Collective Monologue (Monólogo Colectivo)
(Argentina/UK, 104 min.)
Dir. Sarah Jessica Rinland
Programme: Wavelengths (North American premiere)
There’s a moment partway through Collective Monologue in which an elephant receives a mani-pedi. The majestic creature dutifully follows her caregiver’s instructions. He prompts her to prop her foot onto a gate that allows him to scrub her through the fence. Naturally, she puts the wrong foot up, then her trunk, then the wrong foot again, but, eventually, the proper foot hits its resting place. The zookeeper diligently chips away at the gunk that’s amassed on her sole. He rinses away the grime, and the elephant’s as fresh as a daisy. The novel ritual highlights the role of labour entailed within animal care, but also the rights that animals deserve if people force them into captivity.
Director and cinematographer Sarah Jessica Rinland crafts an enigmatic zoological essay with Collective Monologue. This artful documentary takes its name from Jean Piaget’s study of cognitive development among children. Using an episodic structure that mirrors the cadence of children’s fragmented developing speech, Rinland puts the episodes in conversation to artfully evoke a tale of humans’ responsibility to non-human animals.
The film offers striking 16mm vignettes, mixed with some nightvision shots of animals prowling their cages, to explore the relationships and power dynamics between humans and non-human animals. Rinland films in a handful of zoos and animal shelters throughout Buenos Aires. Scene by scene, the film observes animal captivity in transition. These places, some that date back to the 19th century, are transforming from zoos to sanctuaries. The bars and cages still hold animals for humans’ viewing pleasure, but the film considers the ideological shift that guides the element of care that audiences witness.
Collective Monologue actually sees little of the animals in action. (Except for some animals sparking fits of protest that inspire changes in the zoos.) The film eschews wide shorts and therefore generally avoids the typical gaze of a zoo visit. Some shots, especially surveillance ones, capture anteaters and flamingoes trotting around their cages. But Rinland largely favours close-ups. The film offers a tapestry of hands and paws. Humans scrub away, while animals bat and pet. Sometimes, hands and paws clasp, illustrating a bond, an affinity, between species. Although some of the human interactions indicate that select zookeepers bathe less regularly than the animals do, thus providing a shared musk to strengthen their bonds.
Dialogue intermittently peppers the fragmentary sequences. The zookeepers offer instructions and comfort the animals in a mix of motherese and patient, respectful speech. The human animals do talk to one another, too, often with a mix of boisterous jokes or simple check-ins about operations on the job. This mixture of babble both human and non brings Collective Monologue to a thoughtful illustration of Piaget’s argument. Nature isn’t meant to be controlled, nor is intended purely for human pleasure.
In fact, these vignettes teach audiences that there’s a lot to learn from the ways that humans treat animals. Early scenes show humans erecting fences, pasting papier-mâché strips atop some wire. Who these cages are for remains to be seen, but Collective Monologue evocatively flips the act of looking and the role of care back on the humans.
