We Animals: An Ethological Analysis of Attenberg (2010)
Athina
Rachel Tsangari’s latest film Attenberg
(2010) has received mixed reviews since it premiered in America at last year’s
South By Southwest Film Festival.
The majority of reviews focused mainly on the obvious themes and it
seemed the film was slapped with the “awkward” label way too many times. While some analyzed her directing
style, other critics merely compared it to last year’s festival favorite, Dogtooth (2010). Not only was Tsangari a producer for
Yorgos Lanthimos’ film, but Lanthimos in return plays the role of Engineer in Attenberg. Tsangari is also producing Lanthimos’ upcoming and highly
anticipated film, Alps. Both Dogtooth and Attenberg do
in fact have similarities in aesthetics: both films contain a very slow pace,
both dally in the absurdities of human nature, and have similar techniques in
cinematography and editing. Now
that the similarities have been stated, it is suffice to say that both films
operate on two completely different levels. Dogtooth operates
more on a psychological level, while Attenberg
acts more like an ethological experiment.
This essay will examine the film’s narrative, dissect the absurd moments
and will in conclusion, show how these are more behaviorist critiques of the
relations between animals and humans.
THE SEARCH FOR
MEANING
Narratively
speaking, Attenberg does in fact
follow a coherent structure. In
fact, one could watch the film without subtitles and still fully comprehend the
ideal premise. Just taking the
base essentials (A girl, dealing with the critical condition of her sick father,
struggles with finding her identity at the same time), one cannot help but feel
this story has been told in numerous films, however it is through Tsangari’s language
of film that she interrupts the narrative with jolts of absurdity to challenge
audiences. By doing so, she complicates the audience’s narratological
understanding of the film’s meaning.
World-renowned
evolutionary biologist and author Richard Dawkins states in his book, The
Blind Watchmaker, “Complicated things, everywhere, deserve a very special
kind of explanation. We want to know how they came into existence and why they
are so complicated” (Dawkins 1).
While Dawkins uses this to explain the vast fascination with
understanding larger issues like evolution and the universe, it is likely that
he makes an interesting point when connecting it to the absurdity within Avant
Garde and Surrealist cinema.
Audiences watch Attenberg with
the attempt to decode the various ambiguous moments that are detached from the
film’s narrative. Relating this
back to Dawkins’ point, the desire to understand is obvious human nature,
however going beyond generally understanding, it is more vital to
conceptualize. To understand is to
know, when conceptualizing branches out of analysis. There are many different schools of thought in both the
discourse of cinema and biology.
The threads between the two intertwine a firmer conceptualization of
meaning and provide far more discussion than understanding ever could. There are scenes in Attenberg where Marina and Bella indulge
themselves in what one could interpret as choreographed dances. The first begins with the two of them
walking simultaneously down a sidewalk.
Their legs move together in synchronized glides as they walk. Another scene has Marina and Bella
walking and singing to Françoise Hardy’s “Tous Les Garcons Et Les Filles,” a scene that in fact
contains many similarities to her 1964 music video for the song. These moments that break away
from the conflict between Marina and her father become more and more absurd as
they regress to animalistic forms.
ANIMALS
Dawkins
opens Watchmaker with, “We animals are the most complicated things in
the known universe” (Dawkins 1).
He begins his book with establishing the inherent connection between
animals and humans.
Tsagari’s
film makes a similar claim. Attenberg opens with a white wall and
both Marina and Bella enter the frame at profile. Bella leans in to kiss, Marina cautiously does so as
well and opens her mouth wider than Bella’s. Marina sloppily moves her tongue around in Bella’s open
mouth until they pull away and discuss the kiss. Bella tells Marina to breathe, shows her the proper length
to open her mouth and they kiss again.
Marina pulls back and informs Bella that she will be sick, and Bella
tells her that if her mouth is not wet then it won’t work. She then proceeds to tell Marina,
“Stick your tongue out. Rub it against mine. Breathe through your nose.” The two girls exchange tongue
lashes. Marina tries to stop and
Bella softly asks, “Do you want to learn or not?” After Marina decisively
informs her, “No,” the two proceed to shove one another until they begin
spitting. Marina finally shoves
Bella onto the ground and she also collapses to the ground, but on all fours
resembling some sort of mountain lion.
The two girls then proceed to hiss and growl at one another until they
begin crawling forward and swatting at the other. Marina takes dominant control by attempting to bite her, but
once Bella pulls back and submissively meows, Marina stands and walks away in
disappointment. One could see this
scene as people fetishistically role-playing, however two different approaches
are shown: 1) The characters regress back into their former animalistic
identities, or 2) have a sub-human, animalistic nature within their human
exterior.
The
first is illustrated in the way Marina and her father, Spyros, transgress from
one state to the next in front of our very eyes. Marina and her father lay in bed together while watching Sir
David Attenberg’s encounters with gorillas, and then later while he corrects
her Greek utterances by one letter, after going from word to word, the language
deteriorates into gibberish and finally into gorilla grunts and chants. The two humans regress into a former sub-human
state where they sound, move and think like animals. In fact, the very next
morning, Marina washes her father’s hair, a scene that resembles the way
gorillas clean their hair by picking out insects.
The
second case, while different than the first, suggests an animalistic nature
that resides in everyone all the time, however is able to slip through the hard
human exterior at random moments in life.
This is more shown in the way Tsangari frames her shots. A majority of the time, her characters
are shown at profile, merely revealing a single side of their body physically
and metaphorically. Since Marina’s
father is dying, this marks a significant time in her life – a time that
includes vast transition into the absence of a parent. Marina is introduced to a new desolate
future, and one way to cope with said desolation is allow her animalistic
nature out.
TABOO
It
seems that films that give an introspective look at taboos become the very
thing they in fact explore.
Actually it is within the way the individual expresses the taboo that
ultimately weighs in to how individuals interpret the whole critique as taboo
or not. More so specifically, any
form of art that explores the nature of sex, does so more realistically than
merely commenting on the taboo.
Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer or
John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus
(2006) are more critiques of sex and focus more on an introspective look at how
they handle the subject rather than what they are trying to communicate. Readers are fully engulfed into the sex
with Miller’s text and viewers literally see the sex occur on screen in
Mitchell’s film. With Attenberg’s case, one watches the film
and does not see humans interacting, but animals existing in their natural
habitats. By doing so, individuals
who watch the film whom are so likely to label, deem them film taboo for the
way Tsangari has her actors become animals. Those same types of people who watched Mitchell’s film and
read Miller’s book deemed them both pornographic. It seems that the closer one becomes to exploring the
subject, the closer one grows closer to the truth, however as individuals have
branded, goes as far as becoming the very subject they sought to explore.
NATURE
Environment
ultimately alters the way beings originate and exist. The film primarily focuses on the characters themselves and
the way they interact, however a great deal does highlight the natural setting,
acting as a ground for the characters to interact upon. Many critics have focused too much on
the fact Attenberg is set in
Tsangari’s birthplace, Greece, and interpret the film in more political terms,
focusing more on its supposed relation to socio-political relations in Greek
society, however environment plays more of the role as a habitat for the
characters to adventure out into.
Since the characters have patterns of animalistic nature, one cannot
help but compare the same regression to the environment they reside. Many shots in the film are of Greece’s
beautiful landscapes, but also of stark industrial plants in the rural
areas. This might present a
somewhat struggle between nature and industrialism. Spyros tells his daughter how the country skipped the
industrial age altogether, going from “shepherds to bulldozers, from bulldozers
to mines, and from mines, straight to petit-bourgeois hysteria.” When Marina tells her father she likes
it, a major difference is exposed.
Where Spyros represents everything classical, Marina symbolizes
modernity.
The film ends with a four
minute long, static landscape shot of a muddy construction site with an
industrial plant producing a hefty quantity of smoke, which sits behind two
large mounds of mud and dirt, and behind the plant, stands a large forested
mountain. Two trucks enter the
frame from the far background, drive around the large mound and exit the frame.
The remainder of the shot consists of stagnant existence.
The audience is given an
opportunity to soak up a moment of being and is only interrupted by the ending
credits, which signify the end, and instead of coming onto the screen like a
jolt of action or going to a swift blackout, are instead softly introduced
above the ongoing shot, similar to that of John Cassavetes’ films. The final shot leaves audiences capable
of interpreting the ending however they please. Some might look at it and see the two forces of nature and
industrialization battling for control; others might feel that it is simply an
artistic expression of portraying reality. Relating it back to the film as a whole and as an
exploration of ethological exploration, the final shot illustrates a conflict
between regression and evolution.
Just as Marina and her father differed in views on society, perhaps the
final shot allows the audience to decide whether we as humans regress back to
our animalistic nature, are really animals deep down within us, or are beyond
animals and have evolved into something that has created a kingdom of industry
and surpasses animal productivity.
Source
Dawkins, Richard. The
Blind Watchmaker. New York:
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.,
