L'Ours de Jean-Jaque Anneau

Becoming human

I can understand that it is a human need to be empathic. We love to figure out how
someone is feeling and why. To project us in to someone. In german we call this
«sich in jemanden Haut versetzten» - to place oneself in the skin of someone else.
Going to cinema feels like trying on skins of «the other». I go there to experience
something which may not be part of my reality without that frame. Cinema is giving
me the option to be emotive. To try out how it would feel. To reencounter feelings I
know because I went trough in my past. How would I react; feel; act in that decisive
moment? Am I becoming h*im or sharing his company?
Maybe watching films or reading are giving me the option to encounter emotions true
to mine; being in a state where forgetting myself physically makes me able to
encounter something true to me. In an unconscious way I'm exercising empathy.
Cinema or literature give me the option to be confronted to a situation or someone I'd
maybe never meet in my proper life.

«In the conjectural history which became increasingly popular during the European
Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, man's victory over other species was made
the central theme. The true origin of human society, it was said, lay in the
combination of men to defend themselves against wild beasts. Then came hunting
and domestication. Man's crucial act, thought Buffon, was the taming of the dog. It
led, agreed Thomas Bewick, to the conquest and peaceable possession of the
earth.» Keith Thomas writes in his essay «man and the natural world» in which he
describes the changes in the connection between "men" and "nature" at the end of
the middle ages and during the Enlightenment in England.

The steadily objectification of nature.

Before the Enlightenment period, westerners believed that animals were create by a
god to serve the «highest of all beings», the human. Respect! Et vous êtes sure que
j'appartiens à cette race?!
I was meeting people from a different culture, who shared the believe that this
equality can go further, when for example an «object» like a stone becomes
«subject».
And at the end it may not even be a question about equality but simply about
arrogance.

When I was sitting in the cinema and J.J.Anneau proposed me to feel like a bear, I
started to feel very uncomfortable. Awkward. I was actively trying to accept the
romantic Dringlichkeit of Jean-Jacques. He roared at me, letting me know that «we»
humans just aggrandize ourselves. I know, I roared back and kept on trying to fulfill
my task: to get into that bears skin. Be empathic, Nora, this is important moral-flag-
waving and you know. It is brutal to serve ourselves from everything that is
surrounding us. The bear-hunters are bad consumers who have to learn a lesson in
empathy. But Jean-Jacque, I feel a little bit like in school, you taking me by my hand
explaining me what is right or wrong. I know! I just think I have problems to accept
your proposition because I find it in a very romantic sense very violent from you, by
controlling every shiver of these animals - great editing I really had the experience to
feel like I'm that bear thank you! - to make them in a dense way fit into or act your
story.

But what a romantic idea, what a strange conviction you may have had in yourself -
forcing a human into a bear to make him totally accessible for our emotional
projections. Not a bit of incertitude left. But it feels also strangely nice that you
managed to control them (during shooting and edition, both image and sound wise)
in that high amount that me, as a human being which has never encountered a bear,
becomes even able to empathize with one.

You made them act for you. This requires a great amount of control in form of
dressage. It is making a being that doesn't need us depending from us. And it seems
magical that you were able to control them that much to make them actors in your
film. But this is not what the film is about. L'ourse is showing bears in their natural
habitat, far from civilisations. The bear-hunters whit their domesticated dogs are the
strangers in their territory.

You mentioned at the Masterclass that there were in fact people asking you, if you
did your film using humans wearing bear-costumes. I don't think this is a far-fetched
idea. You didn't put a human into a bears costume physically, this would have been
way to easy for you and as you mentioned, you like difficult tasks. But somehow, on
another, rather psychological level, this is what happens. You are «humanizing»
them, to make us «understand» them. You make them «function» in the same way
as human beings do.

This feels violent to me. Maybe I am the true romantic of the two of us because I like
not to «understand» things, I like doubting about intentions. About me thinking I have
understood someone or something. Seems to me like you are forcing someone into
a schema you know, you understand. I have great respect toward things I do not
understand; that are unclear in a way. It feels cruel because it needs a great amount
of control to render them comprehensible. To make them act alike.
And on the other hand I share your intentions, I can understand that it is important to
sensibilise «us», to teach us empathy towards a being we call «animal» with the
history we share - of which we thought for centuries that «it» exists only to serve our
purpose.

–
«Nature» sometimes feels like a fake construct. «It» is growing. But it is growing
exactly in the way «we» want it to grow.