Hadamo

A film about monsters without monsters, in the words of the directors themselves, A Demonstration starts from the fascination for the taxonomic exploits of Renaissance naturalists, who are at the heart of modern European science. Catalogs of monsters now definitively relegated to the realm of the imagination and the unreal, or rather absorbed and defused by the rational gaze that we cast on the natural world around us. Yet the word "monster" comes from the Latin "monstrare" - show, reveal, demonstrate - and reminds us of how short the distance is between a scientific view and a fantastic view. Taking up the challenge of interpreting that gaze today, Litvintseva and Wagner construct a narrative that unfolds through images, juxtaposing naturalistic exploration, iconographic research and digital metamorphosis, creating a fertile short circuit of the eye.