“Can we be moved by the disappearance of rhinos if we have never experienced the feeling of a butterfly walking on our hand?” Marcel Barelli asks not without pathos, but hitting the mark, in his animated manifesto. He is quoting Daniel Pauly’s Shifting Baseline Syndrome Theory: We humans always measure normality by our own experience and not by historical changes and therefore tend to accept environmental destruction. This is not the only allusion in Barelli’s compact three-minute-film: He references the “sixth extinction”, the current human-caused extinction of the species, and the hourglass symbol of the Extinction Rebellion movement. His film, however, which should definitely be understood as a call for active resistance, embeds these reflections artistically.
With his evaporating water animation on paper, Barelli has chosen a simple and consistent animation technique whose ephemeral character perfectly captures species extinction and oblivion. Archive material is added. Unlike the “Cinétracts” pamphlet films from 1968 that he admires, but just as forceful, he has chosen a contemporary, personal approach. He touchingly weaves his theses into his own biography: Family pictures point to a time when Barelli himself “played with dinosaurs and ate chicken”.