Urban Deer (Canon Come and See)

In 2014 Jonathan Glazer teamed up with  JWT London for Canon's "Come and See" campaign, a series of ads encouraging us to get out there and gape at life's marvels, so long as we were gaping through the lens of a Canon camera. The first of Glazer's contributions, "Gladiator Football", was a wordless celebration of Florence's tradition of Calcio Storico (in a nutshell, a form of football thought to date back to the Renaissance era, in which players are expected to beat the living snot out of one another). It was a roaring, full-blooded snapshot of the action and intensity unfolding within the sporting arena, taking us closer to the drama than I suspect most casual spectators would care to venture. His second film, "Urban Deer", looks to have been purposely conceived as the very antithesis of that. This is spectacle of a meeker, almost furtive nature, characterised by its stillness and its quietness. Compared to the brightly-lit brawling in "Gladiator Football", this is a phenomenon that prefers to keep to the shadows, revealing itself only to those with the patience to see it. Turning its attention to Canon's capacity for capturing nighttime images, its subjects are the fallow deer that are a familiar seasonal sight in the Essex suburbs near Epping Forest, at times of year when the grassy verges offer more attractive grazing opportunities than the brambles in their woodland home.

The spectacle here comes from the mismatch between the natural and the artificial; immediately, the deer seem out of place beneath the relentless glare of the suburban streetlights, and sauntering over the patterned terrain of zebra crossings, but seem totally at ease in going about their business in these paved environs. The atmosphere (unlike that of "Gladiator Football") is one of total calm, offering few sounds beyond the patter of deer hooves on the asphalt and the background hum of wind and traffic. In lieu of narration we're left to draw our own conclusions about the significance of what we're seeing. Is it a testament to the adaptability of the deer, or does it say something about the tensions between human expansion and the balance of nature? Are the deer to be viewed as interlopers, or as reclaiming territory that was formerly theirs? There is, potentially, a haunting underpinning to the images - captured largely in silhouette, these shadowy cervines might be perceived as almost ghostly presences, the spirits of a bygone time and place long stripped away and buried beneath cement - but more perceptible still is the faint suggestion of quirkiness in the ad's presentation. Glazer's film seems to capture a feeling of dry humor in the very notion of deer making use of the most mundane features of human development. Take that wide shot of a deer approaching a zebra crossing, as though preparing to use it with as much confidence and casualness as any of the estate's diurnal residents. The film also incorporates what might be described as a comical interlude involving an intersection between three different species and their apparent indifference to one another. A strutting deer, scent-marking fox and cat in a hurry are observed moving along their own private trajectories, uninterested and unfazed by the others' presence (that running cat, a further symbol of convergence between the wild and domestic, makes for a priceless visual punchline). The film' slyest gag comes from a slight interference to its ambience - momentarily mixed in with the soundscape are the muffled noises of a logotone and the opening phases of what sounds like a news announcement, presumably the overheard noise from a television (or radio) in an adjacent living room. There's a sense of two spectacles competing with one another; the loud bombast of the television (or radio) purporting to offer our all-important window into the world, juxtaposed with the actual world as it exists right outside our windows.

Notable in "Urban Deer" is the total absence of any direct human presence, with all representation going to its technology and its architecture. The closest we come is in the vehicle seen disappearing into the distance at the start of the ad, before the deer feel safe to emerge from the greenery. This sets up a circular narrative, with the deer later scarpering to the sounds of a vehicle getting uncomfortably near, although the ad closes before it comes into view. It is in the intermittent presence of those vehicles that we get a sense of conflict, and of immediate threat to the deer (for all their adaptability, maybe this environment is not so ideal a place for a deer to linger), and the calm is accordingly broken. Once again, Man Was In The Forest, even if on this occasion the "forest" looks deceptively like our own turf.

As with many of these advertising ventures, you've got your choice between full 90 second version and the 60 second edit. Alas, the 60 second version makes something of a hodgepodge of the overheard television jingle.