Dead Funny: Laughter, Life and Death in Philibert’s Nénette and Un animal, des animaux

Abstract

Nicolas Philibert’s Nenette (2010), a documentary about an orang-utan living in the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, places the laughter of visitors at the centre of its reflections on the zoo, while also attending to the lived time of captivity, and to the orang-utan as something more than merely an object of fun. Nenette is often seen as a companion piece to Philibert’s Un animal, des animaux (1996), which documents the renovation of the Natural History Museum’s zoology gallery, principally comprising a vast taxidermy collection, located next door to the menagerie in which Nenette is housed. But it is not only the spatial proximity between animal specimens living and dead that prompts my pairing of the two films here. Un animal ’s wry investment in incongruities and visual gags finds continuation in the uneasy humour at work in Nenette . Drawing on Bergson’s theory of laughter as a negotiation of boundaries between the human and the animal, and between the animate and the inanimate, I read the zoo animal in Nenette as inextricably bound up with the taxidermied animal in Un animal . Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) acts as an intriguing urtext here, with one of its scenes set in the same zoology gallery at the Natural History Museum, thirty years before Philibert filmed there. Like La Jetee , Nenette and Un animal suggest cinema as a privileged space of reflection on life, death and temporality — and as in Marker’s museum scene, Philibert organises these questions around the animal. But, with the silent laughter of the couple during the museum visit in La Jetee in mind, I want to suggest that humour in Philibert’s two films marks a series of moments in which boundaries between the living and the dead, and the human and the animal, become especially fragile.