Through a mix of cultural neglect and self-absorption, experimental cinema has often remained outside vital contemporary discourses, for better or worse. Take for example its most towering figure, Stan Brakhage. Between the late 1950s and early 2000s, in nearly twenty films dealing with animals, Brakhage, more radically than anyone else, rendered amorphous the distinctions between looking and being looked at, subject and perception, human and non-human. Yet his work is rarely addressed from this vantage point. Surveying the repertoire of experimental and artists’ films for animal presence inevitably brings up many other formidable names. The most atypical figure who might feature in such a hypothetical catalogue could be the Berlin based experimental filmmaker Karl Kels, whose fascination with the zoological inspires both awe and admiration.

What is it, in essence, that Fellini doesn’t like? The poverty, the sloppiness, the coarseness, the awkward, almost anonymous pedantry with which I’ve shot the scene. Fine, I agree. It was my first experiment. For the first time in my life I found myself behind a movie camera, and this movie camera was all beat up, old, and could hold only a little film at a time. I was supposed to film an entire scene in a day. And the actors too were in front of a movie camera for the first time. What was I supposed to do, work a miracle? Yes, of course, Fellini had been expecting a miracle.