Biology as Entertainment

A dead butterfly in the city of Helsinki. We approach the insect and see its body. We get even closer and see its skeleton, its veins, the texture of its wings. Soon, to our surprise, the butterfly starts dancing a strange ballet with other dead insects, flying around in an unidentifiable space. It moves in every direction, starting new choreographies. The corpse looks pretty much alive.

In another context, we are inside a wax museum in Florence, Italy. The human dummies look anatomically correct, but some changes start to happen. Bodies start to merge and the results are human figures with one eye, two vaginas or no head. They recombine again and again, reconnecting and disconnecting members, genitals, and eyes. Yet the monsters still look pretty human.

These situations, respectively from the short films The Death of an Insect and Picture’s Concise Anatomy, both represent interesting images created from biological origins. They follow an intriguing path in order to arrive at these results, though: from the reality difficult to conceive (how are the bodies of nearly microscopic flies built?), we go to the conceivable reality (the bodies are shown in their entirety) and then to a conceivable fantasy (the bodies of insects can dance a waltz in the air).

It is important to highlight how modern these ideas are, and most of all, how modern the human interest in seeing what our own eyes cannot capture is. We’ve been through three major “regimes du regard” ("regimes of vision"), according to some theorists such as Jacques Aumont: the first lasted until approximately the 1940s, when people demanded to see faithful representations of what our eyes could see on screen; during the second, we demanded different ways of seeing the same objects (with new angles, new colours and new situations), and finally our post-modern vision, according to which we always have to see more - even that which cannot be seen.

The human eye asks for the representation of either imagined things (let’s say different worlds and science-fiction scenarios) or the microscopic or internal parts of real objects. That’s where the taste for biological images fits in. Of course, cinema has not undergone this process alone. Television represented an important aid to post-modernity as series started to explore the wonders of the seas, the air and the land. The Discovery Channel format allowed people to watch a rabbit being chased by a leopard in slow-motion, and recent shows like C.S.I. allow people to follow the trajectory of a bullet from when it exits the gun to the moment it reaches every single organ and destroys the tissue of a body. We want to watch what cannot be seen with our human eyes only, which is not to say that it is any less real – the images of the organs and the trajectory of a bullet may be as physically and biologically correct as it gets.

As modern as they could possibly be, these spectacular and huge productions seize the very essence of our new modernity: showing each time more, in deeper, more inventive and unusual ways, seeking to offer to the human eye what it has never seen – and never thought of seeing. The fantasy of reality seems to be the very essence of The Death of an Insect and Picture’s Concise Anatomy. Have you ever wondered how a body would look if it had four arms? Or how a fly’s feet look when it is dancing? This sort of cinema is there to provide these dreams about a new reality.

By Bruno Carmelo