The New Artis (2018)

Directed by: Willemiek Kluijfhout | 90 minutes | documentary

A characteristic feature of man is his schizophrenic attitude towards other animals. On the one hand they are often a source of fascination and adoration, but at the same time, supported by our sense of superiority based on Christian and humanistic ideas, we exploit them on a large scale as sources of food and entertainment. Domestic animals and wild animals are humanized, often complete with names and character traits, while the billions of beef cattle that are kept worldwide mostly die an anonymous death before they end up on our plates as fillets, steaks or sausages.

You can often find this ambiguous attitude towards animals at the zoo institute too. Virtually all children and many adults can thoroughly enjoy a day of ‘critterwatching’. On the other hand, resistance to zoos is growing among an ever-increasing segment of the population. According to many people, animals should not be locked up behind bars, glass or fences for the entertainment of humans. In ‘Het Nieuwe Artis’, filmmaker Willemiek Kluijfhout delves deeper into this matter and tries to answer the question of whether it is still morally justifiable in the 21st century to lock up wild animals in the heart of a busy city like Amsterdam.

The result is a richly varied filmic document that focuses on the caretakers, designers, management and, of course, animals of Artis. Artis was once a zoo that perfectly matched the horrific image that opponents of zoos so often paint: an institution with an enormous collection of wild animals, the majority of which were housed in meager and (too) small pens. Nowadays, the aim is precisely to accommodate a much smaller number of species as responsibly as possible in small biotopes.

Yet ‘Het Nieuwe Artis’ shows that running a zoo is still an uneasy tightrope walk, in which it remains difficult to find the right balance between animal interests and commerce. This tricky split is very clear, for example, in the circus surrounding the birth of a baby elephant, an event that runs like a red thread through the film. When the little one makes his first public appearance, this joyous event is overshadowed by a photographing crowd and excited human noises, as Artis director Haig Balian frantically tries to get the oncoming crowds to keep a little more distance. However, Artis’s PR department looks at it all from a more commercial side by hoping at an earlier stage that the delivery will take place the Friday before the autumn break. Then the media can take it with them on Saturday, which would maximize the influx.

Here’s the whole problem in a nutshell: keeping large animals and mammals on stamp-sized surfaces, especially with the still expanding wealth of biological data, is becoming less ethically sustainable, but the tragedy is that the public especially for the large nature icons such as elephants, rhinoceroses, monkeys and big cats. The clipping of the wings of pelicans (which nevertheless hinders them in displaying natural behaviour) or the taking of semen from a male false gharial shown in the film are examples of human intervention that is necessary in the zoo context, but certainly stress. for humans and animals and cannot be called completely undisputable from an ethical point of view.

‘The new Artis’ sometimes also holds up a mirror to people. Given the many examples of bad and irresponsible behavior exhibited by certain zoo visitors, it sometimes seems as if the fences and glass walls are protecting the animals from humans rather than the other way around. One thing does become clear after watching ‘The New Artis’: the zoo asks itself the important questions that arise around its own right to exist in modern times and also has them asked by expert outsiders. But the answers are quite different and therefore cannot possibly satisfy everyone – neither the layman nor the expert. Is it not possible to distil a central message from this interesting film? Anyway. Nature in Artis mainly has the character of a carefully cultivated illusion, something that director Balian also seems to realize when he states that ‘the real untouched nature hardly exists anywhere’ and ‘free nature is now a dream image’.