If you played Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari at 20-times speed it would be like watching complex organisms dissolve into blunter forms of matter. As it moves glacially but decisively through nearly three-and-a-half hours of footage––some soothing, some shocking, some otherworldly––it starts to feel like evolution in reverse. Though anchored in three focused settings (veterinary clinic, botanical garden, quarry) it is a film that ponders the vastest things: namely our planet, our place in it, and all the things we interact with. In some ways it’s reminiscent of Victor Kossakovsky’s recent Architecton––though if given the choice, I would sooner return to this film and the curiosity of its diversions, the inventive ways it converses with archival footage, and for its strange, entrancing hold. Acolytes of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab will feel right at home.
Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari (or “animals, plants, rocks”––though this one deserves the Latin) is directed by Massimo D’Anolfi and Martina Parenti, an Italian duo who allow their film to meander frequently (and in attractively indulgent ways) while keeping to a robust framework: three sections of similar length, each pairing contemporary observational footage with archival material in essayistic ways. In the first, “Cinema Invents New Cages,” the occasionally grizzly world of a veterinarian clinic is matched with footage from earlier, less-compassionate days of Zoology. This section offers interesting observations on the shared history of cinema and zoology, including the salient point that images of animals have grown in-tandem with the extinction of many species. Next, the directors move to the botanical gardens in Padua (believed to be the oldest operating) where patient sequences of lab work and landscaping are placed next to footage of earlier experimentations. Lastly, in the quarry, footage of immense machinery and rock is counterposed with images of crumbling buildings from the Second World War. The filmmakers include images of contemporaneous secret police files on communists and dissidents, revealing another sobering idea: this is a film about the human obsession to understand the world––to break things down into tidy categories––but is also a reminder of the terrible extremes of those same instincts.
To say much more of the film’s final third and its exceptional ending would be to spoil a well-earned payoff. D’Anolfi and Parenti have been working together since 2007. The Castle, their 2011 work on the security measures at Milan Malpensa airport, brought early acclaim. Some years and films later, they took Spira Mirabilis to Venice to compete for the Gold Lion, the same festival where Beastiari premiered Out of Competition this year. I caught up with it just last week at Laceno D’Oro in Avellino, a lovely little festival set up in 1975 by Pier Paolo Pasolini that is still local enough for some screenings to play sans English subtitles. That an anglophone visitor could not only make it through all three-and-a-half hours but be utterly entranced probably says as much about the lack of chatter and text in the film as it does about its cinematic power.
If there is a relative lag, it comes in the film’s middle third, which notably features less of Massimo Mariani’s wonderful score and doesn’t quite strike the same balance of new and old that makes the other sections sing; still, the sequence showing an old experiment to track the motion of a plant might be the film’s most transcendent moment. We should also note that some things in the opening third deserve a trigger warning––far from the abstractions of De Humani Corporis Fabrica and work of that ilk, the operating scenes at the veterinary clinic (punctuated by what sounds like visceral foley work) are not played in a way to make one forget what they’re seeing. Stick it out and Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari offers an incredible study of our place on this planet, our fascination with it, and our duty to record and remember.
Bestiari, Erbari, Lapidari played at the Laceno d’Oro International Film Festival.