We continue with the series curated by Sulgi Lie, in which we regularly revisit key works in film history from a contemporary perspective with changing guests.

At the heart of Jean Renoir's adaptation of Émile Zola's novel of the same name is a peculiar symbiosis between man and machine: The protagonist of the film is Jacques Lantier, played by Jean Gabin, who falls in love with the wife of a stationmaster, triggering a fateful chain reaction of impulsive actions; at the same time, however, Lantier's railroad is an equally important mechanical character: even today, the unrestrained shots from the perspective of the moving locomotive are spectacularly intense. In this film, Renoir intertwines the human death drive and mechanical drive: drive. We talk about determinism, fatalism, and naturalism in The Human Beast with film scholar Daniel Fairfax, who is an outstanding expert on French film and cultural history.