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Death is long and the last breath doesn't come like that, not in a snap, not by magic. If we die it's much rather in fear and open-mouthed. The insect's, filmed in close-up, is very spectacular, at the same time old man and infant, the light on its mandibles of steel in the dark revealing a physiology of the missed-out-on and of asphyxia. The method chosen to film this world doesn't differ from the one applied by the pioneers of scientific film, but here, the restitution by the film of the essential characteristics of the studied object, the magic of the animal world and the urban microcosm, is borne by a gesture. Castells films this display of nature under the red lights of the urban city, activating through the documentary the poetic and political dimensions of life, which he records. The frame is not fixed, the focus gets lost, the image gets misty, the film-maker is curved-up, the animal is on its back, one looking almost with cruelty if the other, opened-mouthed, will be able to get out of it. Almost inadvertently the encounter tips towards the social and zoological study. And if the hand trembles, if the breath is lacking, if after the fall and the miraculous recovery the cockroach is dazed, and if the film-maker, just as dizzy, also waddles when setting off, it is because there has been here a kind of empathy in the double performance. The insect is here an inhabitant of the world filmed for its anthropological qualities. Wildlife film and little parable about the human condition,
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