Collective Monologue: an unconventional and touching portrait of cross-species connection

“Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.” With Collective Monologue, Argentine-British filmmaker Jessica Sarah Rinland takes John Berger’s words a step further: in Argentina, zoos are disappearing too. The experimental documentary brings us inside Buenos Aires’ zoos and animal sanctuaries, some of which have become ‘eco parks’, while others are releasing their non-human tenants back into the wild.

Under Rinland’s patient, watchful lens, we glimpse how these animal-keeping institutions operate through a series of vignettes. Handlers scrape muck from elephants’ feet; construction workers repave the floors of enclosures; and a carer called Maca dotes on her various wards. As we drift through these spaces, the contradictions become clear: keeping animals confined is cruel, yet they are treated with affection and reverence by those who handle them. As some animals run free and others fail to survive without human intervention, the future of these establishments remains unclear. Without voiceover, the film leaves us to draw our own conclusions, as did Frederick Wiseman’s Zoo (1993); but where Wiseman’s gaze is distant, Rinland’s is intimate.

The film, shot in 16mm, unfolds mostly in close-up, making both human and nonhuman bodies seem exquisitely strange. You’ve probably never seen an elephant’s trunk like this, so close that its rows of wrinkles and folds crest like frozen ocean waves. People appear in fragments – a tattooed back, a painted fingernail. These tableaux are almost animalistic: there is no past or future, only now. The close-ups hold us captive, but they feel tender rather than stifling, like the many embraces we witness between carers and creatures.

Shots are framed through cages, gates and fences – symbols of constriction – but Rinland is more interested in the gaps between them. Hands and paws reach across these boundaries to grasp and caress. Hands have long fascinated Rinland – her 2016 short film Expression of the Sightless followed a blind man’s hands as they mapped a sculpture. Here, paws play an equal role. Animals are not treated as spectacle – they gaze at the camera as subjects, not objects. She blurs boundaries between humans and other species – differences between hair and fur no longer feel pertinent; what matters is connection, however fleeting.

For all its fragmentation, the film is less like a puzzle than an ecosystem: each creature contributes to its larger portrait of institutions in flux. When the credits roll, it comes as no surprise that the animals’ names are listed alongside the humans’.

► Collective Monologue is in UK cinemas now.