Red and Lilly (cats loved by Marc)
Lilly on train going to Switzerland. Photo by Marc.
Marc loves all cats. Red and Lilly were friends, good friends. I love these friendships. I am jealous because there is a simplicity in their friendship that is enviable.
I hope the video does justice to Marc’s tender relationship with his cats. I wanted a transient, fleeting feel to it because that is the way life is, particularly with regard to our relationship with our cats who live relatively short lives. I won’t go into technical stuff but it was tricky making this straightforward video for all kinds of reasons.
It is short because people like short videos. It is a vignette of cat life and it was a tender time. Despite being short; for me, it is quite intense.
Because of technical difficulties I edited the video almost blind because I couldn’t play the video while I was editing it. This was due to problems with the code that produced the video material of Red on the trampoline (absolutely no criticism of Marc – video code and formats are a nightmare). You’ll see some pixel problems at the end – who cares?
Despite the real difficulties making this video, I think it captures one powerful theme that runs through the life of Marc and his cats: love. A tender appreciation of the beauty of the domestic cat; the domestic cat’s singularity and independence, but at the same time, dependence on us to a certain extent.
There is a conflict in the domestic cat. They are hardly domesticated. There is a miniature tiger roaming around the living room of your home. The domestic cat is far less domesticated than the dog. This is because the relationship between cat and human is a mutually arrangement of equality in many ways. Whereas the relationship between dog and human is symbiotic (dependency through mutual benefit).
You can sense that free spirit in the video of Red, when he runs through the snow. It is his world and we can watch it and admire it, but at that moment we cannot be part of it.