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Space Dogs
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Space Dogs – not to be
confused with the Australian grunge classic Dogs
in Space (1986) – begins from figures of animal legend: the various dogs,
chimpanzees and turtles that were once launched off the earth for experimental
monitoring during the long-gone era of the heroic, global “space race”.
These creatures endured an entire, often tragic cycle:
from birth in nature, to being trained, tested and exploited by human society,
to ending up either dead or discarded by the process – either way, sacrificed
to the system.
Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter also imagine a different
fate: what if these animals are now spirits, reincarnated in the strays that
resourcefully wander the streets and fields of Moscow?
The montage-counterpoint between the daily life of
(especially) scrounging canines and the fabulous myths of famous “space dogs”
like Laika (as seen in extraordinary archival footage) is heavily ironic.
But the film mainly explores a less usual perspective:
with few humans visible, we are invited to imagine how these animals see, feel
and react to the world. This is what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls bare
life in extremis: whether being spun
around mercilessly in space capsules, or killing and eating a cat, these dogs
do what they can, what they must, to merely survive.
Space Dogs is an intimate,
observational documentary unafraid of using fictionalising devices, such as
Aleksey Serebryakov’s sombre narration.
© Adrian Martin August 2019 |
