“Never have I looked so directly into hell.” Werner Herzog on Animal Love
Animal Love (“Tierische Liebe”, 1995) a film by Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl displays an observational view into the world of animal lovers. With a candid camera approach, a kind of cinema verite, the film tells a story about interaction, partnership, love, loneliness and sexuality between pets and their owners.
“Ordinary day is a strange tragedy.” (Seidl) The beginning of the film is a straightforward shot of a large dog being caressed by his owner who is whispering words of affection and affirmation to the rapid tail-wagging canine. Soon after, the film is dominated by the portrait of a young street beggar who after some time of fruitless encounters buys a rabbit and then uses it as an excuse for street panhandling, which in turn becomes quite profitable. This introduces the first of three rhetorical appeal tools. In this case, pathos: a method used to trigger a specific emotional response. Or in other words, “the means of persuading an audience by an appeal to emotions such as pity, guilt, anger, or love. Imagery, imagination, and anecdotes, i.e.: mini-stories can be used to (create) great effect.” This film thus observes a series of experiences by a dozen individuals whose relationships with their pets replace, or displace, the intimacy and companionship of other humans. The director aggressively opens the most private realms, showing pets and their owners set up in bed, engaged in disturbingly sexual poses, while creating a near demented inter-dependency of animal-human exchanges.
The atmosphere of the film takes place in an empty landscape of Viennese conurbation periphery where dark colors of gray, beige and browns sift representations of basements, small rent-controlled apartments and abandoned streets. The language used throughout the film is relatable and common. We see owner’s extending generous gestures of love and compassion to their pets even in their broken-down homes. Seidl’s strategic form of documenting these interactions helps identify the second rhetorical tool used in the film, logos, which is, “means of appealing to an audience through logical reasoning. Reasoning which is true (based on fact) and which follows a logical progression.” To believe this film to be non-fiction and to watch how pets are turned into what their owners envision as intimate friends, i.e. how people treat their pets like human partners, all the while treating their human partners like pets proves to be enough evidence for logos to be identified. Moreover, one initially feels sympathy and sadness for the animals, after which Seidl allows a shift and emotions of understanding and concern, are transmitted towards the owners.
Lastly the third rhetorical tool used by Seidl is, ethos, which explains, “the means of moving an audience to agreement by establishing one's own credibility and one's ethical center.” To illustrate this point I would like to point towards the end of the film, where the viewer is presumably expected to have following responses: empathy towards the pets, consideration for the owners and, finally, complete devastation for both animal and human. Seidl completes this masterfully and strategically. Also, one feels that the overall argument of the director can be summed up as “Hell is us”; namely, that we ourselves create and perpetuate our own misery. His perception and analysis of today’s society is plainly apparent: in today’s boom of technology and global communication, humans still use pets to fill personal voids that civilizations do not fill in other ways. Animal Love operates as a convoluted statement rather than a portrait or a display of research results. Seidl allows the perfectly trusting and uncovered characters to portray themselves, only to than transparently transform them into the victims of their own lives. Cutting precisely into the grayness that lies between omnipresent problems of loneliness vs. love and nature vs. nurture.
Animal Love is a documentary on human non-communication and the complete (mental, physical, emotional) isolation it can lead to. The director makes it clear that as far as he is concerned the domestication and obsessed dependency humans have created towards animals is both detrimental for humanity and for animals alike.