![]() ![]() ![]() It shows a struggle to the death between a bear and a hunter who has killed her cub: despite the knife buried in her throat, the animal is on the verge of making one last effort and devouring the man. When I gaze at her image, her sharp canines immediately bring to mind a disturbing sculpture in the Jardin des Plantes, the Dénicheur d’oursons by Emmanuel Frémiet (1886). ![]() What conclusions might be drawn from all of this? That any speculation on the animal gaze and psyche is fanciful? That we are condemned to remain prisoners of anthropocentrism?īut let’s get back to the bear’s mouth. In his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Thomas Nagel explains that it is impossible to respond to this question from the sensorial viewpoint of a bat, hindered from imagining this by our status as human beings. Frustration in fact reaches new heights concerning the tick, given this acarid’s lack of eyes. In his extremely enlightening text on the tick, Giorgio Agamben makes reference to Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll, pursuing his vain and frustrating search for logical-temporal explanations of phenomena that we cannot comprehend, due to our inability to conceive of perceptions arising from the eyes and minds of non-humans. Animal Cinema is a highly fluid and psychedelic montage of found footage of animals interacting with cameras that have been misplaced or removed from their human owners – one of those creations unleashing a tide of post-anthropocentric interrogations. In fact, it was a work by Emilio Vavarella, Animal Cinema, that led me to spend hours contemplating an image of the inside of a brown bear’s throat, a shot involuntarily captured by the mechanical eye of the camera she had just swallowed. Put in these terms, it could be surmised that this was something real, that I had become a veterinary dentist. In attempting to respond to this question, I found myself in the mouth of bear, an animal particularly dear to me for its dual features of strength and fragility. Which new visions of the living world have struck me? What film might Painlevé have made today, now that the anthropocentric paradigm has been broadly called into question? Would he have settled for showing the sea horse’s eye as it had never before been seen? He undoubtedly would have sought to elucidate his vision. But is it Painlevé’s poetry, his humor or his desire to speak to the broadest possible audience that led him, in his comments, to multiply the references to humans? The sea horse has “a dismayed air transformed into worry by the movement of her eyes”. One thing is certain: when he made his first films in the mid-1920s, Painlevé was following a well-established tradition of scientific films using the art of cinema – magnification all the way to microcinematography, acceleration or slow-motion – to show new images of living worlds. In a tribute, Jean Rouch spoke of this filmmaker, who died in 1989, as the “pioneer of the cinema of tomorrow”. It appears in a 1933 short film, one of many documentaries that Painlevé, a biologist by training and a free-thinking friend of the surrealists, devoted to aquatic animals. This eye, filmed by Jean Painlevé and his camera operator, André Raymond, is that of a sea horse. In this respect, the examination of associations between humans and non-humans is intertwined with those that can be made between humans – with a view, by extension, to sketching out the contours of new knowledge of women, men and children. The affective and perceptive unknowns opening up to us via discoveries on animal existence are no guarantee of leaving behind this anthropocentrism these unknowns must be conquered, and the images serving as a vector for new perceptive experience must be analyzed. In a sense, this entails putting the emerging science of the living world to the test, and considering how it allows us to truly escape anthropocentrism – now increasingly deconstructed, while nevertheless continuing to feature prominently in media, cultural and artistic production. Changes in behavioral science and ethology, allowing for new ways of building relations between knowledge and power in this field, warrant close examination. Transformations in our understanding of this world are gradually rendering obsolete these efforts to dominate animals – constituting one of our main connections with them, in the form of taming strategies, exhortations to obedience, the desire for domestication, etc. They have also radically altered the idea of control that humans have tended to exert over the animal world across the ages. New visions of the living world, new knowledge of humansĪdvances in knowledge of animal behavior over the past two decades have upended our long-held perceptions.
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