Bestiaire

Animals in a zoo. Youngsters sketching a stuffed deer. A taxidermist’s workshop, where what was once a duck is being pieced together again. How do we see animals? How do we film them? Neither essay nor documentary, Bestiaire presents itself as a catalogue of animals or a picture album. Yet, the vibrant musicality of the editing, by connecting up animal eye and human eye, diffracts the viewpoints to finally produce an equalizing effect on all of the subjects filmed. The living and dead, human and beast, a taxidermist and a pin-up pinned to his wall: which one is actually the object observed by the other? As the pleasurable contemplation of the picture book gradually gives way to a profound disquiet (like that roused by Ariane Michel’s Les Hommes or the tiger in the snow in Curling), Bestiaire reveals the strength of its theory: “neither an actor nor a narrative vector” as Côté (1) points out, “the animal challenges cinema on the very notion of “viewpoint”. (1) Interview with Alexandra Zawia