Modèle animal

In a center for animal behavior research, humans conduct astonishing experiments with insects. Our perception of these familiar animals is gradually transformed.

In no way didactic, the experience proposed by Maud Faivre and Marceau Boré is more of a phenomenology: without any explanation, the scientific gestures filmed here are detached from their finality. Words spoken sporadically leave room for a strange soundscape and emotion grows out of the forms, colours and movements themselves. The film takes on the appearance of an experiment in vitro. The first effect of its sampling operations: identification shifts to the animals’ side. The camera positions itself at their level, whereas our glimpses of humans most often show no more than the extremities of their forelimbs. Second effect: the strange and repeated procedures seem extravagant. Just how far are humans willing to go to enrich their knowledge? The film exposes a paradox: studying the cognition and culture of insects may well lead us to view them with more respect, but this is achieved through violence. The flies, drosophilae and bumblebees seem trapped in uncomfortable situations, not to say downright tortured. The comic effects of disproportion between the insects and the apparatus clamping them reveal the mismatch: how can the distance from the nature that produces and surrounds us be narrowed? How can we connect with our environment without inflicting violence on it? When the camera draws back, we see that humans are also confined in strange boxes, but they at least are lucky enough to have freely chosen to be there.

Olivia Cooper-Hadjian