Writers and Director: Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti
Italian documentary Bestiares, Herbaria, Lapidaries, written and directed by Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, is an extended meditation on mankind’s relationship to nature and indeed our relationship to one another. D’Anolfi and Parenti make use of a wealth of archival film footage to explore ways in which this changing relationship has been constructed through the medium of film and photography.
One can’t help but point out that the film is very long – just over three and a half hours – and there are many occasions in which the viewer may long for a documentary maker like Adam Curtis to edit and rearrange sequences into something altogether more punchy. Much of the archival footage is fascinating, but it’s not clear why D’Anolfi and Parenti chose to linger over every sequence for quite so long. There is often no voice over, just New Age-y music in the background. And there’s a strange device: episodes are interspersed with text, a sort of mythical tale of mankind. “Once upon a time,” the opening sequence begins, “the world belonged to those who slept most and longest.” Those who slept most “dreamed most,” we are told, “and dreams were the sole material of which the cosmos was made.” Much depends on your patience for this sort of thing.
In the first of the film’s three acts, Bestiares, D’Anolfi and Parenti are shown viewing material, attempting to understand it in a larger context. This sort of theorising results in their concluding that the recording of animals in photographs and films in some way reduced the number of existing species. “Cinema was concerned as a way to analyse movement, not to produce the delusion [sic] of representation,” says Parenti in rather opaque English. There’s intriguing footage from Amundsen’s second expedition to the South Pole in 1911-12, followed by extracts of films shot by anonymous western hunters on safari. Much is made of the metaphor of shooting but again the commentary is clunky: shooting, we are told, “is of itself a value.”
The past, as we know, is a foreign country, and there is much to deplore in our treatment of animals in the last century. Here we are shown creatures being rounded up to be deported to zoos and laboratory rats being cruelly treated. But there is also modern footage of vets delivering puppies by cesarean section – it isn’t clear whether this is seen as progress of something more sinister.
Herbaria – the Care – Act 2 is all filmed in Padua’s University’s venerable botanic gardens. There are long, long sequences of a botanist potting up plants. It’s meditative, in its way and certainly beautiful. The point the film makers eventually reveal is that 97% of the biomass consists of plants. They rightly want us to see our position on earth from this perspective. This part of the film comes to rest on the ginkgo tree in Hiroshima which began to sprout again three years after being apparently destroyed by the atom bomb.
The third act of the film, Lapidaries, is the most intriguing. Film footage of bombed cities in the immediate aftermath of war is intercut with extended sequences shot without comment in a vast industrial complex where the rocks and general spoil from destroyed buildnings is gradually processed into bags of cement. There is no commentary in this section and much of its interest is in the work it makes us do to find the links between this and the previous sections. We also given glimpses of disturbing files from Fascist Italy which record numerous personal details and mug shots of men and women considered subversives. Lapidaries, in other words, reflects not on prehistoric fossils, but on what is fossilied in the contemporary world, and how it speaks of man’s inhumanity to man. Old footage of Italian soldiers pulling dead bodies out of destroyed buildings suggests a truly chilling link – that all the cement created from rubble may well include human remains.
Bestiares, Herbaria, Lapidaries is screening at the Cinecittá 4thItalian Doc Season 2025 from 5-6 July.
The Reviews Hub Score
A challenging watch
