Animal Love by Ulrich Seidl

Animal Love (Tierische Liebe, 1995) by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl offers an intimate glimpse into the world of animal lovers. By doing so, it tells a disturbing story about interaction, partnership, love, and sexuality. Furthermore, Animal Love is a documentary on human non-communication.

The beginning of the film is dominated by the portrait of a young man who buys a rabbit and then uses it as an excuse for his begging. This introduces the question of how people use their animals, and vice versa. After that, the film focuses more and more on partnership issues. We witness how animals are being turned into what their owners perceive as intimate friends. We see people treating their animals like a human partner, and people treating their partners like animals too. We also get to see people acting on the borders of socially accepted behaviour as their pets become a replacement for the love they have lost or never had. The fact that the word "pet" resembles the word "petting" is brought a new significance in this film. Animal love displays a radical image of human-animal relationships that go far beyond the point of obsession.

Animal fetishism is one of the last post-modern taboos. Animal Love stands out as a unique effort to break this taboo. It explores the most intimate spheres : pets and their owners are set up in bed, engaged in disturbingly sexual poses. In fact, throughout the film there is an underlying notion of sexuality which is introduced by a woman in red walking her dog in an out-of-use industrial building. On one of the walls, a piece of graffiti reads ‘hure’ (‘whore’). This unusual undertone becomes stronger and stronger throughout, becoming a play on pornographic imagery.

Seidl believes that documentary cannot be objective. Therefore he makes it obvious that his documentary has a script. This technique clearly indicates that what we see here is the result of Seidl’s perception and analysis of today’s society. Animal Love is meant as a complex statement rather than a portrait or a display of research results. It is this statement that makes the film a startling experience.

Orkun Åžahin