British-Argentine filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland has always been interested in hands and touch, but in her new film, “Collective Monologue,” she expands her focus beyond human appendages. Her focus on instances of touch between caretaker Maca and the animals at the Buenos Aires Eco-Park, which are frequently framed by the park’s enclosures, reveals a tension between the radical acts of care and the politics of captivity inherent to institutions such as zoos.
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“My interest in hands has to do with process, it has to do with labor, it has to do with tools,” Rinland tells Variety following a press screening before the film’s world premiere at Locarno. Her multi-disciplinary career as an artist, which also encompasses book-making and installation work, has always focused on alternative modes of perception. The films she makes and the tools she uses come to her organically. In her own words: “They are things that I like and the things that I want to see.”
Her short film “Expression of the Sightless” (2015) observes a blind man who experiences a statue through the sensation of touch, and in “Ý Berá – Bright Waters” (2016), she asks whether it is possible to assume the perspective of an animal through filmmaking.
In “Collective Monologue,” interspecies touch takes on a different meaning as labor becomes intertwined with care. “There’s a moment of touch between Maca and Venus, one of the howler monkeys, where Maca’s hair becomes Venus’s hair. Blending together, they become intertwined bodies in a way.”
Affective scenes like these capture the film’s central conflict: the tension between the labor of individual caretakers and institutions whose origins can be traced to European concepts. The Eco-Park first piqued Rinland’s interest in 2019 when she was observing the architecture of the space, which closely resembles the architecture of the Berlin Zoo.
“When the zoo was created in 1888, the idea was that the viewer would see the location of where the animals came from, which is absurd because obviously they don’t come from architecture,” Rinland explains. “For example, the elephants live in a Hindu temple, although they’re actually African elephants.”
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Nevertheless, as Rinland worked on the project over the next five years, she became interested in making a film that was not “completely anti-this or pro-this.” Her interest was in “these gray areas, these nuances within these spaces. I really connected with Maca in the zoo and the workers in the museums in my previous films.”
Rinland’s films are always the result of collaboration – both with her subjects and archival documents. “I’m not interested in going somewhere with a firm idea of what I want to do,” she says. “I want to be learning. I’m interested in different ways of thinking and ways of knowing.”
This is one of the reasons why 16mm has remained her primary medium throughout her practice, as beyond its materiality, the nature of celluloid allows her to consider “the discipline of using it and what it means within space.” She explains, “I may have 20 minutes of film for two days. So the majority of my time is just about hanging out with Maca . It was about listening to what Maca wanted and then her listening to the animals.”
Listening to animals required attention to other modes of perception, especially beyond sight and verbal communication as primary means of interacting with the world. In her films, there’s an “anti-language,” which translates to a more embodied cinema, giving attention to texture and how different beings interact with their environment. For her, sight and sound only represent two modes of interacting with the world. In fact, one of the main inspirations for her film was an essay about animal smells written by the Eco-Park’s second director, Clemente Onelli. “When I read it, I was like, ‘I want the whole film to be this.”‘
She sees her practice somewhere between the experimental films of Chick Strand and Jonas Mekas, and the educational films of Mary Field and Percy Smith. She likes “bringing things together” and her work often incorporates a diverse blend of people (and animals), camera formats, and philosophical citations. “Collective Monologue” is a patient and expansive work, organically weaving commentary on labor with rich observations about the dynamics between animals and carers.
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