People have many opinions about cats. From ancient Egyptian tomb art to Rococo oil paintings like the 19th painting The Cat’s Lunch by Marguerite Gerard, cats have appeared throughout humanity’s art and cultural media. Today, cat lovers can easily wallow in cat videos online in the blink of an eye. Somewhere between the moving pictures of short online videos and formal artistic expressions, film exists as one medium that continues to represent cats today, in all their significance and power.
As film and society have always been intertwined, cats have appeared in significant works of film. One of the earliest cat moving pictures is believed to be The Sick Kitten (1901, George Albert Smith), significant due to its editing and explorations of shot types. Up to today, cats appear in films representing many things about us humans, their happily obliging servants. Cats’ representations in film transcend the relationship we have with them as our pets. Fransiska Prihadi and Saffira Nusa Dewi explore these relationships in their programming for Minikino Monthly Screening & Discussion (MMSD) April 2024: Miaw (emoji: kissing-cat:)
Cats as (Our) Children
The (self) domestication of cats has made them one of humans’ most beloved pets. As pets, their place in the family and relationships with humans have been synonymous with being the child. Like babies, their humans feed them, bathe them, and groom them—their lives revolve around working hard in order to care for them. In other words, they now hold responsibility over another life.
In the first short of this program, Anak Kucing (2023, Berani Nakal Production), Toni and his wife wish their cat to be an actual child. This is rooted in the cat’s position in their family: he is their child. Toni and his wife, like many young couples, crave the fulfillment of responsibly caring for a life they’re in charge of but aren’t quite ready to commit to having children yet.. Getting a pet is the most fitting resolution where their desires and capacity meet.
Sure, we love cats because they are cute, but it goes deeper than that. In a way, they are more similar to humans than their long-standing subjects of comparison, dogs, as they are “subtle and somewhat unpredictable,” captivating us by feeling we need to win them over with the possibility of them not liking us. It also makes perfect sense that we see them as children. A research by a team of behavioral neuroscientists and psychologists suggests that there is a “generalization of the baby schema response to animals, specifically to the most common pet species (dogs and cats).” Our brain reacts to our furry babies’ features the way we react to babies. So, maybe it all has to do with how adorable they are, not that we wish they were our children (Toni can attest to that).
Cats as the Inner Child
Cats not only can represent children in relation to their human parent, but they can also symbolize ourselves, a vessel for our inner child. The second film in this program is a reflection of this idea. In Anyám Macskája (Mom’s Cat) (2021, Annabella Schnabel), Felix finds comfort in his Furry identity, a cat with a mystical and deep lore he conjured himself as his defense mechanism to living with his equally critical and overattentive mother. The only freedom he can turn to is being a cat, a creature he resents and his mother seemingly loves more than him.
To Felix, cats are a reminder of his mother’s disdain towards him which bleeds into his desire to be subject to his mother’s undivided attention. In the latter, he indulges in the comfort of being a fuzzy and winged cat with a painful past. Much like a child playing dress up, he also plays make-believe to comfort the child in him—the child that has never known love and craves for it.
In Mom’s Cat, cats are subjects of envy and desire worthy of scrutiny in the pursuit of self-exploration, specifically concerning trauma or abuse. Felix developed a coping mechanism for dealing with his mother through the process of identification, where he has echoed behaviors of his mother’s beloved cat starting from his youth, the central years of building his own identity. Hence parting with his Furry identity would prove more challenging.
Cats as Baggage
Much like cats being children to their humans, cats can also symbolize the parts of ourselves we carry into a relationship. This is the audience’s impression expressed in one of the after screening QnA session after watching the next film in the program, Santet! (2022, Berani Nakal Production). Produced by the same film production team for Begadang Filmmaking competition, the film includes a cat as a pet or symbolic baggage a person might bring into a relationship. It tells the story of a man who is under constant compliance with his girlfriend. One of his girlfriend’s orders is to get rid of the cat because “I don’t like your cat,” she says as she pets the cat.
In a way, Santet! is an expansion of the idea of cats as children and parts of ourselves others around us must learn to accept. Although the film is experimental and does not reveal much about the nature of the relationship between the man and the girlfriend, the tone and approach to tell the story reveals an underlying wickedness about the relationship. The man’s cat carries the question: what are you willing to give up in a relationship?
Cats as Fantasy Fulfillment
In the previous shorts mentioned, cats are cherished creatures that humans pour their love into. Nachts Sind Alle Katzen Grau (All Cats are Grey in the Dark) (2019, Lasse Linder) depicts how one can love cats too much. In this only documentary in this program, Christian blurs the line between the kind of love a parent would have for a child and the kind of love one would have for their partner.
All Cats are Grey in the Dark could be easily mistaken as a work of fiction. This could be both because of its style which resembles minimalist narrative fiction films or the familiar yet atypical set-up of its subject. Either way, it presents us with ordinary subjects in a stripped-down manner while oozing a confusing (and to some, uncomfortable) uncanniness.
Christian is lonely; he only has his two cats to keep him company. Because his cats have the autonomy of a pet which he has full ownership over, they have become Christian’s only place to pour all of his love and care into; his cats are his subjects. In fulfilling his fantasy of becoming a father, he fertilizes his cat.
Cats as Fate
Unlike the previous films, cats as symbols can also originate from culture and the divine, which ultimately corresponds with where one’s fate in society lies. In 신의 딸은 춤을 춘다 (God’s Daughter Dances) (2020, Sungbin Byun) a cat’s appearance reminds us that this cat parallels Shin-mi, a trans woman going through Military Manpower Administration check, in a social aspect. During her process of having her womanhood questioned and debated, she comes across and interacts with a street cat on a few different occasions.
“You don’t want to be an animal in Korea, but you especially don’t want to be a street cat,” Jasper Kim, a lawyer and professor at the Graduate School of International Studies at Ewha Womans University, says. Treated like bad omens, cats are unwanted presences people shoo away—not rarely through harsher means. In a way, Shin-mi and the cat are members of society without a clear legal place. During their last interaction, Shin-mi even bonds with the cat, she tells the cat, “What did we do wrong?”
As outcasts of society, Shin-mi and the cat are stripped of their right to existence in the eye of the law. With nowhere to go and their future placed in the legal system that is failing them, surrendering their fate seems to be their only option. Their misfortune is also ironic considering Korean culture believes that cats are bearers of good fortune and protection. Society’s mistreatments of cats paradoxes their own cultural beliefs. It almost appears completely spiteful and inhuman—just like their prejudice towards transgender women.
Understanding cats is different than understanding what they represent. You do not need to love cats to enjoy the films in this program, but seeing cats on screen is certainly a treat if you do. Our fascination with cats throughout our shared history with them has inspired many stories and made them a point of attraction in our art, and this program has presented diverse ways filmmakers incorporate cats into their works. Only one thing is for sure: let’s celebrate cats in shorts!
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