Documenting the trans* and animating the still in Sébastien Lifshitz’s Bambi

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines Bambi (Sébastien Lifshitz, 2013), a documentary that deals with carefully selected aspects of the life and career of French-Algerian trans* woman Marie-Pierre Pruvot: a showgirl and dancer, ‘Bambi’ was Pruvot’s stage name. The article considers the film through the lens of animation; the author uses this word both technically (as in cinematic movement) and metaphorically (in a more general bringing-to-life sense). Bambi mostly comprises Pruvot’s first-person oral testimony, which is often juxtaposed with still photographs documenting her pre-transition childhood. What is striking is how the stationary camera almost exclusively focuses on Pruvot’s face while she speaks, in contrast to the mobility of the still photographs that depict Pruvot’s past life. In addition, Pruvot essentially rewrites her own archive via spoken testimony, making it clear that she no longer identifies with her past self. Such a reconceptualisation of animation, where a single picture may have a multitude of significations, helps us understand the similarly many-sided qualities of representing what it means to be trans* in film and visual media.