THE CAT, THE REVEREND AND THE SLAVE

Parisian based artist-film makers Alain Della Negra (FR, born 1975) and Kaori Kinoshita (JP, born 1970) often draw a quirky lens to the ideas of virtuality and utopias.
　　The artist-couple’s most elaborate project to date, the Cat, the Reverend and the Slave (2009) follows three emblematic communities on Second Life. The film’s eponymous trio are Markus, a man who believes his inner beast is a cat and participates in ‘Furry’ online love-ins; Benjamin, the modern day reverend – who preaches from a cyberchurch; and Kris – a goriean master, who controls the sex lives of his slaves from his bedroom. The
　　Each interviewee lives both in the material world and the virtual world of Second Life. The site allows you to take an avatar – and lead a social life, following rules just as complicated and arbitrary than those of American society, that the film follows.
　　Della Negra and Kinoshita flm without moral judgement, blurring the boundaries between the virtual and the real. The film-makers art background is clear, the cinematography of the real sequences boarders that of a video game like the Sims or Second Life itself, reflecting Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.
　　The artists follow these people in their everyday lives while they discuss their exploits in their virtual lives, at times panning out like a reality TV show with a fractured absurdist narrative. We follow domestic disputes, between a devout wife and husband would be drunk by the erotic possibilities available to him this world.Later, we find the Rev. Benjamin Faust that attempts to bring the lost souls of Second Life – and there are plenty of those – to the light.
　　The section devoted to the ‘Furries’ is fun, exotic, like a documentary about an quirky unknown tribe, or a science fiction B-movie. But the filmmakers do not forget to report these strange customs in daily life and land of the citizens of Second Life. Della Negra and Kinoshita filmed in long shots suburban suburban home to their heroes, suggest the monotony of their life, steps out of poverty. One of the most striking moments of the film shows a handsome young man who decides to become a “furry” in Second Life, and immediately asks the profitability of male prostitution in this community.
　　We see few images from the world of Second Life, and the brevity of these extracts serves to accentuate the strength of the influence that the site has on its followers.
　　The last sequence links Second Life and the utopian community of “Burning Man”, which in the California desert, each year ritual of is probably there to show that the virtual life not only generates alienation. It would take a little more to erase the violent impression left the cat, the pastor and the slave.