FACETS CINÉMATHÈQUE
November 2012
The Facets Cinémathèque is located at 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. in Chicago. For more information on films playing in the Cinémathèque, please call 773-281-4114. To order advance tickets online, visit the TicketWeb website by clicking here.
Chicago Premiere
BESTIAIRE
"[A] haunting mix of curiosity and compassion"
-Variety

½ "
Bestiire argues persuasively without words, making a case without explicating one at all"
-Slant Magazine
"Essential viewing"
-New York Times
"Absorbing...
Bestiaire exposes the mechanics of a strange, multi-layered voyeurism"
-Village Voice

"Shrewd and lovely"
-Chicago Tribune
Recommended! "Simple, direct, and ultimately, poignant"
-NewCity Chicago
A popular sensation in medieval Europe, bestiaries were catalogs of beasts featuring exotic animal illustrations, zoological wisdom, and ancient legends. Denis Côté's startling
Bestiaire unfolds like a filmic picture book where both humans and animals are on display. Filmed at Quebec's Parc Safari, this is a film about looking, as it begins with a group of art students attempting to sketch an animal, an activity that blurs the line between observer and observed. Surprisingly witty and continually surprising,
Bestiaire also shows us a team of taxidermists as they seek to provide a kind of ironic immortality to the park's expired "residents," meditating (albeit, obliquely), on the idea of human spectatorship itself.
Filmmaker Denis Côté (
All That She Wants,
Carcasses) invites his audience to reflect on control and power as lions rattle cages and a taxidermist recreates a duck. Using the film form to challenge the very notion of representation, Côté wordlessly creates a beautifully compelling rumination on our relationship to nature and the costs of captivity. "...this film is about contemplationand something else. Something indefinable, something more obscure which I hope to find out more about with the help of the audience." (Denis Côté)
Directed by Denis Côté, Canada, 2012, 72 mins. No dialogue.
Cinema-Scope: director statement
Variety
Slant Magazine
New York Times
NPR
Village Voice
Chicago Tribune
NewCity Chicago
TimeOut Chicago
Showtimes:
Fri., Nov. 16 at 7 & 9 pm
Sat., Nov.17 at 3, 5, 7 & 9 pm
Sun., Nov. 18 at 3, 5 & 7 pm
Mon.-Wed., Nov. 19-21 at 7 & 9 pm
Tickets: