The beasts talk back in John Berger's Parting Shots From Animals. That was 1980 - where has radical TV gone?

Our thanks to Rupert Newton for finding this extraordinary documentary from 1980 - Parting Shots From Animals, narrated by and adapted from the writings of John Berger. As Vimeo puts it:

“Parting Shots from Animals” was inspired by essays by John Berger and developed in collaboration with Chris Rawlence. Shot entirely in the UK, it consists of a diverse series of arresting ‘films within a film’, each presented as if made about us from the perspective of the animals whose lives we may appear to celebrate, but continue to exploit and to destroy. While John Berger doesn’t appear in the film and wasn’t directly involved in it’s making, he narrates to great effect the text he co-wrote to accompany the film’s provocative opening sequence.

We transcribed the opening and closing script, spoken by Berger:

We animals are disappearing. We have made a film - not so much of what remains of us, the animals, but of you, the people.

Make no mistake - we are not victims. We are immigrants - we are going back into the ark.

The idea first came to us when looking at the cartoon by Granville (with whom we often used to stay in Paris). Now this film is no plea for us - it comes too late for that. Rather, we plead for you.

Brave as a lion, you said, without a man. Cunning as a fox. Once we were central to your lives. You hunted, killed, bred, tamed, ate, worked, worshipped and symbolised us. We were the stuff of your life.

You used us, and yet you knew - and the knowledge was a kind of comfort - that we were something like you.

Now we live in the margins of your life. Is this loss of contact a loss to you? Is our absence an absence of a relationship your own nature needs?

So, once you saw our forms in the heavens - the bear, the dog, the ram, the lion, looking down at you in the universe. We were everywhere.

Today you only find us in corners - and you sense your loss. You try to bring us back. But the very way in which you try proclaims the speed at which we are receding from you.

A very long time ago, you worshipped us. It was when you made the first masks. Then three hundred years ago, Descartes divided every creature in the world between those who had souls and those who didn’t. Men had souls - animals didn’t.

We were simply machines. [Laughs] We haunted him a bit. But then later, you invented real machines to replace us. What the silicon chip is for you, the petrol machine was for us.

You used to sacrifice and kill us publicly. Today, your slaughterhouses are hidden away. It’s not from us that you hide them, is it? It’s from yourselves. Yet why should you be ashamed?

Do you feel imprisoned in the world you have now? We’re not surprised. But from your solitary confinement you think of us as free. You desire our wildness, our passions as you see them.

We are not amused. For your presumptions of our liberty are your fantasy.

We always watched you. And now we observe you as you play with the last traces of us and with our shadows. You try to possess us through our images. But you’ll never possess us. For in the act of possessing our images, you make us what we never were.

Because we are going, you invent us. But your inventions aren’t even our motor cousins. You take our appearances and you use them like a mask to dress up whatever you want to say.

You pretend that people will have the energy of the tiger - if they use oil. That people will have the freedom of the horse - if they use a bank. That people will benefit from the defences of the eagle - if they insure their property.

We didn’t invent truth - so all that is no skin off our nose. But you use these appearances to exploit each other. We wish we could watch your pantomime with pleasure. But we fear you will destroy each other, as surely as you have destroyed so many of us.

From 46.57:

Yes, our absence does matter to you. You try to stop us going. You let the more tameable of us recline, unemployed, on your hearth-rugs. And you call dogs your best friends - especially when you think your own friends have failed you.

You look at us with cameras which see what no eye has seen before. You can see us doing everything now. And you bring these pictures of us into your homes.

But what you have forgotten is that we also used to watch you. Perhaps in your dreams you remember that. But in your waking life, the more you record about us, the further away we are.

Now our film is ending, and we’re going to leave you. Alone. You will have to live without us watching you. Good night. We can only wish you animal dreams.

And yes, like this article from Stuart Jeffries - which begins with the Berger doc above - we lament the demise of radical tv. But can’t we just start it again, right here? See our archive of video/film over these past five years, which occasionally shows how radical audio-visuals can still be.