Sumptuous and unpretentious: Marie Amiguet’s pleasantly orthodox nature film about an animal that makes itself scarce and the people who travel after it.
In the proud guild of documentary filmmaking, animal filmmakers are often given a back seat. As if their films weren’t also, and maybe even more, set in reality, they’re mistaken for something else. Those who make animal films appear even less frequently in serious film stories than children’s book authors in the literary canon. Only when allocating the good slots on television do they not have to queue at the very end. Hans Haas, Heinz Sielmann, Bernhard Grzimek and Jacques Cousteau were not only camera pioneers, but also masters of visual storytelling. The French animal film pioneer Jean Painlevé was able to film seahorses as poetically as if a surrealist had painted them.
Animal films are now celebrating an artistic renaissance, and it won’t be long before the documentary world bows to its artists. The documentary Oscar for the Netflix production “My Teacher, the Octopus” by Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed made a start last year. However, what distinguished the South African nature drama from less recognized animal films was the perspective: as a relationship story between the filmmaker, who was hit by a life crisis, and his eight-armed girlfriend, it was at least half a human film.
This also applies to the French film “The Snow Leopard”. There are even two human protagonists here – and the four-legged title character is – due to its species – extremely rare. The main characters are Vincent Munier, a photographer, and the writer Sylvain Tesson. Unfortunately, another protagonist remains largely invisible: animal filmmaker Marie Amiguet accompanied the two men with a small team. Together they traveled to a Tibetan mountain landscape to meet the rare snow leopard. This is by no means agreed with a stock of a maximum of 2500 copies in the People’s Republic of China; but while we don’t want to give anything away here, the filmmakers obviously won’t disappoint their audiences in the end.
Cat with charisma
Plus, they constantly encounter other photogenic animals: wild yaks, Tibetan foxes, bears, and most importantly, the endangered Pallas’ cat. The bushy furry animal with the yellow eyes is not inferior to the snow leopard in terms of charisma.
One is surprised how fascinated one follows this travel story and what it has over other animal films, because Grzimek and Sielmann also liked to talk about the trappings of their excursions. Here, however, the comments do not come from the filming zoologist, but from the rather ignorant but curious fellow traveler, the writer. And the camera work is also a bit different than usual. The still landscape shots stay on the screen long enough that you don’t need any explanations and you can look around them yourself. In fact, Tibetan nature is an event even when no animal is moving in it. In contrast, the blurring of the telephoto lenses used to capture the close-ups is all the more picturesque. The comments puzzle more than they explain: “Meeting an animal means rejuvenation. It opens a door. On the other hand: the incommunicable.” Admittedly, that sometimes sounds a bit stilted, but it is then only whispered.
You have to get used to the over-commentary, but the constant repositioning of the self-confessed city dweller in a completely deserted place is quite amusing. In fact, the excess of reflection feels a little like what Hitchcock liked to call the “McGuffin”: superfluous information poured out on the audience for the purpose of distraction. In return, there are always real surprises. For example, when travelers hide automatic night cameras in nature to secretly photograph the snow leopard they are looking for. In fact, it later turns out that even during their daily work, they had a snow leopard in the picture patiently watching them. Only they hadn’t noticed him.
While animal films usually provide us with an excess of information about the fauna presented, the tenor here is exactly the opposite: the travelers repeatedly realize how little they actually know about the untouched world they are roaming through. She seems genuinely humbled by the surprising interest Pallas Cat and Snow Leopard show them. Despite its sometimes too many words, this film achieves something that animal filmmakers have not often succeeded in doing: To spread the beauties of nature in an appropriately haphazard way – and not to play zoologists with the camera.
The snow leopard. F 2021. Documentary. Directed by Marie Amiguet. 92 mins
