1Spanish artist and film director Carlos Casas’ experimental film Cemetery (2019) follows the old Asian elephant Nga, possibly the last of his species, on a journey to a mythical elephant graveyard to die. The elephant is accompanied by his mahout Sanra. They are trying to reach their destination while poachers hunt for both Nga and the elephant graveyard, with its promise of ivory abundance. The film comprises myth, documentary, fiction, and visual experimentation and, in this process, becomes a form of visual thinking. Cemetery touches upon questions of human-animal communities and relations—most notably human-elephant relations—but also extinction, colonialism, and contemporary capitalism. Due to its visual and auditory richness, I believe Cemetery is able to think along with these issues, as it visually re-imagines multispecies relations in an affirmative sense, both grounded in the South-Asian context of the film and with global implications for human-animal relations. The film is able to do this through its emphasis on the symbiotic elephant-mahout relationship, as well as through framing the agentic force of natural environments while engaging with ongoing human practices of exploitation of non-Western matter and life, which are shaped by subsisting colonial structures. 

2Human-animal and human-nature relations are not a new theme in Casas’ filmography, as he previously created a documentary trilogy on the most extreme climates on the planet and the space taken by humans in these environments. The first of these documentaries is Aral: Fishing in an Invisible Sea (2004), about the hardships of fishermen in the nearly dried-up Aral Sea between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, a lake drained of water for Soviet irrigation projects since the 1960s which has led to an ecosystem collapse. The second film, Solitude at the End of the World (2006), follows three men’s isolated way of living in the deserted Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia. The last film covers the struggle for survival of Chukchi whale hunters along the coast of the Bering Sea in Hunters Since the Beginning of Time (2008). Casas’ work has been screened at notable film festivals such as the Venice Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam—where Cemetery was screened in 2020—and the Buenos Aires Film Festival, amongst others. His work has also appeared in international institutions and galleries such as the Tate Modern and the Centre Pompidou. Cemetery is the result of ten years of archival research on visual imagery and cultural narratives about human-elephant relations and the elephant graveyard, as well as fieldwork with elephant behaviour scientists and conservationists, and elephants and mahouts co-living in Sri Lanka today. In this sense, Cemetery is a result of the intersection of the arts, humanities, and sciences to offer a multi-layered narrative of human-elephant relations.

Figure 1. Cemetery movie poster.

3Casas uses the myth of the elephant graveyard, popularised in adventure films such as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Jungle Book (1942), as a framework to investigate contemporary human relations to nature and other species and meditates on death, time and extinction. Extinction is a realistic threat to elephants, as the Elephant Listening Project reports that a staggering 60% of all forest elephants have been killed in the past decade. Conservation biologists Jean-Louis Kouakou et al. report that 86% of forest elephants in the previously heavily populated country Côte d’Ivoire have disappeared in the last few decades (Kouakou et al., 2020), predicting future extinction without a change of policy. The inability of law enforcement and international agreements such as CITES to protect threatened animals implies that not only policies but also social relations and cultural imaginaries need to change in favour of future human-animal coexistence. Extinction studies pioneers Deborah Bird Rose, Matthew Chrulew, and Thom van Dooren characterise extinction as a biological and cultural complexity of our world and therefore approach it as a biocultural phenomenon (Bird Rose et al., 2017). In light of this understanding of extinction, theoretical, ethical and political action is required, as well as different stories to inform and imagine these different forms of action. Storytelling can be considered a form of action in itself, as it is a situated approach that invites conversation with a multitude of others and therefore has the potential to diversify dominant perspectives. Due to its theme and audiovisuals, I argue that Cemetery invites viewers to remap current destructive human-elephant relations.

4The film is able to re-imagine human-elephant relations through its visualisation of ecological entanglements that shape shared environments and, therefore, interspecies relations and communities. Cemetery shows the double bind of contemporary human-elephant relations: on the one hand, there is the intimate and relational bonds exemplified between Nga and Sanra, which is a lifelong meaningful relationship based on care and respect. Their relationship forms the first part of the film and follows their shared daily rituals, notably the baths taken by Nga while being scrubbed clean with a stone by Sanra. The slow pacing of the bathing scene captures their mutual exposure as the camera zooms in on the textures of their touching skins. On the other hand, the film demonstrates the vulnerability of life under postcolonial structures and the ongoing hierarchical species divide, which stimulates the capitalisation of animal bodies. Practices of extraction, like trophy hunting and elephant poaching for ivory, are both historical and contemporary issues that demonstrate the exoticisation of elephants. Although the destructive side of human-animal relations is not central to the film, it nonetheless meditates on the exploitation of hum(animal) cultures in the Global South, which destroys the potency of sharing a differentiated world otherwise than through a global capitalist prism. In the process, it kills off species, communities, cultures and local economies. I find this a strong aspect of the film, as I argue that only by explicitly taking into account (settler) colonial histories that continue to produce neocolonial practices of resource extraction affecting both human and nonhuman extinction (and their relational cultures) can alternative futures be imagined. 

Figure 2. Lake.

5Casas’ non-anthropocentric filmmaking is apparent in the second part of the film when poachers seek to track Nga and Sanra. This chapter is focalised through point-of-view shots of the natural environment, voyeuristically following the poachers. The ocular form of agency this framing creates is fortified by the cinematographic structure throughout the film, which consistently first shows the vegetal or mineral environment before other species enter the shot. This is further emphasised by the meticulous sound editing, which centralises the relational yet diverse environment, as the audio track upon entering the jungle bursts with an abundance of noises made by cicadas, birds, amphibians, monkeys and grasshoppers. The audiovisual, agentic, natural force portrayed by Casas annihilates attempts to reduce the immeasurable relational environment, as the poachers operate within the intersectional colonial logic of supremacy over Asia and the nonhuman. The agency of nature is therefore portrayed as more forceful than human weapons and scientific technologies, destroying attempts to enforce colonial capitalism on this dynamic entanglement.

Figure 3. Nga.

6Non-anthropocentric filmmaking is central to re-imagining human-elephants relations in Cemetery, realised through the interspersing human and elephant focalisation of the camera in the third part of the film when Nga and Sanra journey to the elephant graveyard. The apparent interchanging point-of-view shots between mahout and elephant asks the viewer to meditate on the importance of this interplay in order to create their own narrative and meaning. The choice of visuals and audio is a clear deviation from the nature documentary genre. The nature documentary keeps distance from animals to enable the viewer to identify the animal at all times and therefore makes it serve as a representation of his species. The nature documentary also frequently uses non-diegetic music to create a narrative reinforced by the voice-over. Through its slow pace, extreme close-ups, human-elephant interactions, shifting focalisations and diegetic soundtrack, the viewer is able to establish a new relation to Nga as a singularity, folding the usual subject-object/human-animal hierarchy.

Figure 4. Eye of Nga.

7The final and fourth chapter of the film shows seemingly non-human landscapes that are predominantly mineral and an ominous soundtrack that juxtaposes the exuberant soundtrack in the chapters before. The entire chapter consists of a series of shots of various rocky and dry landscapes, offering seemingly static images. Audiovisual mirroring the prologue of the film, this chapter proposes an experience of cyclical time, where the end of life is also the beginning, or the beginning of life is the end. Here we view not human or nonhuman time but inhuman or geological time, which I argue allows the viewer to experience duration through lingering, static shots. Inhuman time cannot be perceived by the viewer due to the different perceptions of what constitutes movement or change. Yet, physicality forms a continuation in terms of visual language in the film through an emphasis on surface textures. The defined lines and shapes of the rocks in this final part parallel the elephant and human skin with its lived history imprinted on the surface. Yet, it is more robust and static compared to skin, hinting at a longer, slow-moving history; mirrored by the unmoved framing of the shots. Is this what human and nonhuman extinction looks like? Will transformed life start again afterwards, or will it repeat the cycle? Through this structure of cyclical time, of which death is an inherent part, Cemetery suggests that the extinction of human and nonhuman life is an inevitable and natural course. However, it does urge us as viewers to meditate on the human responsibility in the acceleration of this course and on the meaningful human-nature and human-animal relations that are lost in the process. By visually re-imagining multispecies relations through a visual language that diverges from nature documentaries, it tells the story of human-elephant intimacies and ways of living that might inspire the future.