Henri, le Chat Noir

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Henri, le Chat Noir ( French Henri, le Chat Noir [ lə ʃa nwaʁ ], German , Henri, the black cat ' ) (often: English "Existential Cat", German, existentialist cat') is a video series of black and white Short films about the thoughts of the cat Henri. In the films, you learn from him in French with an English accent about the existential questions in everyday life for cats. Henri himself is black and white, with a white chest and white paws. He is an existentialist , lying around in the videos or looking melancholy out of the window. The videos have English subtitles. The subject of the videos is also Henri's philosophical boredom . Particularly well-known is Henri 2, Paw De Deux (2012), who received the prize for the best cat video on the internet at a festival.

Henri (2007)

The filmmaker Will Braden should shoot a video profile about a person as a student at the Seattle Film Institute and chose due to shortage of time a video profile of a cat as a parody of films of the Nouvelle Vague . As part of their film studies, Braden and his fellow students had seen some French black and white films from the 1940s and 1950s. Braden began to think about how Americans perceive these films, which he describes as "very sophisticated and idiosyncratic". He wrote the script and his mother, who is fluent in French, helped him with the pronunciation. The tomcat, who came to relatives of Braden from a Seattle animal shelter when he was eight, is actually called Henry, but was named Henri for the film to make him look more French.

The video is musically accompanied by the first of Erik Satie's three Gymnopédies . Henri's first thoughts in the video are "My name is Henri ... I am a black cat .... I live a life of luxury ... But I feel empty ...". The two and a half minute video was well received by teachers and fellow students, and finally Braden decided to set up a profile of Henri on the social network Facebook . Henri was also published on the video platform YouTube in 2007, which was still young at the time. The online cat video genre was only just beginning to emerge.

Henri 2, Paw De Deux (2012)

In late 2011, Braden began filming the second video. In preparation for the film shoot, he read authors who are associated with existentialism, for example Albert Camus and Friedrich Nietzsche . This second film also tells the story of Henri's cat soul in the style of an avant-garde film from the 1950s. Henri is also reflecting on the absurdity of existence here . The film is also about his philosophical-existential fear . His considerations range from sardonic to absurd to comical. The film is 2 minutes and 6 seconds long. Even Henri 2, Paw de Deux is backed by piano music.

2012, Henri 2, Paw de Deux on the Walker Art Center aligned in Minneapolis Internet Cat Video Festival of the first ever Golden Kitty award as the Best Cat Video of the Internet.

Further information

Many more videos with Henri appeared from 2012, including a Halloween clip entitled L'Haunting . In 2014 Braden started to organize the Internet Cat Video Festival and has been organizing the CatVideoFest since 2016 . In 2016, Henri had 175,000 likes on Facebook. In 2019, Henri 2, Paw De Deux had over 10 million views. The 2012 award had significantly increased Henri's fame. Celebrities like actor Christopher Walken publicly confessed to being fans of the video. The film critic Roger Ebert described the short films as "the best internet cat videos ever made".

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Isabel Leonhardt: Are cat videos art? Rulers of the internet. In: monopoly . July 23, 2015, accessed October 6, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Claudia Rusch : Cats . The book. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2016, ISBN 978-3-10-403514-7 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  3. ^ A b c Anthony Wing Kosner: The Smart Marketing of Henri. Viral Cat Videos for People Who Hate Viral Cat Videos. In: Forbes . April 17, 2012, accessed October 6, 2019 .
  4. ↑ a b c d Kelly-Leigh Cooper: Viral cat videos and the man who watches thousands of them. In: BBC . March 17, 2019, accessed October 6, 2019 .
  5. ↑ a b c d e Erik Lacitis: Garfield High grad wins Internet Cat Video Film Festival. In: The Seattle Times . September 2, 2012, archived from the original on October 23, 2012 ; accessed on October 6, 2019 (English).
  6. ↑ Own translation.
  7. ↑ a b Leslie Larson: Henri the existential kitty voted star of the world's best cat viral video, festival declares. In: Daily Mail . August 31, 2012, accessed October 6, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Melena Ryzik: At Cat Video Film Festival, Stars Purr for Close-Ups. In: The New York Times . August 31, 2012, accessed October 7, 2019 .
  9. ↑ James Leo Cahill: A youtube bestiary . Twenty-six theses on a post-cinema of animal attractions. In: Katherine Groo, Paul Flaig (Eds.): New Silent Cinema (=  AFI film readers ). Routledge, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-317-81943-1 , pp. 263–293 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  10. ↑ Jennifer A. Kingson, "How Cats Took Over the Internet" at the Museum of the Moving Image. In: The New York Times . August 6, 2015, accessed October 6, 2019 .
  11. ↑ Edith Podhovnik: The Meow Factor - An Investigation of Cat Content in Today's Media . In: Proceedings of the Arts & Humanities Conference 3806257 . International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences. 2016, ISBN 978-80-87927-24-3 , doi : 10.20472 / AHC.2016.001.013 (English).