Raindrops on roses, and whiskers on kittens. Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens. Brown paper packages tied up with string. These are a few of my favorite things. [Sound of Music (1965)]
When Rodgers and Hammerstein first produced this song in 1959 on Broadway, they may not have been thinking about debates related to ontology – but how wonderful to be able to list in the same breath raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens as favorite things.
Speaking of kittens, I recently watched the film Statues Also Die (1953), directed by Chris Marker (who is obsessed with cats) and Alain Resnais. A brilliant filming of a series of sculptures, masks and other things from Sub-Saharan Africa, set to music, edited to match the tempo, and a narrator posing many thoughtful questions. Through the use of music, playing with light and shadow, the directors of this film were able to animate the masks in such a manner that allowed the things themselves to mount an anti colonial critique. One of the central questions of the film, why African art should be placed in ethnographic museums and western art should be placed in art museums is a question that continues to crop up even today. The impact of this early questioning was so profound that the second half of the film was censored in France until the 1960s. I suspect it was not only because it was an anti colonial critique, but rather the manner in which it unfolded in film might have much to do with it as well.
There is something unflinchingly uncompromising in the face of things that we have in some way wronged or failed to recognize. It is remarkably uncanny. And I am only human to find some humanity in these sorts of encounters.