Before Their Eyes

When we think of wildlife filmmaking, we usually imagine mammals, sometimes including a few familiar insects such as bees, ants, or caterpillars. Here, the proposal is to turn toward the infinite variety of living beings that escape our gaze—or that our gaze simply overlooks. The film opens on a seashore, alternately revealed and concealed, where clumps of earth, pebbles, and seaweed transform into gelatinous bubbles evoking an originary blur. Focus is placed on the distant, leaving the foreground indistinct, or the reverse, depending on the movement of the camera (or the gaze). From the farthest distance to the closest proximity, layers of visibility overlap. This becomes a metaphor for the necessary adjustment required to perceive our close neighbors who nonetheless vanish into matter: for instance, a rock face where part of the surface comes alive and becomes a crab. A convention then takes hold, allowing these living beings to be observed with precision and clarity while humans remain blurred. Like a tale emerging from the filmmakers’ imagination and a 21st-century sensibility, the film also reminds us that we humans, on a scale of size and distance, are situated somewhere between the moon and the tiny barnacle Chthamalus dalli, a crustacean measuring five millimeters. Above all, it is a question of gaze and attention.

 

Diane Poitras
Professor and Co-Director of the labdoc
Université du Québec à Montréal