About the film by Nicolas Philibert
In the spring of 1991, when I heard that the Paris Natural History Museum’s Zoology Gallery, which had been closed to the public for 25 years, was going to be restored, I immediately wanted to make a film on this unique undertaking: of course, the actual building was going to be renovated, the manner of presenting the specimens was going to be rethought, and adapted to present-day knowledge... but, above all, the project aimed to restore part of its fabulous collections, hundreds of pieces among the millions of stuffed animals that scientists and naturalist travellers of the past had taken from all four corners of the globe and amassed for over two centuries.
For months, in the secrecy of workshops and laboratories, work would go ahead on dusting off, re-stitching, patching up, cobbling together and repainting the residents of the Gallery whom 25 years of neglect had left a little shabby.
One of my earlier films, Louvre City, had already explored the behind-the-scenes aspect of a great museum... But this time, I would, in my own way, sing a sort of hymn to the diversity of the animal kingdom, where mammals, fish, birds, molluscs, insects, amphibians and reptiles would all share the bill, presenting human beings, naturalists, museologists, architects and taxidermists as mere foils to them.
But filming the collections meant first of all discovering how they were - and are - conserved: a whole system of boxes, jars, cans, labels, drawers, shelves, stacks, cupboards, display cabinets, storage units, compartments... So many divisions and subdivisions referring back to the notions of kingdom, class, order, genus, family, species and sub-species that organize the inventory on the basis of a hierarchy that is forever being updated. And if we are to believe the specialists, this gigantic classification system, which Linnaeus laid the modern foundations for 250 years ago, is far from complete, because each year we are still identifying almost 7000 new species and sub-species throughout the world, mainly among the insects.
And so I set about the task of filming strange silent bodies, those defunct animals turned objects, frozen forever in postures designed to make them look life-like.
But how is it possible to make these bodies that have been voided of their substance, and of which all that remains is the outer envelope, look lifelike? It would obviously be necessary to give the illusion that they are looking at us, placed in such a way that those motionless eyes, those dead eyes which never blink or move, find a semblance of intensity. However, not all animal species lend themselves to this in the same way, because many of them have an eye on each side of the skull. And to obtain the illusion of an eye looking, it is best if both eyes are in the axis of the camera.
And we should talk about the postures, poses and expressions in which the specimens have been immortalized, and which reveal to us so many things about people’s imagination in the face of nature. A keen examination of them might produce a History of taxidermy, which would reveal the existence of fashions, trends and styles, for it is a fact that the representation that we make for ourselves of the animal world develops over the centuries.
The classic image of the lion, frozen in an aggressive and belligerent pose, mouth open, fangs sharpened, an antelope between its claws, brings smiles to the faces of specialists these days - specialists who, if they had to stuff such a specimen, would probably give it a more neutral expression. Anthropocentrism has lost some of its haughtiness, while the idea of evolution has gradually gained ground. Because of the combined discoveries of palaeontology and molecular biology, we now know that all living beings which exist or have existed belong to one and the same genealogical tree, that they come from one and the same line of descent, which encompasses the human species itself. As such, this film is nothing other than a family movie because, from the dromedary to the tarantula, via the Brittany spaniel, the whiting and the tsetse fly, all animals, apparently, are our long lost cousins.
But let’s not get the wrong idea: my aim was not to display some kind of scientific knowledge. No explanations, no interviews here: this film proposes a certain remove, the amused and prying eye of a filmmaker who has worked his way into these places by breaking and entering. It suggests the viewpoint of a lover of dreams in the grip of the strange eeriness and emotion that emanate from these hundreds and thousands of motionless creatures, amassed by scholars of yesteryear and so painstakingly preserved by today’s scientists.
And over and above all this, Animals refers us to the origins of life, on another scale: the scale of geological eras, expressed in hundreds of millions of years.
