The Fabulist

The Fabulist (2011), interprets La Fontaine’s beast fables as a series of vignettes, in which a magician’s high-class magic act with animals fails, as none of them can be made to appear. Struggling to continue the show, he enacts the various animal characters as aspects of his own persona, the fables become the conversations of a menagerie within himself.

Referencing The Fables of Bidpai, the Eastern origin of the fables acknowledged by La Fontaine, which were themselves an Arabic translation of the Indian Panchatantra, the individual fables are alternately linked as a frame story through their common animal characters or common theme, or structured as autonomous tales.

Commissioned by FIAF