The Animal That Therefore I Am
2019 · 11m · Netherlands
Directed by Bea de Visser
Genres: essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
A woman, a dog/wolf, a rabbit and an eagle study one another in an enclosed space, in a wordless interspecies encounter after Derrida.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Derrida as a premise for interspecies staring contests sounds like exactly the kind of self-serious academic trap that deserves to fail—except de Visser actually pulls it off, which is almost worse because now I have to think about it.
The film's patient formalism—four bodies in stillness, refusing narrative hierarchy—positions itself squarely in the lineage of Bresson and structural cinema, though its wordlessness and philosophical rigor push toward something closer to contemporary performance theory.
The singular choice here is the rabbit: by including it as an equal witness rather than prey, de Visser reframes the entire power dynamic of the gaze, and that one casting decision transforms what could've been predictable into genuinely unsettling.