New documentary on Asian elephants
The way that humans treat animals speaks as much to our cultural
values as it does to the characteristics of the animals themselves. In
the case of our treatment of elephants, filmmaker Klaus Reisinger
believes the animals can speak for themselves.
That's the guiding philosophy behind "Life Size Memories," a two-hour
documentary that received its world premier screening Friday - and which
will be screened again on Saturday and Sunday - at the CINE Film
Festival in the US.
Shot and edited over the course of four years, "Life Size Memories"
explores the lives of individual captive elephants in Burma, Thailand,
India and Sri Lanka.
But unlike most documentarians, Reisinger approached the project with
the aim of telling the story of the elephants with as few human words as
possible.
"We didn't want talking people, because the elephant is the main
character, so we wanted the elephant to do most of the talking," said
Reisinger, a native of Austria who came to Missoula this week for the
film's inaugural showing. "It's so easy to set someone up and ask them
what they think and then fill the soundtrack with blah-blah narrative.
But to go into the situation, understand it, and translate it into a
sequence that's told in images that gives the same impact emotionally
and intellectually, that's the challenge we set out to achieve."
Reisinger and his French filmmaking partner, Frédérique Lengaigne,
are certainly accustomed to letting images speak for themselves. Both
spent years as war-zone news photographers, shooting human chaos from
Russia to Haiti to Rwanda.
But back in 1996, the two began a filmmaking project, documenting the
complex situation faced by wild elephants in Burma, which were coming
into increased conflict with farmers.
The resulting film, "Elephant Power," was picked up and distributed
by National Geographic.
Since then, the two have documented the lives of seafaring nomads off
the coast of Burma, explored the trade in rare maral deer antler velvet
in Siberia and Korea, and continued their work as photojournalists.
In 2006, the pair decided to revisit the elephants they had
documented a decade ago - this time with a somewhat different goal.
"We started taking life-sized portraits of elephants with a
large-format camera, to be printed at exactly one-to-one scale," said
Reisinger. "So we would take a photograph of the animal, and then
measure it so that it could be printed exactly to size.
"Then, to go along with that, we also wanted to tell their individual
biography of each elephant we photographed - what was his life story,
what's his personality. So we interviewed people and got information for
that as we went along photographing these elephants."
Amid that project, the two began filming as well, but this time with
a more open-ended approach to their narrative.
"There's a narrative, but no spoken narrative," said Reisinger,
noting that the film attempts to depict not only the conditions but also
the pace of life for its subjects.
"The point of the film is really to show that every animal - and we
use elephants, but this is true for any animal - has a past, a
biography, a history. Those are the elements that create an empathy for
us, which is the foundation of conservation. If you don't get people's
minds set on that, there's no way to get them to think about the
cormorant or the weasel or the other animals that need protection."After
completing the film earlier this year, the two showed it to the sponsors
who had underwritten the project.
It was immediately picked up for theatrical and television
distribution in Europe.
But before those debuts take place, Reisinger traveled across the
Atlantic to Missoula for his first experience putting the film before
the public.
He said he hopes that those who see the film will find food for
thought through its larger-than-life protagonists.
"We hope that the people should walk out and question their
perceptions that they inherit, their previous prejudices," said
Reisinger.
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