On notes for les sanglières

Adrian Demleitner, University of Bern, Spring Semester 2023 Exploring Human and More-than-Human Relationships

The piece “notes for les sanglièrs” by Elsa Brès is a preview of things to come, literally and speculatively. Literally, since it contains material from a film yet to be released. Speculatively, because it intensely engages with revolutionary politics and interspecies relations.

Despite being not more than short over quarter of an hour, the film packs a punch. True to its title it feels like a rough assemblage of scraps and field notes. The piece is not telling a clear story with a beginning and an end, but uses sound, video, text and interviews fragmentarily in different arrangements. It was premiered at transmediale 2021, and subsequently shown at other exhibitions.

I could make out roughly five distinguishable parts in the film, the first being just a grey screen and the soundscape of somebody walking through a sparsely inhabited landscape. This part fades into a discussion on how the boar’s way of being can be interpreted towards revolutionary politics against private property. This first brief talk between Elsa Brès and Paul Guillibert, an activist and philosopher, already exemplifies the core message of “notes for le sanglièrs”.

In a brief intermezzo, a map is shown, underpinned by sounds of radio static. The blue map is overlaid by a visualization, indicating a suitability index. A voiceover and another recorded discussion explain how the map came into being and what it signifies. The map is presented as the product of quantitative methodologies that attempt to simulate the behaviour of boars. The term boarcentrism leads into the next scene.

The third and longest part is composed of photos as well as video-material from night vision gear. The scenery shows what one might have imagined in the beginning. Sparsely inhabited landscapes, on the edge of the rural. There are hints of unfinished buildings, street signs, fences, a tractor, and a lot of overgrowth – once claimed but untended pieces of nature, lost to scrubs. A brief gap and, finally, we’re about to see boars. The recording shows a singular¹ of boars. While the leading mother is passing the camera, the younger ones are hesitating, staggering around, not sure how to proceed. The scene ends in one of the boars attacking the camera.

We’re now in the dark. Brès is reading a short story about womxn performing a ritual, painting a sign on a wall, which we’re also shown illustrated on the screen. Some boars stand by, being acquainted with the presence of these womxn.

The last scene is a frantic night-vision recording of running through the underwood. The shaky camera, taken straight from Sam Raimi’s play book, filmed from the perspective of a boar and tinted in red references inhibiting a non-human point of view. Fittingly, Paul Guillibert talks about how the camera relates to shamanism and can be seen as a tool of translation, bringing content from one system of signifiers to another.

I was initially hooked by the proposition of reading the boar’s way of being as politics against private property. Leaning towards anarchism, I can see the boar as a fitting symbol for revolutionary action, especially in terms of the making of borders. That said, the rest of the film remained illegible for me. Only in rewatching the film as well as researching the bits that made it up was I able to dig deeper into the pieces’ meaning.

There were, for example, quotes dispersed all over, their content seemingly unrelated to what is on-screen. The credit role does not mention their source. Only the website will tell the interested viewer that they stem from Monique Wittig’s “Les Guérillères”. The book from 1969 is about the life, rituals and legends of an all-woman community, as well their armed struggle against men. It might be of importance to mention that boars live in matriarchal societies.

The implied politics, from both points, left me wondering why they are not taken up on the contextualizing websites from the exhibition and the director.

The piece’s strongest point, in my opinion, is pointing out the difficulties of interspecies communication and shared meaning making. Attempts of creating and sharing signifiers with the boars appear throughout the film. Elsa Brès and Paul Guillibert engage philosophically with the boar by acts of translations. The boar’s way of being is mapped onto a political agenda. It is the boar that produces meaning here. Being a trained architect, Elsa Brès uses her skills of trade to attempt to map into the other direction, to understand the boar through quantitative methodologies. The map enables speculative interaction with the boar, even asking it questions through manipulating parameters of the landscape like knobs on a radio.

Dispersing meaning and meaning-making all over the film highlights how it was built up as an epistemological assemblage. The resulting speculations on interspecies relations, on the other hand, are left vague.

I believe that Elsa Brès is aware of the futility of attempts to communicate with the boar. The almost cathartic episode, and the only time the boars appear, results in them destroying the film equipment. The boar does not understand the kinship that is forced upon it. It eludes appropriation through the director and stays true to its own politics.

The piece works wonderfully as a kind of trailer, knowing it contains field notes from a film yet to be released. Still, it can be a daunting or overwhelming experience when simply side glanced. The highly relational and referential style is tough to chew on. The media-aesthetics are confusing in parts, and as a viewer, I was uncertain whether I should focus on sound, video or text. I had to critically engage with the film to get the most from it. Rereading and deep reading are time-consuming, but ultimately rewarding and thought-provoking, regarding “notes for le sanglièrs”.

Lastly, to use a concept of Elizabeth Povinelli, what does the boar think of this manifestation, the forced upon kinship as well as the media piece? How does it make sense of being spoken to, speculatively, and being used as a symbol, philosophically? After all, the boars are absent, even when the film seemingly is about them. This absence, though, needs to be understood as agency on behalf of the boar. It is not only our inability to speak to it, but also its own choice to elude our attempts to do so.