Programme 2

In Siam, now Thailand, a family leaves their village behind and goes into the jungle, taking with them their Neolithic lifestyle, a defining feature of the human, bolted still to all brains: agriculture, livestock, domesticated plants and animals; basketry, containers to go about accumulating. Of course... the jungle is not empty. The pioneers of our species are, in fact, the last to reach places that are already teeming with existences and relations. They introduce cattle and pets, and a different order: in the passage from predators to producers, they must protect the animals of value to them from the predators now in force. Hollywood imposes the discourse of progress in the intertitles, but it does not support it through the gaze, which is childish, which believes in the game, and plays. In South, reality transformed a polar adventure into a question of survival; in Chang, fiction transforms mere survival into an adventure, and then out come the tricks, from trap to trap until the final grand trap, and the most charismatic animals under the sun filmed like never before. Leopards, tigers, elephants. According to the discourse, one must kill or proletarianise, but Cooper and Schoedsack include the animals in the cinematographic game, they tell them apart and they make them act and, while at it, they make us realise we are not always glad that brains overcome brawn.

The rifles that tip the balance in Siam—unequalising rifles—are nothing in comparison with the advances of the industrial order. We know very little of the life of Topsy, an Asian elephant (you can tell by her ears) who worked in an American circus. It seems that they mistreated her and she killed a man. They sold her to Luna Park in Coney Island and again they mistreated her; she became a “threat” and her owners decided to execute her, by hanging. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested this method, for reasons similar to those put forward in favour of the electric chair, and they ended up electrocuting her. Members of the Society who were present on the day said that “they had never seen a more humane manner of causing death”. Cinema, in the face of this, in this film, is also applied science and it registers the highly concrete collapse of an animal among columns of smoke and, without meaning to, a synthesis of modernity. The century of everything is possible was just beginning.