Beasts in Bits and Pieces

Composed of fragments drawn from the archives of Amsterdam's Eye Filmmuseum, Beasts in Bits and Pieces offers a fertile, dreamy meditation on our relationship with animals and their presence in images. Structured in four chapters - Prologue, Hunting, Observing, Touching - and featuring the voices of Muriel Pic, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Christophe Bailly, the film multiplies the senses by opening up to the elusive part of animal existence.

Pursued, captured, locked up, butchered and staged, nothing that beasts perceive of the world or their condition is taken into account in the anonymous documentary footage of the last century when captured in its raw state. The fragments present themselves to us (and to the author) as "the crumbs of our feast of beasts".

Muriel Pic's anxious, subtle reflections seek to approach the consciousness of these filmed beings, and tell us how their gazes affect her. The editing gives us a sense of the beasts' own interiority, which our control over them prevents us from granting them. She questions the gestures of editing, describes the places where she works and the spaces she travels through in the city, allowing another geography to unfold, this one off-camera. As we watch a whale being butchered on a pier, she recalls her wanderings through the streets of Amsterdam, where she sees "animal forms making and unmaking themselves in the mist of the sky".

"Nature likes to hide," said Heraclitus, and it's by tuning in to what's not visible that Muriel Pic glimpses animal becoming, projecting it into the future in the form of a question addressed to us: "Will we manage to make all these worlds coexist together?"

 

Sylvain L'Espérance
Filmmaker