[in]Transition

This is really a strong piece of work that demonstrates the potential of the longer-duration video essay to articulate and develop an argument of equivalent complexity to a conventional article.

It’s certainly not a video to skim over breakfast – not only because of its length but also because of the mode of viewing that it encourages. The video makes the case for ‘observation’ as a reflexive form of looking, distinguished from the gaze by an acknowledgement of the fact that the object of your look always literally or figuratively looks back at you. The argument, developed through an exploration of various clips of filmmakers observing animals, is clearly articulated, and culminates in a powerful assertion of the importance of filming at research centers that experiment with animals. What I find most impressive about the video, however, is the way in which it supports viewers’ own acts of ‘observation’. It does so in various ways – for example, through the studied rhythm of its editing, through its carefully paced voice over, and through its willingness on occasion to leave the viewer alone with an image. All of these techniques provide space for me to reflect on what I was seeing and hearing, to engage in a mental dialog with the author with the same reciprocity that distinguishes observation from the gaze, and so utilize precisely the ‘visual thinking’ that the video advocates. 

It was especially interesting to look at animals in the process of looking – trying to get to grips with an image of an animal trying to get to grips with what it was seeing, and so seeing my own look doubled. At times, I even imagined my own scrutiny of the animal faces in the video scrutinized in turn by those I was observing. Was the orangutan in Nicolas Philibert’s Nénette also engaging in visual thinking? Of course, these reflexive thoughts did not occur by chance. They came about as a result of the video’s rhetorical structure. If its ultimate aim is to make the viewer engage more actively with animal consciousness, then – in my own experience of watching at least – the video was wholly effective. It articulated empathetic ‘observation’, exemplified it, and helped me to engage in it myself. 

The title of this video reads in a double way. We, the human, face the subject of our observation, the animal, in other words, our object. At the same time this object faces us, the subject of this observation, so the object becomes in turn a subject who faces its object that observes it. Thus the subject and the object turn out to be topological positions that mirror and mingle with each other, while still always facing, before each other, an invisible gap of ontological incomprehensibility between them. Conversely, it is this unbridgeable schism that inter-faces them with each other, enables and conditions their phenomenological chiasma. It opens the room for “observation” as defined by the author, the synaesthetic experience and embodied event of encountering the other, both its communal companionship and irreducible alterity in critical looking-thinking.

The video deftly weaves archival footage of human and animal faces into a compelling audiovisual essay, putting critical animal studies and actual scientific experiments face-to-face each other in its reflective way of observing them. Relevant references to key scholars including Anna Tsing, Jacques Derrida, and Cary Wolfe are brought into the author’s well-composed narration along with notable documentary films on apes such as Nenette, Project Nim and Primate. Viewers who are not familiar with these academic and visual branches could be inspired by their ideas and approaches that challenge the anthropocentric paradigm of looking. The observation of the video itself would then activate the critical deterritorialization of human subjectivity into a vast environmental life-world of inhuman gazes. Some fundamental questions such as “what is human?” and “what is life?” may wait for new answers there.

For those who are used to the trendy animal studies, however, the video might slightly lose its intended freshness. This risk paradoxically comes from what makes this audiovisual work a “critical essay,” i.e. the voiceover. More precisely, its perfection seems its weakness. The narration situates the audience in a virtual seminar taught by a professor who speaks in a highly polished academic language. She articulates the sensorial observation of the animal gaze, the Real of nonlinguistic otherness in this most sophisticated version of the Symbolic order. Of course language inevitably frames the unspeakable Thing, but here, its pedagogical effect is maximally exploited to survey a set of class materials that introduce major points and names in animal studies within 25 minutes. Consequently, facing the blank stare of monkeys does not really leave room for the viewer’s own critical observation while its signification is proactively narrated. Images then lose some primal potential, reduced to sleek illustration packages of established discourse taken from books and delivered in a somewhat stereotypically contemplative tone. How to overcome this monotonous observation? Indeed it is a difficult question, not the limitation of this video only. One thing to note is that there is still no image taken from the animal’s gaze toward us. The animal is still our object, not a subject yet. Facing its subjectivity would be a next task for critical observation.