Animalaise - Becoming Animal in Experimental Cinema

Film-essay "Animalaise – Becoming Animal in Experimental Cinema" published in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies (nº12.3/2025) special edition on Ecocriticism and Animal Studies.

[in]Transition is an indexed journal published by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) and owned by SCMS. This blind peer-reviewed scientific journal was awarded the "2015 Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship of Distinction" by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). https://doi.org/10.16995/intransition.15788

Creator’s Statement

“Only at times, the curtain of the pupilslifts, quietly—. An image enters in,rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,plunges into the heart and is gone.”“The Panther” (1903)Rainer Maria Rilke

Animalaise is an essay-experimental found footage film. It was developed as an offshoot of my PhD doctoral thesis. It was screened in film festivals, including film exhibitions in the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris and in the Cinemateque of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM-Rio).

The film aims to adapt Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “The Panther” into a cinematic form, focusing on co-creation rather than literal translation. Drawing from Haroldo de Campos’s idea of “transliteration” poetry, the film embodies a partnership akin to Pound’s “make it new” proposition, aiming for a creative co-creation under the poem’s influence rather than a film “about” the poem.

The film was also inspired by the readings of J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus,” and the studies of Amerindian perspectivism by Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

The film’s production followed a deviant methodology, with no script or screenplay. It was filmed in one day, with my cats. The film is supported by archival footage that I appropriated from the film Awakenings (1990) and excerpts of circus images found in the Paper Print Catalog of the Library of Congress online archive, images prototypical of the era of “Cinema of Attractions,” also known as “early cinema” (Gunning 1986).

This work intentionally deviates from the narrative cinema form, avoiding the causal linearity of Aristotle’s Poetics. But I also did not intend to endeavor into a formalistic or “structural” investigation (as in P.A Sitney’s definition). Even without fictional fabulation, it is possible to observe rhetoric. In the friction between the images arises a political debate between two distinct regimes of utterance. From the dialectical clash between opposites, a third latent and reflective “text” emerges. A pensive-image evokes affections without articulated language (but still language).

The film deliberately avoids sharpness or transparency. The soundtrack “Finding Rothko” by Adam Schoenberg gradually envelops the viewer in an atmosphere of dreamlike strangeness. The sound design was structured to mix musical composition with an echo of a male voice, which comes from an extradiegetic space. Its foreign words cannot be understood, in a cacophony that remains untranslatable. This phantasmatic speech communicates through babbling, in a vain attempt to establish a kind of dialogue or enunciation that never fully materializes.

I created this deliberate noise, considering the transformative force of disfigurement and inaccuracy, which opens a gap in the representation itself, finally revealing an energy that pervades all of Rilke’s poetry: the desire for communicability between different species, a difficult attempt of exchange that can only establish itself through the gaze: a gaze pregnant with words.

I sought then to depict the elements present in the poem as metaphorical extensions, creating new analogous images, as part of Rilke’s “visual dictionary.” In this sense, the image of the feline’s retina appears as a synthesis of Rilke’s poem. Gradually, different disembodied eyes (of animals and humans), come loose, floating in an aqueous space in a sequence of overlays. This mise en abîme invites us to look at the gaze itself, coming from both the “flesh’s eyes” and the “spirit’s eyes.”

In the poem, the movement of the pupil’s expansion and constriction relates to the movement of opening and closing of the cage, as well as to the circular and obsessive movement of the panther. This denotes an imminent violence, energy dammed up in both the animal’s muscles and the bars that separate the animal and the poet. This latent power generates an atmosphere of tension that permeates the entire poem.

I sought then to trace in the film a path of elements that would be like different rhymes, or “stations,” of the ocular metaphor in Rilke. The poem oscillates between opening and retaining, causing a sensation of confinement and something about to emerge, which could also serve as a phenomenological meditation. Consciousness and rationality would appear as a force of repression or “cage” of the being. Both animals and humans are trapped within themselves, condemned to see only from their own perspective.

This would, finally, relate to Viveiros de Castro’s central notion of Amerindian perspectivism. The Brazilian anthropologist (2007) draws attention to a common proposition in many American indigenous mythologies, primarily based in narrative, that in immemorial times animals and humans were the same being or entity (36). This presents a kind of reverse Darwinian theory of evolution, where animals are ex-humans who gradually distanced themselves from their “original” human form. The past humanity of animals, therefore, enhances a potential capacity for communication between species, a lost “common” koiné language.

This idea of Amerindian perspectivism sharply contrasts with Western philosophy and evolutionary theory, in which “past” animality is seen as a primitive state, surpassed by civilization and culture. This binary division between nature and culture reinforces the myth of “wild” nature and the view of animals and plants as irrational beings, available to be objectified, used, cataloged, and controlled by humans. This mindset, as we know, laid the foundation for modern zoos, colonialism, and indigenous epistemicide, while also underpinning the birth of cinema. The cinematograph was conceived not only for entertainment but also as a tool for scientific inquiry, supporting humanity’s imperial quest to know, “capture,” and therefore control the world (e.g., travelogues, Lumière views, Westerns, etc.).

In contrast, indigenous Amerindian myths and cultures do not view animality as something forgotten or superseded. Instead, they recognize a continuous trace of humanity in animals, an enduring potential for communication between species, beyond the limits or need of verbal or written language. In indigenous societies, the figures capable of bridging this communicative intraspecies gap would be the shamans. In Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari (1997), there is also the understanding that the artist would be a kind of “sorcerer.” The writer would not write for the animals—never really becoming an actual animal or transcending itself—but rather writing by the animals; that is, being crossed by their “becoming-animal.”

Thus, in an artist-sorcerer gesture, I perform in this film a perspectivist “eco-phenomenological” experiment, creating alliances of gazes where the senses (and not the sense) become the heart of language. This face-to-face interaction between species creates a new borderless territory where it is possible to coexist within other non-human orders or an “inter-being” zone of indiscernibility, which is not transcendent or spiritual, but rather material and immanent.

Furthermore, I worked with Deleuze’s concept of affection-image, which occurs when there is a combination of two reflective elements: immobility and intense expressiveness. At this moment, the image can be considered “facialized”; that is, it is full of dense affectation. This intensive moment occurs when the face of the green-eyed cat stares fixedly into the camera, breaking the fourth wall. As in the gesture of Dadaist detournement, we subvert the original meaning of the images. By placing the animals’ seeing images that were not originally directed to them—since an animal is “a thing that is seen, but does not see” (Maciel 2023, 151)—we disorient the dominant human perspective, producing a reception deviation that creates an ethical short circuit.

In What Animals Teach Us About Politics, Brian Massumi (2017) argues that the embodied logic of animal play (such as performing hunting “scenes”) is essentially analogous to language. Play, according to Massumi, is an excess—an expression of bodily enthusiasm and vitality affect that he calls the “surplus value of life” or “metacommunication” (22–25). This surplus constitutes a form of abstraction, an “aesthetic yield” and inactive pragmatics. As such, the act of play instinctively belongs to an artistic dimension and represents an aspect of culture.

In other words, Massumi asserts that animals possess culture, which precedes and transcends both written and verbal expression. Consequently, when we view early cinema images where animals are forced to “play” human games, mimic gestures and bodily movements, and wear human attire, it becomes, in my view, a depiction of colonialism in a nutshell. On displacing these images, the film reveals the violence inherent in the dominant anthropocentric perspective.

On engaging a “becoming-animal” in viewers, an experience of a political awakening can be subsumed through the animals’ gaze. In this sense, to conclude, viewing “Animalaise” allows us to produce knowledge not only through rationality but also through bodily senses—a form of communication that leads to an understanding of the world grounded in experience, based on inter-corporeality and inter-animality.

Recognizing sentient beings affirms our solidarity with other physical forms and acknowledges our existence as animals among others on Earth. The film serves as a propaedeutic to the defense of animal rights and an alert to the dangers of the Anthropocene today. It aims not to provide answers but to provoke tension between gazes, embodying the malaise inherent in its title.

Works Cited

Coetzee, J. M. (2004). Elizabeth Costello. Cia das Letras.

Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1997). Devir-intenso, devir animal, devir-imperceptível. In Mil platôs: Capitalismo e esquizofrenia, trans. S. Rolnik, Editora 34, vol. 4: 11–37.

Gunning, T. (1990). “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Cinema, Its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, 56–62. BFI Publishing.

Maciel, E. Maria. (2023). Animalidade, Zooliteratura e os Limites do Humano. 1ª ed. Editora Instante.

Massumi, B. (2017). O que os animais nos ensinam sobre política. N-1 Edições.

Sitney, P. A. (2002). Film visionary: The American avant-garde 1943–2000. Oxford Univ. Press.

Viveiros de Castro, E. (2007). Encontros (G. Zarvos, Org.). Beco do Azougue.