Animal worlds: Denis Côté’s Bestiaire (2012)

Abstract

Theoretical reflections on animals in film often invest in an ontological association between cinema and the animal. This article traces this ontological association (in the work of André Bazin and Akira Mizuta Lippit in particular) yet also asks how reflections on screen animals might move beyond this theoretical trope. Denis Côté’s Bestiaire (2012), an experimental documentary about a zoo, seems to affirm the idea that the on-screen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Including a sequence at a taxidermist, Bestiaire reflects on the display of animals both living and dead, still and moving; it mobilises two key metaphors – cinema as zoo, and cinema as taxidermy – in order to interrogate the ontology of film. Yet Bestiaire also moves beyond this theoretical conflation of cinema and animality. Drawing on work by Nicole Shukin and Anat Pick, this article reads the film’s strategies of framing and ‘witnessing’ as posing questions about zoo biopower, captivity and suffering. Invoking Jakob von Uexküll’s notion of the Umwelt, the author addresses Bestiaire’s attunement to nonhuman perceptual worlds. Initiating yet exceeding a reduction of the film animal to an expression of cinematic specificity, Bestiaire explores two different concepts of life: the ‘bare life’ of zoopolitics and the life-worlds that expand, and make meaning, beyond this.