French filmmaker Chris Marker will forever be one of our most beloved visionnaires. His dystopian points of view are beautifully articulated in short films like La Jetée (1962) and Junkopia, and in feature length experimental films like Level Five (to name just a couple of our favorites).

Lesser known video works by Chris Marker are seen in the collection Bestiaire, aka Petit Bestiaire from 1990. In these short videos Marker focuses his camera on one or another species from the animal kingdom.

Zoo Piece is one of three films from Bestiaire, and is by far the most difficult to watch. Seeing a sequence of wild and domestic animals kept in cages in a Zoo setting evokes the sadness and helplessness I feel when visiting a Zoo in real life.

I find myself returning to this particular episode of Petit Bestiaire very infrequently.