Joël Bartoloméo “Le chat qui dort”
About Love
As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia “people who love dogs and cats are idiots”. With this statement, they mainly want to go against the usual distinction made between cats and dogs, including the claims, e.g. that cats are much more independent and thus less attached than dogs are. In truth, house pets are always kept dependant on their owners, isolated sexually from their kind and tied to the nutritional feed supplied by their charitable providers. This suffices to force them to adapt to owners’ moods and requirements, owners for whom pets are a reflection of their own narcissism.
Photofilm – Lenin with Cat unwittingly illustrates this diagnosis. Spliced together in 1975 in the GDR by Joachim Hellwig with a text by Günter Kunert, word and image alternate between birth, hunger, Bible quotes and a hymn to the way Lenin holds a cat rather than a dog. Only the others pat dogs, as the film also implies, not good people like Lenin. And the cat lets it happen because it knows it will get nothing to eat without Lenin, a predicament it shares with all pets.
The Chihuahua figurehead happily driving around at the front of the automobile in Chevrolet Leader News has grown just as much into the human world as the cat of the Swedish performance artist Joanna Rytel in her piece Then I’ll Take Your Cat. Rytel doesn’t restrict herself to amicably patting her cat, but rather intensely French-kisses it. Strangely, this breach of taboo is not repellent, perhaps since the cat registers exactly who it’s dealing with. Cut off from a pure animal sexuality, dogs and cats remain dependent on the affections of their human proprietors. Vladimir Tyulkin’s About Love shows the disastrous consequences this can lead to in the household of an animal lover. Her house is taken over by a throng of animals, who seem so helpless under the woman’s love that all they can do is multiply. In the many dependencies of human-animal relations the pets remain the most dependent animals. Despite this dependency, however, they develop capabilities with which to occasionally overwhelm even their worst enemy. The older Gilles Deleuze spoke of this in an interview. After his daughter had brought a small kitten home he also had to live with cats, concluding “it wasn’t as bad as all that.”
Pancia – Frauchen – Mistress
Iwona Siekierzynska, PL 1995, 15 minA 13-year-old girl with a close bond to her sheepdog lives with her parents. She falls in love with a priest and tries to confess her love to him. This doubly impossible and, in the end, speechless love is reflected in the way she tries to train her dog – while her parents seem to be completely excluded from her world.
Chevrolet Leader News (Vol. 1, No. 3): Grand Rapids Michigan
The Jam Handy Organization, USA 1935, 2 minIn the 1930s, the car manufacturer published a kind of advertising newsreel in which Chevrolets were mostly to be seen in some shape or form. Here, a chihuahua becomes a living radiator mascot.
Vierbeinige Weltraumfahrer
N. Tichonow, UdSSR 1959, 22 min; Archiv: BundesfilmarchivWith the launch of Sputnik in 1957 the Soviet Union achieved an unexpected success in the space-race; it threw the West, and especially the USA, into a veritable crisis. Socialism seemed – at least at the level of science – to have made a significant advance. That same year, in another, larger satellite, the dog Laika became the first mammal to be sent into space. The world’s fascination was quickly diverted however with the realisation that there had been no return-journey planned for Laika (the precise details of her fate would not be known until 2002). From that point onwards, for both sides, the welfare of animal-cosmonauts became paramount – a fact anxiously stressed in their respective propaganda campaigns. Four-Legged Space Explorers shows the scientific dog-laboratories as they appeared in publicly authorised imagery, which, in its naïve simplicity, is reminiscent of an earlier science fiction age. The film was dubbed by the DEFA for East German cinemas.
Pro lyubov / About Love
Vladimir Tyulkin, Kazakhstan 2005, 26 minNina Vasilyevna, a Kazakh woman, looks after animals; her story is backgrounded by a choir of barking dogs that despite all awaken some love and warmth in the despondent woman. After all, 50 to 120 helpless dogs do not produce anything, and Nina has to get by on 40 dollars a month.
Photofilm
Joachim Hellwig, DDR 1975, 3 min; Vertrieb Progress Film-VerleihA short essay consisting of photographs of poverty and injustice in the world, ending with a picture of Lenin holding a cat. Lenin’s famous love of cats was often used to argue that he wasn’t in fact a dictator, because cats simply elude the authoritarian will of people – unlike Hitler’s sheepdog, for example. The poem about Lenin with the cat is by Günter Kunert.
Le Chat qui dort – The Sleeping Cat
Joël Bartoloméo, FR 1992, 4 minJoël Bartoloméo defines his oeuvre as a negative self-portrait. At first, from 1991 to 1995, he recorded his relations with his wife and the doings and misdemeanours of his children in short sequences whose form somewhat recalls family films. For all that, they are anti-films about the family in which the main subject is emotional relationships and power games.
Then I’ll Take Your Cat – Part One
Joanna Rytel, SE 2002, 8 minMy work can be divided into three main characters. One is my interest in the relationship between animals and humans. I have done performances for animals and filmed their reactions. In Then I´ll Take Your Cat – Part One I kiss a cat, in part two I masturbate in front of a cat.
In both these works I am interested in the animals’ reactions to human behaviours. (Joanna Rytel)