Director: Jeroen Stultiens
Running time: 1hr
For as long as I’ve been walking, I’ve been exploring forests of poorly-made model dinosaurs. In retrospect, the ‘delights’ of Norfolk’s Dinosaur Adventure Park in the early 1990s were nightmarish, amorphous globules of clay and lead paint – but running between them, dodging their feet as if they could step on me at any second, is one of my happiest and earliest childhood memories. On that basis, Dinoman is a documentary which feels almost as though it was designed by algorithm on my behalf.
The film follows Aart Walen, who has been one of the driving forces in helping the world move beyond the hilariously inept attempts of staging dinosaur recreations from the early 20th century – and developed the understanding of dinosaur anatomy in the process. When Jeroen Stultiens says he and his work seem like the perfect subject for a film early on, it soon becomes clear he is bang on the money.
Walen is a passionate and slightly eccentric artist from the Netherlands, whose early encounters with his father’s taxidermy experiments have since evolved into a lifelong obsession with the accurate reconstruction of dinosaurs. His eyes still light up when he is shown an intriguing piece of ancient bone – his voice lowering to an excited whisper, as if out of reverence for the long, long, long behemoth before him. But time is not on his side, and his five-decade career seems to be drawing to its conclusion – whether he likes the idea of stopping it or not. With Walen reaching retirement age, without an heir-apparent at the film’s outset, Stultiens’ camera follows him on two final eclectic projects, which may be a final chance to document this kind of artistry at work before it too goes extinct.
The first of these escapades sees Walen tasked by a museum to reconstruct a dinosaur found in the Netherlands – something which excites him greatly, as the country has not hosted many big discoveries of this kind. The only problem: he only has access to a single, damaged femur. The rest will rely on educated guesstimates, based on existing scientific knowledge regarding better-known species from the same era, with similarly shaped thigh-bones. It is a task which takes him across Europe, and to call upon various friends he has made over the years for help.
The entire premise of this project seems utterly insane when first broached. This is the kind of thing which would (and probably still will) result in decades of back-and-forth disputes between squabbling palaeontologists. But Walen is both single-minded in his determination to bring fossils ‘back to life’ for the public, and extraordinarily experienced – something relayed to us by interviews with an impressive array of scientists and historians, who have called on him to rescue doomed reconstruction jobs previously. With all the scientific knowledge in the world, putting the pieces together is still also an art – and that is a beautiful point in its own right.
That first project eventually falls by the wayside however, when the Covid-19 pandemic hits, three years into Stultiens’ filming of Walen. This leaves both men with a box of disparate scraps, scrabbling to make something whole.
Here, I think it is important to note Stultiens’ choice to frame his entire film with a verbal narration – something which will divide audiences. Regular readers will know there are few things IFL critic Tony Moore seems to hate more than a documentary filmmaker who inserts themselves into the story, or overtly intervenes to steer the conversation. But in this case, I would argue it is part of his most interesting choice with this project.
Beyond Walen’s job being genuinely fascinating – and as pointed out later in the film, is a field which is increasingly popular with the filmgoing public – it is clear that Stultiens also feels a kind of kinship with the subject. Both men spend their lives trying to piece together meaning from a mess of fragments – figuring out how a lone thigh-bone might have once been part of a larger organism, or wondering which fragments of conversation might suddenly provide a backbone upon which to hang a cohesive narrative. In lieu of a wider skeletal structure, one has to use scraps from other finds of similar dinosaurs, and use our current scientific understanding of them to guess what the rest of its body would have looked like. The other meanwhile has to fill in the gaps of five years of life, and try to construct some semblance of a message from them – something Stultiens literally depicts when giving us momentary screen-captures of his nightmarishly cluttered Adobe Premiere storyboard.
In both cases, we are being shown how the sausage is made. That is something which not everyone will appreciate – because it overtly instructs us how to think and feel about a complex set of information. To be fair to that point of view, documentaries can overstep their bounds in this way, when they seem to pretend that life works in easily-woven, linear stories. To the contrary, life is a series of chain-reactions, coincidences, accidents and anomalies. But that is also something that Stultiens is happy to point out.
Laying his own cards on the table, he uses this opportunity to highlight some of the contradictions and pitfalls of documentary work – but also to make the case for why it is still worth doing. If you are treating this as a science, a method of empirically showing life and the universe as it is, you’re on a hiding to nothing. However ‘hands-off’ you present your filmmaking as being, every single choice you make in its creation – from what action the camera’s lens focuses on, to what the framing omits, or what parts of the reems of footage you leave on the cutting-room floor – mean your hands are thoroughly dirtied with the construction of meaning – not it’s simple reflection.
There are still arguably points where this goes a little too far. At certain points, Stultiens insists on paraphrasing what would have been captivating testimony from Walen, his daughter (and possible successor), and their supporting cast of passionate experts – relaying essentially the same information, just with less of a twinkle in his eye as he does so. That’s a shame when it happens, because all these people are fascinating – and audiences deserve to spend as long with them as possible. But these are moments are relatively few and far between – and by clipping their wings slightly, Stultiens has also made space for other moments to breathe.
One other great shame is that Stultiens never manages to get Walen and his daughter to both speak to the camera in the same sitting. Over the duration of the film, it would be nice to get more direct insight into their developing relationship, as she mulls over whether she will take up the family business when her father’s body finally puts a stop to his own involvement. As it is, we do hear from both of them what they think of each other, and how that evolves, but never while they are together – and as difficult as that might have been to orchestrate, it would have added an extra layer of emotional punch to some otherwise brisk and jaunty proceedings.
In the end though, this is exceptional filmmaking: it boasts an intoxicating subject with relatable lead characters; thought-provoking and introspective narrative construction; and a refreshing brand of playful honesty, which more than makes up for any of its minimal shortcomings. Stultiens and Walen are both driven by a unique human trait – not a need to necessarily ‘make order’ from chaos, but instead to embrace that chaos, dance around and make art from it. To imagine how things might have been, or still could be: to use visual shrapnel to build a compelling story for others to enjoy, or to build an interpretation of one of natural history’s greatest wonders from a single scrap of bone. That is everything that I love about documentary in a nutshell.