Chris Marker’s “Petit Bestiaire”: A Cinema Essay

Auteurs

  • Rosemary O'Neill Parsons School of Design – The New School, NYC

Résumé

In Petit Bestiaire, Marker turns his light-weight camera on animals and birds in this compilation of courts métrages. This essay film is poetically composed and includes Chat Écoutant la Musique (1990), an intimate sequence of his cat, Guillaume-en-Égypte; and Zoo Piece (1993), An owl is an owl is an owl (1990), and Slon Tango (1993), observed accounts of physical, social, and environmental displacement in public zoos. Marker’s deliberate pacing of these films and accompanying music/sound scores create resonant scenarios using both fixed frame and varied montage approaches without conceding the directness of the camera eye. His essay film bears witness to the reality of non-human animal subjects by engaging the viewer while challenging the viewer to question the social, political, and pedagogical semantics of non-human creature collection/display when distance from nature has become increasingly the norm, and the consequences of these displacements are marginalized. Marker also evokes memory of ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds where natural science and human moralizing often merged, as well as the charm of animals in children’s books. His incorporation of this essay film into the installation Zapping Zones (Proposals for an Imaginary Television), 1990-1994; and the CD-ROM Immemory, 1998, signals a migration of this essay film into multi-media platforms, again inducing an égalité du regard between human and non-human animal creatures.

Biographie de l'auteur

Rosemary O'Neill, Parsons School of Design – The New School, NYC

Rosemary O’Neill is an Associate Professor of Art History at Parsons School of Design. She is the author of Art and Visual Culture on the French Riviera, 1956-1971 (Ashgate, 2012), co-editor of Art as Adventure: Going Beyond (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017); book chapters: “Agnès Varda’s du Côté de la Côte: Place as ‘Sociological Phenomenon’” (Bloomsbury, 2018); “Christoph Fink’s Atlas of Movements: Between Cartography and Poetry” (2018), “La Cédille qui Sourit: aesthetic research under the ‘sign of humor’” (Ashgate 2012); and “Le ‘naturalisme intégral’ de Pierre Restany: la perception disciplinée et la dématérialisation de l’objet” (Éditions des Cendres, 2009). O’Neill has published essays in museum catalogues internationally, served as reviewer for an UNESCO world heritage site application (2020) and contributed to the peer-reviewed International Art Market Dictionary (2023).

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Publiée

2022-12-01

Comment citer

O’Neill, R. (2022). Chris Marker’s “Petit Bestiaire”: A Cinema Essay. Elephant & Castle, (27). Consulté à l’adresse https://elephantandcastle.unibg.it/index.php/eac/article/view/212

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