Tarp fikcijos ir realybės: kelios mintys apie gyvūnu pasaulius kine

ENToday, animals appear in all cinematic genres: from nature documentaries to Hollywood films, from educational science films to classical avant-garde works, and from animation to video productions by contemporary artists. Is it possible to tell the cinematic history of animals? The invention of an optical device to animate and mechanically reproduce photographic imagery in the latter half of the nineteenth century changed the dynamics of the human-animal relationship. Developed in 1881, Edward Muybridge's so-called zoopraxiscope brought life to a series of twelve photographic images of a race horse (and, later, other animals) recorded by stereoscopic cameras arranged in a parallel line. Muybridge's experiment not only satisfied audiences' voyeuristic thrill at seeing otherwise inaccessible animal realms, but also became a subject of debates then taking place in the fields of science and art history. The range of depictions of living nature expanded further still in 1895, after the public demonstration of a cinematographic device invented by the Lumiėre brothers. Early films recorded by the brothers gave animals greater freedom of expression, often allowing them to enter the camera frame by chance. Whether filming the brief flight of a fly, a cat's unexpected leap, or a horse's graceful canter, the camera operators behind the Lumiėre films always sought to capture something unexpected or record a particularly surprising movement.A new chapter in the history of cinematic animal portrayal began in the early twentieth century. The representation of animals on film gradually shifted away from scientific ambitions when cinematic practices became instrumentalized to promote ideologies and develop cultural industries, with animals becoming actors displaying human traits. Images of animals appearing in popular cinema quickly transformed into consumer products that had little in common with their natural origins, thus reinforcing the growing alienation between people and animals. And while this process has continued for more than one hundred years, it is impossible to ignore cinematic work that offers audiences the chance to experience the world's rhythm free from human domination. One of many cinematic artists seeking to answer the question of how a cinematographic point of view can expand our understanding of the world was the French filmmaker Jean Painlevė (1902-1989). Using a custom-made camera to film underwater realms, Painlevė emphasized that, regardless of the aesthetic choices made by filmmakers, the initial cinematic image is born at the moment of encounter between an optical cinematic device and a worldly object, thus conferring upon the cinematic image an exceptional status. Such cinema is understood not as a form of human entertainment or the presentation of an animal's perspective, but as a means to convey a unique vision of the world - a mechanism that challenges the conventional understanding of the world.To be sure, images of animals can perform different functions, depending upon how the animals are incorporated into a narrative. An animal's portrayal on the screen emerges within a system of complex reactions and consequences, in which that animal is recorded as a narrative figure that echoes, or fails to reflect, its animal nature. The invention of the film camera, then, not only expanded our knowledge about the animal world, at the same time distancing us from our everyday interaction with animals, it also provided opportunities for new experiences that obscured the relationship between fiction and reality, between human and animal. [From the publication]