Goodbye to animals

We had the sun, but we went and looked for energy with our backs to the sun, underground, in a typically human movement: complicated, idiotic, heroic at times. Since the 1970s, the decade of the “oil crisis” and the beginning of the end of our mining civilisation, almost 70% of wild animals have disappeared, they say (not counting invertebrates, which are uncountable). They also say that soon the largest animal on the planet will be the cow. Goodbye to elephants, goodbye to whales. Wild animals disappear, for the most part, because they have no place to live. We have left them without forests and with lands and waters divided up by property deeds and infrastructures. We are the height of a bad neighbourhood. Have we always been? According to this film program, the answer is no.

 

To find something other than pets and cattle in a twentieth century art, one must go to the far reaches, towards the cold, to exotic biomes like the jungle and the savannah or places of confinement. Ten films will take us there. The relations between humans and animals change, they have changed, and from film to film we will see how, what we were willing to do and have done to us, and if we wanted to invent an ethic. The limits of the human are blurred when in contact with animals, and cinema, due to its capacity to document, to register, has shown us that indeterminacy. We will see executions, and requiems too. Mistreatment, and considerable efforts to forestall the loss of the grace of the woodpeckers, of the mystery of the musk oxen, of the evidence (as any child knows) that all us species were equally invited to the table of the sun.