This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Cat Listening to Music, a short film by Chris Marker.
I met a cat the other day that I thought looked a lot like the one in this film, and I told her owner so. I said when I got home I would send her a YouTube link to this film, but when I got back and watched this again this cat here didn't appear much like the one I had just met. I realised I was thinking of another cat video which I have seen a lot, which gets posted a lot by this Facebook page. The page routinely picks absolute shite for the music, and I keep meaning to download the video and set it to some tunes of my own choosing. This isn't especially important or relevant information to anyone in particular but neither is this film really, important or relevant I mean. I once showed it to someone and they said it was fine, and pretty cute, but they didn't see why they should care in particular about it, since there are so many other cat videos to choose from. I said, there isn't really much of a reason to care about this one in particular, nor any other. It happens to be by Chris Marker, who made the stunning Sans Soleil, but it would be a move of extreme posturing to argue that Marker's understanding of the grammar of a cat video is here somehow more mature or artistically worthwhile than the craft of thousands of anonymous internet shitters who have immersed themselves in the medium of videos of cats doing stuff. This is a video of a cat sleeping on a keyboard and it deserves just as much of your love and attention as this video of my cat investigating a toilet.
My girlfriend's cat sticks her tongue out really far when she yawns. One of my cats, the one in the video, likes to walk along when he stretches out after a nap which makes him look a bit like a frog shuffling along with its legs trailing behind. My other cat, the little ginger monster known as Gustav, has a tiny head and has a habit of staring into the middle distance while sitting in a sort of battle stance, making him look simultaneously confused and on the brink of springing into a flurry of activity. Cats have a lot of individual personality—not just in the way they behave, like how they react around people for instance, but in their physical mannerisms. The trick to a good cat video is to capture something of that personality. It's no use trying to compare one cat to another, as though some are inherently better subjects. It might be easier to make a cat video if yours is flamboyant and extroverted, but a filmmaker with a subtle eye for feline gesture can get gold from any cat. This doesn't make them worth less.
