Mastering Bambi
(Rotterdam / Veerlaan 13, Katendrecht, Fenixloods 1 – first floor)
Mastering Bambi reconstructs Walt Disney’s animation classic Bambi (1942). In this animated movie Disney presented us with one of the first virtual worlds. In their ‘remake’ Broersen (1974) & Lukács (1973) have removed the well-known anthropomorphic animals from the film. What remains is a desolate wilderness that in no way compares to the Disney original. Walt Disney’s version, the artists suggest, was but a utopian dream, rooted in the European Romantic tradition in which pristine wilderness is being threatened by technology and ruthless, cultured man. The woods are presented as the quintessence of purity in which the ‘inhabitants’ live peacefully. This very metaphor is also part of Bambi, a Life in the Woods, the original book by Austrian author Felix Salten that dates from 1924. In 1934 Hitler put the book under a ban because the novel presents nature and society as a Darwinian competitive reality that did not match the utopian view of national socialism. In their version Broersen & Lukács focus on nature as construction. The soundtrack by Berend Dubbe and Gwendolyn Thomas underlines the original score and reinforces the film’s dissonances.