the vampire did not have as much), without being recognized by either side, confronting a moral equivalence without comment. This flattening is often within Renoir’s scheme of things: the corpses of dead animals carry the same cinematic weight as the living aristocrats (which I would have liked to see more often in Stroheim). As for this balance, moreover, no one knows it as well as Howard Hawks, who approaches a form of intelligence that the narrative will encounter along the way, rather than something it will become natively (and yes, I did say we would be talking about a lot of filmmakers).
In Hatari!, the final scene, where the captive baby elephants free themselves from their pen in hopes of finding Anna Maria again, did so of their own free will. For his part, Hawks does not comment as such on this moral reversal, contenting himself with noting that human needs can interrupt an animal’s time when it is to his advantage. For example, the leopard that cuts through the comedy in Bringing Up Baby (1938) does not need to signify anything, for he accepts it as a given. It is far more worthwhile that we wit ness the animal argument being put into play within cinematic narrative, whether because of such a freely exploitative mechanism of cinema that accomplishes something beyond the linear traces of human history. But, outside of the creative mission, carrying them to this instant also compels closure, as it will force it. Unlike Stromboli (1950), which manages to do the same thing with the ritual of the mattanza.
One might imagine this was done through a lens rather than presented, but Ingrid Bergman’s image presents an affec tivity at once within the associated couple and within the fish; the image bursts, literally, with shot after shot of dying tuna, one harpoon after another, in a violence that allows for no shred of narrative logic, for in leaping from being toward meaning, it has no time for everything that assails it. In the second half of the nineteenth century, as urban moralities crystallized into hygiene norms, and a nascent secularization evacuated a common body through processes of dispossession, industrial slaughterhouses radiated outward from cities, transforming meat into an invisibility barely perceptible to the smell of the life from which it emanates. An Eternal Treblinka covered the American industrial slaugh terhouses that drew up the plans for the Nazi extermination camps.
This succession of deaths in the form of corpses, of animals first and then of humans, can only be a plausible continuity because it rests upon a prior erasure, the cosmic relegation to the rank of commodity, endowed with an enterprising force within the mechanisms of industrial transformation. Respite, 2007 (Farockyu) Stromboli, 1950 (Rossellini)
In filming the Vaugirard and La Villette slaughterhouses in 1949, the workers eat with half-carcasses laid out; blood flows in the gutters while the work continues, as death offers a backdrop (which Farocki delights in exploiting in Respite), a banal condition of the professional sphere. Franju and Painlevé are only two bodies issued from a single body, but they also share a theory of the body, and thus a common horror confronted with its captivity (and by coincidence they worked on this very same film). The second degree of coincidence: Luc Moullet, for one of his short films (La Cabale des Oursins): the term mixture appears in these agglutinated masses that allow for spirals, quasi-urchin-like, under a name that no longer signifies exactly anything anymore (for Painlevé’s sea urchins have nothing to do with it), likewise with Le Sang des bêtes and its approximation of the extermination camps.
What cinema can do against this kind of logic, by showing an animal at every instant and in every choice of distance, so as not to let this presence escape toward death before the chain, or the commodity, or the forgetting that make everything else possible, is not merely to make us aware of slaughterhouses. Brakhage describes, in Mothlight, the result as perceived by a moth, from birth to death: an attempt, then, to cite a vision born “here” in this body, except that it is irrefutable, because it assimilates representation to the absence of mediation, without even passing through figurative artifice, and contrary to what one might read along a dialectical line. To force the body to bear witness, through technology, to its own murder filmed head-on, does not reanimate the animal on its own terms, but reveals it by signifying according to conditions fixed by theology rather than by ethology.
This brings me back to another example, an older one. The walls of Lascaux, seventeen thousand years before Brakhage, already had the form of animal bodies before the paint ers added anything to them. Water and time had sculpted the rock into reliefs of shoulders, flanks, heads, and the Paleolithic painters recognized these forms before completing them. It was not so much invention as recognition; after all, Painlevé does the same with gelatin (instead of film), the form lived within the matter before the artist arrived. It is here that the true “why” of everything else attached to it can be heard, and it must be said clearly, without beating around the bush. The animal in cinema: how could one avoid speaking of animals in cine ma? Not even to defend animals, for we know well what the only means of defense that will come is. It is not that I am here pointing my finger at Hollywood for criticism, even if this is probably justified.
But because the animal is the most tested test of cinema. Can one film something that, naturally, repels its own propensity to also become our natural tendency to turn everything into a sign? The animal inhabits our material world (it breathes, it bleeds, it hungers, it fears), but, according to the terms laid out (as set forth earlier), its interi ority (if indeed there is some subjectivity or consciousness involved here) will be structurally inaccessible to us. From this follows the second consequence: what to do if biosemantics itself goes beyond the politics and ethics tied to the age. The hunter-gatherers who painted at Lascaux did not evidently distinguish, in their relation to the world, between the body of the prey and that of the represented animal: both alike sheltered a being that was not simply and entirely subject to imposition, but that had to enter into relation, to respond (without, howev er, being able to be dominated) such that non-human existence carries with it a portion of independence, that we ought not so much to use nature as to meet it on its own terms, and that it possesses something more than its place within our economy.
Anima (breath and soul in Latin) gave us both animal, that which has a soul, and gave animation, and created the act of entrusting it to it. When Bambi is animated at Disney, it keeps the promise of the word and yet thwarts it: it animates the animal in our place, replacing our anima with its own. When Brakhage glues moth wings onto the film, he animates in the original sense, letting the anima of the body pass through the image without replacing it. And the painters of Lascaux, who projected pigment onto the rock, in other words gave life to what was already there.
The fact that this posture is found again in Painlevé’s films (and so many others I would like to dis cuss, especially experimental ones, though there would be too much to say) does not constitute a romantic regression; it is rather the inevitable result of having taken seriously what ethology and philosophy of mind have laid bare. One question remains that these films pose but do not resolve: does cinema want to learn to see what exists before its gaze? The answer of great works is yes. The answer of the industry, so far, is no. And between these two answers lies a conception of what an existence we did not make is worth, one we cannot translate, and which, like Rilke’s creature, continues to see the Open with all its eyes, indifferent to the trap we set for it.
