“Everywhere animals disappear,” wrote art critic John Berger in his seminal book Why Look at Animals? Berger proposed an argument from capitalism, where the industrialized world order took the animal’s likeness and reproduced it: his examples include “zoos, realistic animal toys and the widespread commercial diffusion of animal imagery.” Animals “withdrawing” from daily life meant man-made machines could step in — even if this correlation seems a bit too simplistic to the reader, it’s considered one of the pillars of critical animal studies (or human-animal studies, or animalities) today. But what does that mean for cinema, this beloved man-made mechanical wonder we critics pledge our allegiance to on a daily basis? The question is too big for a singular answer — and as some of the films in this year’s CPH:DOX will tell us, granting a singular status is dangerous — yet the very proposition is haunted by a specter of skepticism. Can we even ask this question without pitting nature (animals) against culture (cinema)? Perhaps this is the most important stake to keep in mind, as we survey the animal films across the various CPH:DOX strands.
As an animal film scholar, my research and viewings often oscillate between slow cinema and “mainstream” animal documentaries, with the notable inclusion of Disney animations and their dubious live-action equivalents. Nothing out of the ordinary here, since this — if we don’t count the hundreds of hours worth of cat, rabbit, and raccoon TikTok content I consume — is where the film-animals dwell. Between the niche, independent, activist films and the Disneyfied version of our fauna, lies a rather exceptional title that world-premiered in Copenhagen only a week ago.
French documentarian Thomas Balmès teamed up with Universal (!) to make À demain sur la lune (See you tomorrow on the moon), a film about life ending: the terminally-ill and incandescent Amandine is at its center, as is her husband and two young sons. With a few months left to live, Amandine welcomes the film crew into her home, her family, and her past: throughout the film excerpts of home videos documenting her since early childhood aim to bring us closer to the life she had before cancer.
Yet the film begins with an incredible image: a horse and his rider, draped in fairy lights, illuminate the darkness of the frame. In a forest at night time, we see an otherworldly figure glowing with such allure that it must be an allegory of sorts. We find ourselves in Calais, on the north coast of France: a place known as a refugee passage, but in this film, it’s simply a small town with some great people and an even greater horse. Peyo is a real hero, we soon learn, as wide shots and long takes of the horse being disinfected, cleaned, and dried show the preparation for his daily rounds at the hospital. It may be surprising to see a horse and his trainer navigate elevators, corridors, and small hospital rooms, but to the patients, those two are a lifeline.
Balmès, who has made socially engaged documentaries in China, Bosnia, Bhutan, and Mongolia, to name a few, doesn’t make a fanfare out of his return to France. On the contrary, he approaches this newest project with a sense of whimsy and curiosity, making sure the audience is aware of how aesthetically pleasing Peyo and his trainer look both in and out of the hospital. Highlighting those extraordinary mash-ups—a single horse among humans, living and dying—occasionally tips into fetishization of the visual disproportions. The slow, steady pace of the camera and the beautifully arranged static compositions of Peyo in the middle of a corridor or the stable sit at a stark contrast with the handheld close-up interventions in Amandine’s life. As a result, the difference in how animals and people are presented on screen becomes intensely apparent. Make of that split whatever you may: whether the removed, observational approach means admiration from afar or simple voyeurism, the effect is rather confounding. With the exception of those touching, tender scenes of Peyo in the dying patients’ hospital rooms, where the camera is nimble, announcing itself, the attention to animals in À demain sur la lune reminds one of Eadweard Muybridge’s fascination more than a century ago. Muybridge’s Horse in Motion (1878) is perhaps even more honest about the equestrian’s metaphorical value than Balmès cares to admit for himself.
Being fascinated with animals is not a moral sin per se, but the way you film animals says a lot about your personal ethics. First-time feature director Eleanor Mortimer exhibited How Deep is Your Love? at True/False last month, and the film was programmed as part of Copenhagen’s Special Premieres, featuring in the Science strand. Mortimer spent two months on a research ship in the Pacific Ocean amidst scientists and crew in the service of deep sea creatures. The film is guided by Mortimer’s first-person narration and soft, loving voice that, undoubtedly, fits the film’s overall pathos. A beautiful 100 minutes spent with marine biologists, legislators, and many, many alien-looking creatures which never fail to elicit a gushing response (in scientists and audience alike) make How Deep is Your Love? the most enjoyable and empathetic watch of CPH:DOX.
Mortimer not only acknowledges her position as a “last-minute addition” to the research trip, but also shares with the audience the limitations of her work: what she could not film and what she didn’t feel comfortable asking. Her candidness and consideration accompany the film throughout, contextualizing for all us novices what deep sea creatures are, how rare they are, and why studies of the ocean floor are so important for the world’s ecosystem. Behold, a brachiopod that’s 500 million years old; species that have yet to be categorized but have flamboyant English names such as “Barbie Pig” or “Mystery Blob”; and the Enyptiastes eximia, whose Latin name translates as “Remarkable dreamer,” found in 1882 — so many of these truly fascinating animals we see on screen are what scientists call “singletons,” or the only individuals of their species known to man. “Isn’t it strange to have more detailed maps of the Moon than of the deep sea on planet Earth?” asks Mortimer early in the film, and the rhetorical question echoes throughout. Still, the film doesn’t hide the fact that the deep sea is still being seen as a resource to be mined by companies and its “ownership” disputed, even though the scientists on board are exuberant and joyous when the mission proves successful. The unbridled glee takes the form of “awww”s and “aaaah”s, clapping, hooting, inside jokes: their triumph is palpably not about their careers — those people who have devoted their lives to beings that are not made to share the same environment as humans still manage to connect to them on their animal terms.
If there was one documentary that promised a knowledgeable, comprehensive treatment of the human-animal divide, it was the Swedish-French co-production Unanimal. Narrated by actor and filmmaker-biologist Isabella Rossellini (whose Green Porno you should most definitely see), Unanimal begins by directly addressing the viewer with an ask to try and leave their anthropocentric bias behind going in. What’s phrased like a meditation of sorts is the filmmakers (Sally Jacobson and Tuva Björk) taking issue with the human-based hierarchy in the natural world. Since consciousness and rationality are considered superior in the Western philosophical tradition, animals have fallen under a sub-species category; in any case, way less than humans are. However, Jacobson and Björk take a rather encyclopedic approach to relaying scholarly truths from the fields mentioned above, mixing philosophy with long-take observations of zoos, beauty pageants, pets, and their humans. Still, it’s a much better way to engage with the material than to be didactic and offer one single interpretation of the disbalanced human-animal relationship. But as a whole, Unanimal will not offer compelling new findings for audience members who are already familiar with the research and seminal texts on the matter (Jacques Derrida, Peter Singer, Donna Haraway, etc.). It’s safe to assume that the majority of viewers are not, and for them, it will be compelling, nevertheless.
But for the clued-in, Unanimal won’t satisfy those who want to see a rather novel, medium-specific way of engaging with animals by way of dismantling the human-animal dichotomy. Wide shots, occasional close-ups, long takes, and a meditative pace are part and parcel of how animal documentaries look today: we have festival favorites dating back decades now, but to mention a few — Bestiaire, Stray, or even Our Daily Bread — yet the camera’s distance and the time passing, when left unreflected upon, can potentially make out of the living animals a filmic taxidermy, even with the best intentions in place. It’s a similar conundrum I have been forced to acknowledge as a scholar and critic when writing about animals on screen and to constantly interrogate the way my words see them. What becomes of the solid philosophical underpinnings of a film, if its cinematic form does not engage with them critically enough to allow for its own transformations?
Certainly, the competent, beautiful Unanimal does not deserve such a harsh verdict. Perhaps this dead end, too, is a result of the proliferation of animal images, videos, and films — be it real or CGI. Slow cinema was first conceptualized as a form of resistance and an attempt to savor something precious for the medium that might soon be lost; naturally, “slow” and “arthouse” animal documentaries became a way to push against the “mainstream” wildlife documentaries, but now, the resistance has ossified into a new norm. Not surprising to say the least, since festival filmmaking begets more of the same films that get awarded and rewarded year after year. That said, I personally felt like How Deep Is Your Love? went further in dismantling the human-animal relation by asking the biologists what would they say if they could “meet” a certain deep sea animal; them recounting their animal-infused dreams on the research vessel — the positionality of a human filmmaker using a mechanical tool to understand better what hangs in the balance: a relationship.
While all animal documentaries tackle the question of speciesism — the assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals — in one way or another, both these films directly mention the father of animal taxonomy, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus. Linnaeus lived in 18th century Sweden and originated the bipartite system of naming organisms (e.g. Homo sapiens). Of course, the man himself is not a subject for any of those documentaries, but the act of naming a species has since been a formal recognition of its existence. “Only after an animal has a name can its existence be accounted for,” Mortimer aptly remarks, and her inquisitive tone holds no grudge: for biologists of the deep sea, there is always so much more to discover and so many species are still unknown (as it may take more than a dozen years for an official name to be approved).
“Humans have never been my favorite species,” says artist Warren Ellis when introducing the Justin Kurzel-directed doc Ellis Park in front of a full house at Copenhagen’s Bremen Theater music venue. He is as frank as he can be, whether he’s talking generally about how humans suck or asking for a “spit bucket” before he starts playing his violin as the crowd trembles in anticipation. This event — the second of its kind, we are told, following a fully sold-out showing two days ago — offers a special meeting point between film, audience, and music, but the big surprise here was the acute feeling of shared vulnerability. As Ellis hoisted his violin and kicked away the two chairs perched on the stage, it was difficult to imagine the film he had been talking about for the last 20 minutes. Ellis Park is the name of the animal sanctuary in Sumatra, which Ellis sponsored during the pandemic by buying a large piece of land for the animals that cannot be sent back into the wild, and, one assumes, the main topic of the film. Yet when the Bad Seeds member spoke about Kurzel’s film, he focused on the journey of redemption he undertook from meeting his elderly parents in his hometown of Ballarat, Australia, to his first ever visit to Ellis Park. The documentary itself is divided in two parts according to this journey and never makes any artificial links between the themes of empathy and inter-species understanding; on the contrary, by letting the film “breathe,” Kurzel and Ellis have given us an example of a cinematic coexistence of the species and a lingering sense of irreversible loss.
Ellis Park sees the loss of John, Warren Ellis’s father, who shelved his dream to become a musician but never stopped writing songs; at the same time, the sanctuary run by Femke den Haas (who also founded the Indonesian wildlife rescue center network) takes care of abused and/or trafficked animals. Grief is almost miraculously transformed into hope in Ellis Park and in The Lost Wolves of Yellowstone, an IMAX documentary by Thomas Winston. In the latter, 16mm footage deemed lost has been discovered: the so-called “Wolf reintroduction footage” from 1995, when a crew followed the project of bringing back grey wolves into Yellowstone National Park. The species had been extinct since the ’30s — just imagine how different the world is 60 years later, historically and politically — and the restored images of animals as they repopulate the land feel very special. At the heart of the film stands biologist Mollie Beattie, who was a forester and the first female director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: the film pays conscious tribute to Beattie, who is no longer with us.
Loss and extinction are also at the core of Robin Petré’s Only on Earth, a film about the wild horses of Galicia in Spain — a place vulnerable to forest fires. These two films make a preservation appeal by portraying what hangs in the balance between human intervention and the lives of wild animals, and they do it in a rather conventional documentary format, in a suitable addition to the formal inventiveness of the films above. On the other side of the aesthetic spectrum sits Time Paradox, an experimental short by Korean artist Minha Park made in collaboration with Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde and its dinosaur vertebrae. MBR 19 is the actual remnant of the Brachiosaurus species, and the film interrogates the ability of humans to imagine extinct creatures. There are 3D reconstructions and drawings that reimagine dinosaurs in different ways across time, as well as restoration data and archives from the colonial era, to point out the paradoxes scientists dwell in. Much like the deep sea researchers, the museums of prehistoric times have to work with the unknown: Time Paradox calls it “a world without witnesses,” and it makes us think of deep time, lived time, and human time — the last one being the only measurement we have of life. Perhaps our innate anthropocentrism is due to the ability to experience time the human way, and not our rationality; perhaps the most helpful thing a human can do is imagine another viewpoint, but never be arrogant enough to assume they can actually inhabit it. Thankfully, in the case of nonhuman cinema, there is still a wider horizon to be explored.
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