Fragmenting to recompose: The pieces of the past in Breathless Animals (2019)

After the 1980s, what Lyotard calls the grand narratives came to an end; progress, history, science, and political ideologies lost credibility, giving way to local, subjective and often contradictory micro-narratives. This paper focuses on a textual analysis of Breathless Animals 动物方言 (2019) by director Lei Lei 雷磊 (b.1985), taking as its starting point of a reflection on how new digital technologies applied to cinema affect the narrative and viewer experience. Archival material and found footage reshaped, reiterated, and reimagined by the director triggers a meta-reflection on both the audiovisual medium and the traumas of the past which, far from being processed, hide in the interstices of old photographs and old film.