Grande Gallerie de l'Evolution

 

On something of a whim, went to see the great gallery of evolution at the Jardin des Plantes - a place I've wanted to see since encountering Chris Marker's remarkable 1963 sci-fi film "La Jetée." It was closed during my Paris stay for renovations, so it was the newly appointed one I saw today. Marker's post-apocalypic story plays with the museum's display of animals (18:53ff), and the sense of doom remains, though the concern now is the anthropocene rather than nuclear armageddon: the great parade of living animals, the extinct dodo and thylacine, some doomed-looking seals, quarreling monkeys, and, in tiny little boxes, human innovations; the rifle, the tractor, the Concorde, a factory...