The Pool Group and the Quest for Anthropological Universality by Betsy van Schlun

Author:Betsy van Schlun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2016-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

6.1.3Monkey’s Moon – Happy Animal Nature

6.1.3.1The Art of Biosophy

Monkey’s Moon, as stated, was thought to be lost and all that remained of it where the comments, references and the stills in Close Up. Then, eighty years after its making, the film was rediscovered and announced as fully restored by the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library Yale.375 Although always classified as a documentary, Monkey’s Moon displays the same lyric quality as the other Pool films, which makes it a lyrical documentary.376 Most certainly it was inspired by such documentaries as Marc Allégret’s Voyage au Congo 1927377 and Joris Ivens’ works. Allegrét, a young French filmmaker whom H.D. mentions favourably in her essay on Wing Beat, was a personal friend of Pool378 and became their Paris correspondent for Close Up. Guest notes in her H.D. biography that it was Allegrét who first got Macpherson started on film (184). His Voyage au Congo, in cooperation with his uncle André Gide, had a similar lyrical quality and stills of this film accompany stills from Monkey’s Moon in Close Up, accentuating an association between the two works. Joris Ivens is mentioned appreciatively by Macpherson in his editorial to the Close Up issue of June 1928, where he speaks of his “remarkable ‘absolute’,”379 and the references to Joris Ivens’ Rain (1929), a poetic short film, in Monkey’s Moon can hardly be missed.380

As early as 1927, Bryher’s brother John had already pleaded for animals as protagonists in a story film, in his contribution to the very first issue of Close Up.381. John Ellermann Jr. was a dedicated scholar of natural history and would later contribute several academic papers on this subject under the pseudonym E.L. Black. His early Close Up article called for the presentation of “animal psychology” in order to educate as well as entertain (42). He warned against anthropomorphising animals, criticising that so far animals had only been “represented as blown out with a kind of pompous human attitude, and that their very often superior qualities [had been] softened and blurred in human imitation” (ibid.). The only exceptions to such a distortion, according to Black, were films of actual wild life. “Much could be done,” he was convinced, “if facial expressions were studied. The donkey, the camel, the monkey, each of these registers definite moods” (ibid. 44). Black was convinced

that a close and sympathetic study of any one of them would reveal rich possibilities, both in the way of education and entertainment. Someone may get the idea in time and if he studies animal psychology and allows the animal to be itself instead of himself, the screen will have been enriched, and the public needfully instructed. (ibid. 45–46)

Monkey’s Moon seems to intend exactly this: to portray animal psychology. After his first two films Wing Beat and Foothills, which concentrated on human psychology and mood, and which Macpherson had somehow felt to be failures, he decided to settle on a ‘simpler theme’, the psychology and mood of animals.382 The film portrays a moment from the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.