Over the course of her filmography, Jessica Sarah Rinland has demonstrated an unusually perceptive eye for the natural world and its inhabitants. Her camera’s fascination with anatomy is obvious from Nulepsy, one of her earliest shorts focused on the titular condition which describes the fictional “pathological need to be nude.” In Expression of the Sightless, a blind man explores a 19th-century sculpture with his hands, the camera only ever focused on the part of the figures where his hands are placed. Elsewhere, and featured more prevalently in her oeuvre, is the relationship between humans and nature. Adeline for Leaves explored the dynamics between a botanical prodigy and her departed mentor, from whom she learned about the “deep time” of plants and the environmental philosophy of gardens. More recently, in Black Pond, Rinland turned her attention to the animal kingdom. Collective Monologue features prominently each of these themes — the corporeal, the environmental, and the wild.
The film follows various workers at zoos and animal sanctuaries in Argentina, collecting histories of these institutions, and the laborers and animals that form their foundations. The relationship between worker and animal is formed between bars, but is nonetheless portrayed sympathetically and with a tenderness for both parties. Hands, both human and animal, grasp onto each other with such profound intimacy that the interspecies dynamic of the pairs could be all but forgotten if not for the literal barriers that separate them. Rinland’s camera is just as fascinated by the workers as it is the animals. For every moment that lingers on the textures of a tortoise shell or flash of pink feathers from the flamingos, there is a pause to gaze at a worker cleaning the habitats or repairing deteriorated facades — shot with just as much care, and with as much respect for their individual movements and momentums. The nature of the film is liberatory, and its sight is set on a more equitable world for both the laborers and occupants of these institutions. Though the cells never seem so uncaring as those of prisons, the flight the liberated animals take once in the wild seems to suggest that the captivity imposed on them was no less stifling.
The film ends addressing the question of the titular Collective Monologue, which comes from Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget: “a period of egocentrism in a child’s life where they see the point of view of the listener as irrelevant. They believe that nature is created for them, and that they can control it.” The metaphor is blunt, but no less effective for its obviousness. Rinland’s films are typically narrated in such a way as to “educate” the viewer — here, the purpose of the given exposition feels more evocative. Where much of her previous work elucidates specific phenomena that exists within the dichotomy between man and nature, Collective Monologue lingers on a more intimate and unassuming look into the tangled web of contradictions that make up the relationship between humanity and the world it inhabits.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 4.
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