Bestiari, erbari, lapidari

With the expression “more-than-human perspective” a flourishing debate means a decentration of the focus on human beings in order to consider and experience the various forms of continuity between human beings, animals, plants, and minerals. Is Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti’s last film assuming this perspective? Yes and no. Yes, because they dedicate their three filmic chapters to the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms, and no, because their preoccupation is less one of venturing into non-anthropic points of view, and more one of witnessing the anthropic interference in those kingdoms. Already the title – in English Bestiaries, Herbaria, Lapidaries – refers to the scholastic classification of living and non-living beings. Or, more accurately, to the human appropriation of them for the sake of knowledge. Continuing on a theme that haunts many of their previous films, the Italian duo stresses the violence of such classification, the virtues and vices of measuring, and the role of images and cinema in this problematic endeavour.

These tasks are particularly evident in the first of the three chapters of the film, which shows the exploitation of animals as test subjects, and the array of constrictions they have to endure in order to satisfy the human’s thirst for knowledge. The originality of this chapter certainly depends on the “cinematic” perspective from which we see this peculiar collection of animals, insofar as this perspective is embodied by two analysts and historians of scientific film archives. Through them we learn how science and violence are connected, simply through the act of seeing and the physical constraints that are imposed by the capturing of images. Is captivity inherent to the cinematic eye? Can we really record the image of a living being without strongly interfering with its life? If the anatomic, dissecting approach of science would clearly answer this question in the negative, the two analysts interestingly underline how the historical shift from an anatomic to a behavioural approach in science did not necessarily improve the situation. On the contrary, we see how test animals are spared from killing only to be often tortured. However, the film also shows how science and knowledge could help the animals, in saving their lives – or at least we happen to interpret the images in this sense when we look at some scenes of surgery, scenes which can also refer to further scientific tests. The absence of commentary leaves open the question of how science can also become an instrument of care, even of repair – hinting at a delicate question that still has to be properly assessed in our epoch.

With the second chapter of the film, concerning the vegetable kingdom, we experience a double shift: formally, the film abandons the composition of archive footage and scientific imagery in order to dive into one of reality: the most ancient Botanical Garden in the world, in Padua, Italy. This shift changes the perspective, from the forcing of image creation to a gentler, more distant, observational gaze. On the screen, the scientists seem to give way to the workers, of which the filmmakers underline the gestures of care. Nevertheless, the Botanical Garden appears to share the same museal approach as zoos: they are nothing more than an artificial archive of the living. Why do D’Anolfi and Parenti prefer a more positive tonality in this second chapter? The answer is probably in the voiceover and the formidable lesson of the biologist Stefano Mancuso (a scientist…), who teaches us how plants are not only the most pervasive and successful living being on earth but also an extraordinary source of inspiration, with their “communitarian” organisation and distributed, non-hierarchical intelligence. Padua Botanical Garden thus becomes the paradigm of a learning model, where we can listen to the non-anthropic functioning of nature. Here, in this wonderfully shot chapter, we also listen to birds (within a rich and refined soundscape), but we rarely see any. For me, they are the symptom of the organic interconnectedness of all the kingdoms of nature, of which a didactic concentration of plants in a spot of Padana Plain is still a non-organic deviation. Are botanical gardens so different from zoos? Mancuso points out that a plant is less individual than an animal; despite any division, it is somehow indestructible. So the question would be: how much is a botanical garden able to reproduce itself, and propagate?

The first two chapters of Bestiari, erbari, lapidari show the shift from the archive as a storage for knowledge to the archive as seminal model of expansion, from captivating to developing. The third chapter conflates the immobility and dynamicity of the archive. This is actually only one possible interpretation of a monumental film that, in my understanding, prefers to ask open questions than affirm theses. The immovability of stone and mineral is approached here through a filmic discourse that is dramaturgically enigmatic. On one side, we follow the process of the creation of concrete through a contemplative gaze that expresses all the fascination for the demiurgic power of industrial machines; on the other, we bear witness to the political victims of fascism, whose archival files are excavated and recollected. The connection of these two lines is not uniform, even if concrete matter and photographic archives share the same movements of unearthing. For both it is a question of extraction, but a far different extraction to the one criticised today as the exploitation of natural resources. This third chapter is constructed through a suspense of meaning, a suspension of sense, where great attention is dedicated to the labour as such. Only at the end of the film will the extracted elements find a composition in commemorative plaques, where the absent, often forgotten body of the victims is made of concrete, made to last into the future. In this way, memory and political awareness close this encyclopaedic film in sublimating the mineral kingdom as a bearer of hope.