The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview

Nathaniel Mellors’s absurdist short film features an interview between an ethereal “modern” man (Truson, a character from Mellors’ video project ) and an apparently real Neanderthal. The Neanderthal is cleverer than Truson and plays with him and his expectations of primitivism. The interview takes place in a version of the mythic “Eden” (“E-Den”), filmed in the historic Bronson Caves in Griffith Park, LA. This site is presented as a metaphor for the shift between a sustainable mode of human existence (hunter-gatherer) in the Upper Palaeolithic to the Neolithic/modern age. The Neanderthal has been thrown out of the caves by “The Sporgo,” a phenomenon that, he claims, owns the caves and controls cave art. The work draws on the emergence of art as a marker of human consciousness and the idea that art and religion are hardwired into the architecture of the human brain. It also plays off the formerly accepted idea that Neanderthals were not capable of making art – hence the eponymous “Sophisticated Neanderthal” character, who toys with his empirically naive interrogator and ultimately presents the cave as a site of hermetic mediation.