Laurence Favre | Corpus Animale

A glacier, a forest, a desert: they triggered three films, Résistance (2017), Osmose (2022), and Zerzura (2024) respectively. Laurence Favre placed her eyes and ears as a film artist within these elements in order to let them speak from the distance of their gigantic scale. Through the films, the distance of our perception evaporates, and they start to speak as one living body. Corpus Animale, both title and programme of the trilogy, points out the common soul (anima) that we share with the glacier, the forest, the desert. The trilogy attempts to convey the experience of this continuity between the human and non-human or, better, the more-than-human. It will be from this eccentric perspective – eccentric with respect to anthropocentrism – that we can look differently, that meaning more empathically, at the environmental issues that those elements are witnessing during our particular eon.

The more-than-human perspective

Are films able to accomplish such an ambitious task? How can they do it? And, more fundamentally, what does the experience of the continuity between human and non-human exactly mean? The discussion around the more-than-human perspective is a topic that has already been a subject of interest on the sites of Filmexplorer, and I find in Laurence Favre a passionate discussant with whom I can explore the challenges of the more-than-human perspective in relationship to filmmaking.

In a long conversion with her (whose traces will tint my text), I learned, for example, how to approach the question about a glacier that would be provided with a soul from the point of view of another question: how is it possible that it is not provided with a soul? What makes us reduce it to an inanimate object? Laurence speaks of the “objectifying gaze” – also in reference to Laura Mulvey’s reflection on the “male gaze” in cinema – that dispossesses the bodies of their agency, of their freedom. This objectifying gaze would be the result of an egocentric posture, in which we take ourselves as the only legitimate subject. From this perspective, everything becomes “dispensable” (to use a notion that Walter Mignolo developed in order to explain how our societies tolerate slavery and wild extraction of the earth resources). An apparently simple question of posture can have huge consequences.

Now, the opposite, non-reductionist approach of sacralising or hypostatising a glacier, common to religious attitudes like animism – a term that Laurence does not refuse – would assume the agency of the glacier as a metaphysical postulate. Speaking of sacralisation, Laurence makes me discover the quite interesting reflection of Nastassja Martin who, in the context of environmental issues, puts exploitation and protection in close connection: «Exploitation and protection of environment are two faces of the same ontology, a Western, modern and dialectic ontology. The common element of these two conceptions of environment is fundamental: in both cases, it’s the exteriority of the human being towards the environment that allows its sacralisation or its exploitation» (Les âmes sauvages: face à l’Occident, la résistance d’un peuple d’Alaska, 2016). We should leave ontological issues aside, and come back to us, to the question of our experience, with the conscious awareness of not placing ourselves at the centre of the universe (anthropocentrism). How can we experience the soul or the agency of a glacier?

The art of listening

As a viewer, Résistance has the specificity of not showing or depicting the Aletsch glacier, but of listening to it. Listening to it, not anticipating but being open to the most unexpected features of the glacier, is the attitude that allows the glacier to manifest its agency, if it has one. Concretely, this attitude has meant for Laurence Favre – she tells me – setting a minimalist approach to the creative process: walking a lot with the camera but without a plan and avoiding reflection, trying to be receptive and shoot in a quite instinctive way. Thus, the film becomes an invitation to share the attitude of listening, listening to the environment, its being, its liveliness, listening to both the immensity and fragility of the glacier. In this framework the deliberate use of hydrophones, for example, will not anticipate a concept or representation of the glacier, but welcome the hazards of its own expression. The attitude of listening does not renounce formal choices, but balances them in leaving room to chance and welcoming the “accidents” – or at least taking them seriously. In this way, the attitude of listening becomes an artistic methodology, which Laurence clearly uses for the other films of the trilogy as well. I would say that, in general, this methodology implies a sort of transparency, in which the creative process is visible in the filmic result.

Three dialectic ideas for one experience of decentring

More specifically, in the trilogy I observe three formal ideas that play in a dialectic manner. Firstly, the alternance of fix frames and little camera movements, which breaks the contemplative gaze and the risk of falling into the trap of the beauty of the images. In Zerzura, for example, some shots are introduced with the wind visibly shaking the camera itself, and in Osmose are some slanting frames – and in our conversation she tells me that she even refused the use of image stabilisation in post-production. This dialectic between framing and “deframing” (décadrage) also places the action out of focus, out of our control, making it an action-accident to which we would be late. Secondly, the alternance of close views and landscape views, which creates dynamism in the films, and builds a non-narrative dramaturgy. Compared to other-than-human beings, we are immediately faced with a gap in temporal and spatial scale. Non-narrativity and the composition of closer-then-distant views help us enter this gap, because they challenge and widen our centre of perception. In Zerzura, there is more than a successive alternance of close and distant views; we see how they dissolve, one into the other, thus creating a specific ambiguity in the perception. In said ambiguous perception, we can experience a third dialectic idea, the play between visual abstraction and recognition. For example, I had the experience of the dunes of the desert (in Zerzura) as “appearing” out of an abstract image with lines and patterns of colours – which could well be the macro-image (close view) of the sand. In this respect, Laurence tells me that such play is even more complicated in Osmose, because the forest we “recognise” in the film actually is the composition of several forests that she shot, a both abstract and recognisable “body”. She adds that this choice has precise motivation in the idea of embracing the forests in their cyclical death and regeneration, between the vegetal and mineral domains.

The methodology of listening in the process of filmmaking, and these three dialectical formal choices, gives filmic substance to the most fundamental experience at the core of the trilogy of Corpus Animale: the experience of “decentring” – decentring our perception, our perspective, our anthropocentric posture. Only in experiencing a decentring of our perspective can we feel how close we are with living beings like a glacier, a forest, or a desert. Accordingly, it is probably less a question of postulating an agency for these living beings, and more a question of decentring our perspective in order to be able to listen to their eventual agency.

Sound binds it all

Here is probably the slight difference of emphasis between me and Laurence: while she puts the accent on the fact that the glacier, the forest, and the desert do have a soul, or agency – which would legitimately allow to speak of animism, for instance – I would put that accent on the fact that, through her films and the experience of decentring, we can open ourselves to their eventual agency. For me, we cannot experience their souls, but we can have the experience of being connected to and with other souls. This is why I would prefer not to speak of empathy with those other beings. In my perception, Corpus Animale can literally make us experience sympathy with them. The question is not what they are, but what binds us – the corpus, the body, in the singular.

On a formal level, if the experience of decentring depends on the methodology of listening and these three dialectical ideas, the experience of being connected – in this context Laurence refers to the global interconnectedness of all beings as in Timothy Morton’s notion of “mesh” – then the experience of sympathy depends on the treatment of sound in the films, which I believe is responsible for the feeling of organicity, of continuity, both between us and the other beings and among them. More precisely, the wonderful work she did with the sound designer Philippe Ciompi brings unity to the films through the breath with which the sound is able to inflate them. In a way, the sound allows us to re-centre ourselves in a non-anthropocentric world.

Two tricky questions and a poetic answer

One could legitimately ask: Is the attribute of breathing still too anthropocentric? It is actually anthropomorphic, which is the occasion for me to make the important distinction between anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism, two notions too often confused in the critique against anthropocentrism. The act of projecting human features onto non-human beings does not neutralise the decentring of our perspective, because in the idea of a continuity between all beings, what we recognise as human features can reveal themselves to also be pertinent for non-human beings. This is why it is better to speak of a “more-than-human” perspective, so that the absolute otherness of the non-human beings is radically questioned. In a nutshell, anthropomorphic projections still have their place in a non-anthropocentric world. Anthropomorphism does not necessarily entail anthropocentrism. Along this line of questioning the exact place of the anthropos, a second tricky question inevitably arises:

Who is the author in a more-than-human world? If the artist refuses to impose his/her authority through the methodology of listening, is he/she not an author anymore? Or perhaps is he/she a sort of super-author, because it’s up to him/her to reject authorship? As previously mentioned, Laurence Favre accepts chance to take its place in the process of creation: is this acceptance weakening her role as artist-author? Or for this exact reason, being herself the author of this weakening, will this acceptance be the most perverse way to appropriate what intrinsically should resist any appropriation: chance itself? (In terms of the history of music, is John Cage more totalitarian than Richard Wagner or Arnold Schönberg?) We have to distinguish the author of a methodology open to non-authorial elements (chance, the agency of a glacier, etc.) and the author of the resulting work. As author of a methodology, Laurence is following what happens and is ready to accept unexpected inputs, even if she sets the initial framework and rules. The fact that she, as filmmaker, wants in the process of filmmaking to decentre herself does not mean that she pre-empts the decentring itself. Even if she “authorially” wants to decentre, once she is decentred, she will be in a position whose specificity she could not anticipate. Thus, I think that individual authorship is effectively questioned.

In exchanging with Laurence, we recognise how this last answer describes exactly what is going on in poetry, in the practice of writing poems. In fact, this practice is essential to Laurence as filmmaker, and to the creation of the trilogy Corpus Animale, where texts also play an important role. She tells me that texts were initially thought as a form of dedication to the elements, a simple strategy, as if with letters, to get in contact with distant beings. In poetry, we also follow a voice that is not necessarily under the full control of the author.

A multiple perspective

A further decentring moment that concerns Laurence as an author and the trilogy as a work is the question of the screening order of the three films of Corpus Animale: should it be a chronological one – Résistance, Osmose, and Zerzura – or a perfectly inverted one, as Laurence herself prefers? In Résistance, I see the continuity between human and more-than-human displayed as problematic, and find in Zerzura, with its mineral core and few traces of only-human beings, a sort of accomplishment of such continuity. From this standpoint, the order from Zerzura to Résistance would show something like an anthropic emergence, up until the human damages evident in the glacier. The opposite order, from Résistance to Zerzura, instead, will draw a utopic path of communion. To this, Laurence impels me to remark that the animal trace at the end of Zerzura could hint at an apocalypse, which would be a dark end of the trilogy, while the perpetual fight of Résistance seems to her a more open end, if not a hopeful one. At the very least, it is an invitation to act, to commit oneself, and Résistance also shows the perpetual regeneration, where the ephemerality of life is made eternal through film.

Corpus Animale is actually also intended to be shown in an installative version in an exhibition space, in which the three perspectives on the same corpus would coexist through our own circulation throughout the films – with the difficulty of finding a solution for the wonderful sound of the films. This would certainly enhance the intrinsic multiplicity of perspectives of any more-than-human world. Is expanded cinema a “natural” form of decentring, and therefore the perfect form for more-than-human perspectives?