ANIMAL LOVE
d. Ulrich Seidl, 1995

5 March 2006

ANIMAL LOVE documents the domestic lives of two dozen or so Swiss pet owners, the majority of whom seem to be living marginal lives, economically or emotionally. The result is as if Errol Morris had shot UNCLE GODDAMN, but instead of American White Trash, we get Eurotrash gladly airing their sordid, sad lives in one unblinking tableau after another.

The human subjects of ANIMAL LOVE monologue for the camera, or baby-talk to their pets in German. (It is difficult to describe just how disturbing baby-talk is in German.) Much of the talk is bitter, and most of it is about relationships which have failed or are painfully dysfunctional. When the humans attempt to communicate with each other, they seem for the most part to be talking to themselves. No one seems all that responsive to anyone else in ANIMAL LOVE.

One obvious approach to this topic would be to humanize the pets, to suggest that the animals are more human or at least more sympathetic than their owners. This approach was wisely not taken. I think that angle would let the audience off the hook, as it were, by providing them with an ironically distancing point of reference to the despair and loneliness of the subjects. The animals in ANIMAL LOVE are just animals, and remain so even as their owners reflexively, relentlessly, attempt to make them be something other.

One wonders what the subjects were told the film would be about. "Pardon me, but we are making a film about the horrors of private life among people who compensate for their complete inability to communicate with others by projecting their emotions onto their ugly pets... can we interview you?"

Although presented as a documentary, something else is going on in ANIMAL LOVE. While I believe that these are real people, more or less being themselves, I believe they are "being themselves" in situations which have been carefully constructed by the filmmakers. There are aspects of the production which emphasize the artifice of the work. In particular, the composition, lighting, and blocking of the interviewees suggests a formal process to the filmmaking which is a step more elaborate than Errol Morris's half-mirrored camera. Everything is much more arranged and composed than in Morris's simple frames. Most significantly, the subjects all come off as narcissistic, emotionally crippled, and unhealthily fixated on their pets. They were not chosen at random, obviously, but for specific qualities the filmmakers wanted displayed onscreen.

This is not by any means to denigrate ANIMAL LOVE, but to identify it as the type of documentary that might more rightly be called a documentary essay. My comparison to Errol Morris is not arbitrary, as he is that sort of documentarian as well - Chris Marker is another, even more obviously than Morris. None of them hide the fact that they are articulating a point of view; in fact, expressing their point of view is the point of their films.

ANIMAL LOVE is a film which has haunted me now for weeks, and which I am coming to think of as one of the best I've seen in a long time. I can't recommend it enough.