LISA ÅKERVALL  Bauhaus-University, Weimar
Can’t Hug Every Cat: modulated sounds in digital media ecologies
This paper examines how the use of sound modulations in the viral would-be dating video Can’t Hug
Every Cat (Digital Video, YouTube, 2011) exemplifies a mutation characteristic of digital media
ecologies. I show how these modulations display a growing emphasis on the non-anthropomorphous
and non-subjective within digital media ecologies. In Can’t Hug Every Cat, which landed over twelve
million hits on YouTube from July to December 2011, eHarmony online dater Debbie confesses her
love for cats and bursts into tears. As the video spread virally, investigation showed that this emotional
confession to interspecies love was the performance of the actress Cara Hartmann and did not involve
‘real’ tears. Within this performance the use of the plug-in auto-tune underscored the shifting lines
between natural and artificial expression. The use of auto-tune allows the video to point to the
mutations of media-specific norms. Whereas twentieth-century media cultures strongly opposed the
natural and the artificial and aspired for the inconspicuousness of the artificiality of the reproduction of
sounds, twenty-first-century digital media ecologies exhibit and emphasize the artificiality of
expression.
BECKY BARTLETT  University of Glasgow
Gorilla filmmaking: acting the ape in Hollywood
Human representations of gorillas – men in suits – have featured on screen from the early days of
cinema, with the first known example of a ‘Hollywood gorilla man’ appearing in the 1914 serial The
Perils of Pauline. Since then, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s, gorillas have featured in horror,
science fiction, comedy and drama films ranging from big-budget, professional productions, to lowbudget bad movies. Inside the suits, a small group of men carved out careers playing gorillas: men like
Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan, George Barrows, Bob Burns, and others. These men, who often created and
owned their own suits and were frequently hired on this basis, have created distinctive alter egos, each
one revealing unique and identifiable visual and performative characteristics. The relationship between
human and gorilla will be examined in this paper, particularly regarding the function of the gorilla in
fiction film in terms of both narrative and spectacle. Through their portrayal of creatures that combine
qualities of the human and inhuman, these gorilla men represent such duality through performances
that exploit otherness yet remain distinctly anthropomorphic. In an area ripe for further study, this
paper offers one of the first academic studies of gorilla men.
KARIN BEELER  University of Northern British Columbia
Beyond zombies: resurrected youth in telefantasy
Contemporary screen culture has featured a host of resurrected creatures, and artistic creators of the
‘undead’ continue to push the boundaries of the concept. While most films or television series about
the undead tend to revolve around monstrous adult characters, two recent examples of telefantasy have
incorporated children or youth to highlight the incongruity that the construct of a resurrected child
injects into a narrative. A French series, Les Revenants, (2012; 2015– ) engages with the concept of the
displaced, undead child by presenting a young boy and a teenaged girl who have returned from the
dead. The American series Resurrection (2014– ) depicts the alienation experienced by an eight-yearold boy who returns to the world of the living after thirty-two years and is reunited with his
considerably older parents. In each case, the resurrected child highlights a desire to suspend time and to
preserve a particular bond that a traumatic incident has severed. Both series allow viewers to reflect on
the concept of the resurrected child as the intersection of the familiar and the unknown, but Les
Revenants also imbues the resurrected child with an ‘older soul’, while Resurrection presents the child
as a symbol of elusive youth.
STAN BEELER  University of Northern British Columbia
The werewolf as a symbol in young adult television
As the popularity of fantastic fiction in television increases, the trope of the werewolf has become more
common in all of the subgenres that make up the fantastic. Consequently the werewolf has become a
staple in young adult/teen television where it serves a more complex symbolic function than the simple
bogeyman of horror fiction. In order to more clearly analyze these symbolic functions, I would like to
consider the figure of the werewolf in the BBC production Wolfblood and MTV’s Teen Wolf. Both
shows incorporate the connection between the werewolf and the physically maturing bodies of the
young adults who are the protagonists of these serials. They represent the hormonal vagaries of puberty
as the shift from rational human being to raging wolf. A new development is the wolf as representative
of an animal living in the strict hierarchy of a pack. Young adults are quite comfortable with the idea of
alpha, beta and omega character-types in the context of education and life within the boundaries of
adult expectations. The third aspect of the symbolic representation of the young werewolves in both
serials is their ecologically sensitive connection to the natural world.
FRANCES BONNER  University of Queensland
Live animals: the role and place of BBC2’s Springwatch and related programming
Natural history television is primarily categorized as blue-chip, action-adventure or docusoap – all of
which may or may not be presenter-led. All however are pre-recorded. What then to make of live
natural history shows? Early natural history television (as some children’s shows today) involved live
studio presentations with animals brought in from local zoos. This paper’s focus, however, will be on
what liveness contributes to the BBC’s Springwatch and its spin-offs. These shows have provided a
significant contribution to BBC2’s schedule since 2005. While the spectacle of the ‘live’ animal is at
their heart, in many ways they draw as much on the conventions of sports broadcasting as wildlife
television. Unlike most of the programmes that share the BBC Earth brand, the centrality of liveness to
their address makes them unsuitable for overseas sales, or much in the way of repeat screenings to
recoup costs. Their justification would appear to lie in their public service components, education and
regionalism. However they should also be seen as a strong example of the tactics employed to maintain
the importance of broadcast television and the perception of it as distinctive yet attuned to modern
realities through dedicated online and other social media sites.
WILLIAM BROWN  University of Roehampton
The digital female body: ScarJo as inhuman
From the novel The Future Eve (1886) to Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), myths have circulated about
how technology will help to create the ‘perfect woman’. This paper will analyze various films featuring
Scarlett Johansson and the ways in which her star image seems to perpetuate this myth, especially via
an association with technology. A highly mediated star, ‘ScarJo’, as she sometimes is known, is
associated both with notions of ‘female perfection’ and with the digital – as evidenced by her presence
in Her, Don Jon (Joseph Gordon Levitt, 2013, Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013), Captain
America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2014) and Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014). Although
her star persona is one of an empowered woman, as reflected in the action movies in which she stars,
‘ScarJo’ is nonetheless a problematic spectacle to-be-looked-at. Considering these films, the paper will
suggest that her posthuman agency is digitally enabled, but that there is enormous tension surrounding
the persistence of all-too-human gender definitions in these characterizations of ‘ScarJo’ as
transcending humanity, and extending into the in- or posthuman.
ANDREW BURKE  University of Winnipeg
Blood and beauty in Jack Chambers’s The Hart of London
Jack Chambers’s The Hart of London (1970) begins with found footage of a 1954 incident in which a
deer wandered into the centre of London, Ontario. Chambers reveals the beauty of the animal as it
bounds through fields at the edge of the city and leaps over suburban fences, but also documents the
deer’s tragic demise when it is trapped and shot by a group of hunters and police. Chambers’s film has
long been critically celebrated, most notably by Stan Brakhage, for its formal innovation and
experimental vision, but in this paper I want to focus on the hart at the heart of The Hart of London.
The doomed deer plays a crucial role in Chambers’s film, which is at once a civic history, a meditation
on memory, and the story of Chambers’s own artistic formation and development. The deer is a symbol
of modernity’s brutal subordination of the natural, yet simultaneously represents the wildness that
persists at the heart of modernity despite all efforts to eradicate it. This paper examines the cinematic
force of the blood that spills from Chambers’s eponymous Hart and considers its importance in a
longer history of animals and experimental cinema.
ELENA CAODURO  Queen’s University Belfast
Animal motherhood: Rossellini’s Mammas and the maternal instinct
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the idea of motherhood in the
animal kingdom and postfeminist sensibilities in the Sundance TV series Mammas (2013), written,
directed by and starring Isabella Rossellini. The quirky short videos explore the maternal instinct of
different animals, from the dunnock’s practice of polyandry to the hamster’s tendency towards
cannibalism. Mammas features Rossellini performing animal behaviours in absurd costumes and
follows the humorous projects Green Porno (2008) and Seduce Me (2010), both authored by Rossellini
herself, which consider animal mating strategies. Going against naturalistic documentaries, Rossellini
plays with her body masquerading as an animal and directly addressing the viewer with tongue-incheek lines. These educational and experimental videos enhance our knowledge of the animal world,
but also challenge and confound our idea of maternity by voicing some human maternal issues. In this
paper I argue that in line with present-day postfeminist reconfigurations of motherhood, Mammas goes
beyond the fascination with baby animals, viral animal videos and stereotypical ideas of sweet and selfsacrificing motherhood. Drawing on works by Alphonso Lingis and posthuman studies, I read
Rossellini’s project as an attempt to confront ethnography and zoology, underlining the connections
between human, animal and the nonhuman.
EU JIN CHUA  Birkbeck, University of London
Inhuman rustling: film theory’s fear of nonhuman nature
What is the most monstrous image that could be depicted on film? An unlikely answer to this question
can be found in classical film theory. According to some of the earliest theorists, the most monstrous
filmic image was that of chaotic physical phenomena such as rushing water or rustling leaves – any
image of random, ungoverned nonhuman nature. Today, we are more likely to think of an image of ‘the
wind in the trees’ as one that enchanted the earliest audiences. Yet the forgotten flipside to this trope is
the fact that certain thinkers on film and photography – Kracauer, Baudelaire, Pirandello, Lindsay – felt
that such images were improper and deeply threatening, for the reason that human consciousness is not
meant to revel in such images, but rather to pull itself out of the soulless, empty-eyed morass of raw
Nature. This idea goes very deep into the history of western thought – its sources are in nineteenthcentury German idealism, in the Romantic motif of Nature’s inhuman ‘rustling’ (rauschen). By
excavating these sources, I show how certain strands of film theory might actually be said to be antiNature – begging the question of what stance we should take towards film theory’s deep-seated fear of
nature.
GRAIWOOT CHULPHONGSATHORN  Queen Mary, University of London
The vegetal life in the films of Naomi Kawase
Though less-well known on the anglophone film scene, Naomi Kawase is a world-renowned
filmmaker, thanks to her decades of association with the Cannes Film Festival. She also has a
respectable career as a documentarian, and career retrospectives of her work have been held by several
global art institutions. Viewed under the biopolitical lens, her work usually depicts an
anthropocentric/non-anthropocentric tension. On the one hand, her films put the human animal at the
centre of a narrative, prioritizing the human experience with topics spanning personal trauma,
imperfect families and carnal senses. On the other hand, her cinematic style always demonstrates the
umwelt where human is part of larger interconnected networks in which nonhuman entities prevail.
However, because film studies tends to be an anthropocentric field, that side of her work is usually
discussed while the other is ignored. To reverse the reading, with the emerging field of critical plant
studies, this paper attempts to look at the cinematic plants presented in Kawase’s work. From a botanic
garden to the forest, from a pea to a banyan tree in the wind, what are the roles of the vegetal life in
Kawase’s world?
TIAGO DE LUCA  University of Liverpool
‘Cows! Dogs! Donkeys!’: animals, children and the inhuman in Carlos Reygadas’s Post
Tenebras Lux
This paper aims to use the experimental film Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, 2012) as a
privileged springboard upon which to reflect on the relationship between humans, animals and the
inhuman in the cinema. Set in a remote rural area of Mexico, the film deploys a number of features and
techniques that arguably strive to frame the natural world and humanity through a non-anthropocentric
perspective. This includes the visual motif of a half-human half-animal figure and the use of lenses that
distort the edges of the frame, which intimates a strangely inhuman gaze. The film is further punctuated
by a number of scenes involving the spontaneous interaction of children (the director’s own) and
animals, thereby calling to mind the evolutionist notion that the former are the latter in the process of
becoming humans. A case in point is its celebrated opening, in which the toddler Rut is seen in the
midst of a waterlogged meadow surrounded by a number of animals, all of which she vocally
designates ‘Cows! Dogs! Donkeys!’ By drawing on the conceptual framework of realism and theories
of the gaze, this paper thus aims to examine the ways in which Post Tenebras Lux consistently blurs
and questions traditionally separated notions of humanity and animality, depicting the human and the
nonhuman world as simultaneously communion and estrangement.
ROSEMARY DELLER  University of Manchester
‘Everything is made out of meat’: visceral vitality and carnal equivalence in Beasts of
the Southern Wild
Despite commenting on regional precarity and environmental disaster, Beasts of the Southern Wild
(Benh Zeitlin, 2012) has nonetheless been praised for its exuberantly visceral depiction of the Southern
US swamplands. While the film’s attentiveness to the vitality of bayou life has been viewed as an
ecologically minded vision, what has not hitherto been discussed is the relationship between the film’s
meat economy and its posthumanist impulses. If the notion that scarcity can turn humans into meat has
provoked horror in contemporaneous post-disaster films such as The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009), in
Beasts the claim that ‘everything is made out of meat’ suggests that the recognition of carnal
equivalence between human and nonhuman life can encourage closer communion with the natural
world. Yet, as the need for meat becomes integral to the central melodrama of the child narrator’s
desire for maternal reunion, Beasts struggles to sustain its initial commitment to ecological harmony
and interspecies communality. By tracing the shifting significance of meat throughout the film, this
paper argues that Beasts of the Southern Wild does not so much affirm an unequivocal posthumanist
perspective as evocatively show the lingering attachments that can render it difficult to push beyond
‘the human’ in the contemporary moment.
RAYNA DENISON  University of East Anglia
From cute to ugly-cute: Japanese cinema and the cute animal industry
Cute animals have become a significant industrial force within Japan, from celebrity cats and dogs to
animal television and film stars, a growing industry of kawaisa, or cuteness, has become connected to a
wider boom in Japan’s pet industry. This paper focuses on two distinctive film production cycles
featuring animals as main characters: a cycle of ‘professional’ cute dog films that includes Quill (2004)
and Dog x Police (2011); and a subgenre of iyashikei, or ‘healing-style’, films that feature cats and
dogs solving the emotional problems of their human families, including, Neko-ban: Cats in your Life
(2011) to Wasao (2011). Moving from film genres to multimedia animal stardom, this paper
demonstrates the reach of the increasingly profitable ‘cute’ animal film genre within Japanese media
culture. In so doing, it shows that the industries of ‘cute culture’ in Japan have begun to commingle
with those involving pets and their representations in Japanese media, creating a series of industrially
significant subgenres of Japanese cinema. Through this examination of a booming cute pet industry
that includes film, I explore both the cute and the ugly sides of the relationship between Japanese pets
and the industries that represent them.
JONATHAN DRISKELL  Monash University Malaysia
Stardom and the inhuman in Malay cinema: P. Ramlee’s portrayal of the ‘oily man’ in
Sumpuh Orang Minyak
In Malay folklore the Orang Minyak, which literally means ‘oily man’, on account of the black oil that
covers its skin, is a paranormal being that roams the countryside and kampungs (villages), preying on
and attacking young women. The Orang Minyak frequently appears in Malaysian culture: in literature,
songs, news stories concerning apparent sightings and, especially, in the nation’s cinema. This paper
will examine the first film to portray the Orang Minyak, Sumpuh Orang Minyak (P. Ramlee, 1958),
which starred P. Ramlee, Malaysia’s biggest ever movie star. The film explores how an outcast
hunchback becomes transformed from his human self into the powerful but inhuman Orang Minyak.
Drawing upon archival materials and analysis of the film, the paper will explore such questions as: how
did Sumpuh Orang Minyak shape ideas about the Orang Minyak?; to what extent does P. Ramlee’s
stardom influence his portrayal of the Orang Minyak and blur the human-inhuman divide?; and how
does P. Ramlee use his celebrated acting skills to embody the Orang Minyak? Above all, what does this
particular example from Malay cinema reveal more generally about cinematic representations of the
inhuman?
PANSY DUNCAN  Massey University
Shrubs and the city: the plant life of cinematic New York
This paper explores the language of vegetal life in an unlikely cluster of film texts: The Apartment
(Billy Wilder, 1955), Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) and New York, I Love You (Various, 2008).
Their setting, Manhattan, is a highly developed urban environment notable for its estrangement from
the plant kingdom, while their genre, the romantic comedy, is remarkable for its solipsistic
anthropocentrism. In this sense, this coterie of New York-based ‘rom-coms’ would seem to tell us less
about how we imagine plants than about our failure to do so – except as set-dressing, symbol or object
of exchange. Yet in tracking the itinerary of plants and plant matter across these familiar, even
canonical texts, this paper will argue that the urban romance fables around which they ostensibly
revolve at once displace and point to another story altogether: the story of the de-individuated, organic
substrata on which city-dwellers in advanced western nations build their lives. This story, I contend,
can help us think differently about the conceptualizations of sexuality and sociality that these romantic
narratives are widely assumed to sustain.
MATTHEW ELLIS  Brown University
I was walking with a ghost: Reddit’s nosleep, Marble Hornets and performed
inhumanism in web-based horror
The arrival of Web 2.0 around the turn of the millennium empowered media creators with a myriad of
new and participatory digital tools for storytelling, many of which have flourished within a trans-media
genre form that has come to be known as ‘creepypasta’. These media objects often blur the line
between reality and fiction through new modes of digital address, engaging viewers and users directly
into their diegeses and providing agency to nonhuman modes of digital presence and embodiment. In
this paper I look at two popular objects from this genre – Reddit’s /r/nosleep digital literature
community and the Marble Hornets YouTube webseries – to ask questions about both the stakes and
consequences of depicting inhuman embodiment within what is always already social, as well as the
possibility of emancipatory political and social potentialities emerging in new media climates outside
the control of corporate capital. To these earlier questions, I look to Friedrich Kittler and Jeffrey
Sconce in the reading of a haunted media presence elaborated in both objects. To the latter, I use Julie
Levin Russo’s notion of ‘seeing from below’ as a step towards Tiziana Terranova’s digital political
affect.
GEORGINA EVANS  University of Cambridge
Framing aquatic life
There is an enduring parallel between the aquarium and the screen, both operating in the realms of
public exhibition and domestic space as frames offering voyeuristic access to moving images of
another world. Nineteenth-century aquarium practices, favouring illuminated flat panes puncturing
darkened rooms, flourished in dialogue with proto-cinematic technologies. The formalizing film frame
is mirrored in the conventional rectangular tank, containing what Phillip Warnell has termed ‘the sea
with corners’. Screens and aquaria find new sympathies in the digital age, with screens used as
simulacra of tanks to display moving images of marine creatures without the burden of sustaining their
life. This paper uses this genealogy to prompt an analysis of the on-screen aquarium, the frame within a
frame yielding a window into a world which is intangible, inaccessible and resistant to facilitating
identification with its non-mammalian inhabitants. I will consider the presentation of the Williamson
brothers’ underwater ‘photosphere’ footage embedded within Stuart Paton’s 1916 adaptation of 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea, before moving on to draw connections with the enlarged, matted-in film
images used to animate the public aquarium scene in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947)
and the imprisoned octopus of Warnell’s Outlandish (2009).
CLIFTON EVERS  University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
Becoming-wave-media: ‘posthuman performativity’, the GoPro™ camera and
researching lifestyle sports
Since the 1960s, waves and animals have helped surfer/cinematographer George Greenough invent
wave-riding and camera equipment to uniquely film what the flux of surfing (dolphins, water, energy,
bathymetry, wind, and so on) brings forth. In The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1970), a cutting-edge
sequence shot from the fold of the ‘tube’ – behind the falling curtain of water – allows the momentum
of a wave to fill the screen (rather than the human surfer). Here, wave becomes screen whilst screen
becomes wave. Inspired by Pure Fun, I interrogate ‘becoming-wave-media’ through an ethological
study of events involving small wearable digital video cameras (such as the GoPro™, which has a fisheye lens) now popular among enthusiasts. I discuss how media technologies are woven through human
sensation, biology, body techniques, cognition, sociality, culture and perception. I also consider how
technologies create ‘autonomous spheres of action and expectations’, as well as how they become
entangled with other living and material ecologies. The ‘posthuman performativity’ of the study and
‘élan vital’ (vital impetus) of becoming prompts a reconsideration of the relation between knowledge
production, creativity and research intimacies in ways that move away from anthropomorphism and
give inhuman beings their due as active participants.
JAMES FENWICK  De Montfort University
Producing the ‘ape’ in 2001: A Space Odyssey: questions of authorship
This paper examines the depiction of the ‘ape’ in the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey
(Stanley Kubrick, 1968), utilizing a case-study of the art and makeup technicians and placing them in a
key position as originators of the aesthetic construct of the ape. This will allow for a fuller
understanding of the aesthetic constraints of the production and will emphasize how ‘the historian can
illuminate the creative function of the film technician’ (Laurie Ede). The paper will draw on primary
sources to argue for the repositioning of the film technician in the authorial vision of the ape. Central to
this argument will be the Producer, Choreographer, Head of Makeup and the Art Director. The paper
will give an overview of the role of these individuals in how the ape is represented, roles that were
overlooked by the Academy Awards, with Arthur C. Clarke musing that Academy members had
assumed the apes were real.
DAVID H. FLEMING  University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
Scarlett: the inhuman starlet, or the vamp becoming-Vampyroteuthis? Regarding
squids, insects and digital becomings in contemporary science fiction
Scarlett Johansson has recently embodied a series of ‘posthuman’ or inhuman roles in sci-fi films such
as Her (2013), Under the Skin (2013), Lucy (2014) and Captain America 2 (2014). These diverse
characters are united by their deceptive appearances, typically used to conceal their ‘true’ identity or
nature behind an illusionary facade or body-form. Using this body of films as a focalizer, I explore
some contemporary hopes and fears surrounding our creative and transformative embrace of new
technological forms. By keeping an eye upon the role technology plays both within and beyond the
frame, I argue that the current congress of digital software and biological wetware can be understood as
opening up lines of flight that not only trouble everyday identity politics, but signal an ontological
breakdown in our understanding of the divisions between the human and the inhuman. To explore these
processes I engineer a productive encounter between Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent concept of
‘becoming-animal’ and Vilém Flusser and Roger Caillois’s provocative writing upon the ‘art’ and
‘politics’ of inhuman creatures. These models allow us to perceive how digital technologies
‘molecularly’ connect us to, and ignite strange forms of becoming with, the ‘alien’ kingdoms of squids,
insects and software.
ISABELLE FREDA  Hofstra University
Womanliness as animal masquerade
This paper will examine the intersection of the human and the animal as it is performed by Catherine
Deneuve in Jacques Demy’s 1970 film Donkey Skin and Isabella Rossellini as she performs a spectrum
of provocatively sexual animal identities in her two web series, Green Porno and Mommas. Both
portray sexuality as masquerade and sexuality that is ‘outside’ the law, inviting a dialogue with
Derrida’s assertion of the ‘troubling resemblance between the beast, the criminal, and the law’.
Deneuve’s character’s adaptation of the donkey’s identity allows her to take a position outside of the
law which parallels that of her father/sovereign who pursues her. While as a result she is treated as a
beast and forced to dwell outside of the village, Deneuve’s appropriation of this sovereign position
allows her to escape the law (of the Father) through another form of ‘femininity as masquerade’.
Relatedly, Rossellini’s masquerade emphasizes, with even greater force, the arbitrariness of the law’s
regulation of female sexuality: as Mamma-hamster in Mommas she eats a few of the offspring she has
pulled from between her legs: now resolutely in the realm of the beast, the sovereign and the criminal,
her masquerade elicits laughter and liberation at once.
COLIN GARDNER  University of California, Santa Barbara
Louis Malle’s Kleistian war machine: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becomingimperceptible in Black Moon
Reading the battle of the sexes in Louis Malle’s Black Moon (1975) through the paradigm of Kleist’s
Penthesilea, this paper explores Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion in A Thousand Plateaus that, ‘If
becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with the becomings-animal that link up
with it coming next, what are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becomingimperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula’. More
importantly, this molecular assemblage is connected directly to the Kleistian war machine, that pure
form of exteriority or deterritorialization, a ‘climate of infection’ where one multiplicity of bodies is
invaded by another, producing a series of affective encounters and lines of flight. It is in this sense that,
‘All of Kleist’s work is traversed by a war machine invoked against the state’. In Black Moon, Malle’s
battle of the sexes is now superseded through the catalytic intervention of animal becoming, producing
a deterritorialized velocity of affect, a form of waking dream that releases the utopian promise of an
uncoded, intensive love: the fulfillment of what Mathieu Carrière calls ‘Kleist’s great desire – to live as
two in madness’.
JODI-ANNE GEORGE  University of Dundee
‘And your little dog too’: Toto, Terry and animal performance in The Wizard of Oz
Toto, Dorothy’s pet terrier, plays a central part in the 1939 MGM film of The Wizard of Oz. The
animal, who appears in almost every scene, has become an indelible part of the film’s visual
iconography, and also acts as the catalyst for the film’s narrative, as Dorothy runs away in order to save
her dog from Miss Gulch. This paper will examine Baum’s novels and earlier films adaptations of The
Wizard of Oz to demonstrate the greatly expanded role that Toto plays in the 1939 film. It will also
address the casting of Terry, a Cairn terrier bitch, in the role, and her place in the tradition of canine
performers in the Hollywood studio system. The paper will also offer a close reading of the shooting
script – which is full of directions and ‘dialogue’ for the canine character – and the finished film, to the
extent we can read Terry’s contribution to The Wizard of Oz as a ‘performance’. The paper will also
briefly consider the theoretical and ethical issues surrounding the use of animals in film and assess the
ways in which nonhuman performers can make us question our understanding of film acting.
REBECCA MERCEDES GORDON  Northern Arizona University
Affect, affluence and the inhuman
Several recent films that feature AI or robot protagonists situate them as creatures whose capacity for
human emotion far exceeds that of the actual human beings also featured in the films (for instance,
Wall-E, Ex Machina and Chappie). Often, this more-human-than-human capacity to feel is conveyed
through the robot’s relationship with animals or even plants: Wall-E’s pet cockroach and concern for a
single green seedling is an obvious example; Chappie the baby-robot learns from his off-kilter human
family how to gently pat a dog’s head; and the AI lifeform Ava in Ex Machina is visually related both
to enclosed rooms and to lush vegetation – as is the robot Eva in Wall-E, oddly enough. Though at first
these characterizations seem simply ways to anthropomorphize nonhuman characters and thus render
them more sympathetic, for only humans have pets and cultivate plants, read another way the affective
relationships these nonhuman entities develop with other living creatures, but not so much with
humans, suggests a likeness between the inhuman, the plants and the animals that humans lack:
specifically, the AIs, plants and animals lack affluence and/or a desire for affluence. What needs to be
ununlearned for affect to exist, I suggest, is affluence.
KATHERINE GROO  University of Aberdeen
Ethnocinematic animals, following Derrida
This paper takes the relationship between ethnographic writing and ethnographic cinema as its central
concern. What difference does cinema make? What does the visual do to the textual? The paper also
tries to follow several distinct lines of thought through the work of Derrida, including his foundational
critique of anthropological discourse and his meditation on the spatial and temporal entanglements of
following that ‘wholly other they call animal’. Animals of all kinds crowd the frames of ethnographic
film. They visually compete with the objects of ethnographic study (humans) and, in so doing, confuse
the boundaries between ethnographic and zoographic categories of otherness. Moreover, one of the few
conventions of expedition cinema includes the hunt and slaughter of at least one, but more commonly
multiple, animals. These films detail a gruesome transition from animal life to death as well as the
extensive efforts required to produce a taxidermic rebirth. They undo the lifelike appearances that
populate the corridors and glass enclosures of the natural history museum and overturn the theories of
taxidermy and salvage that dominate studies of ethnographic cinema. Instead, and in pursuit of Derrida,
I argue that these scenes of animal death and dying exemplify the ambiguities of hunting, following
and pursuing (historical, ethnographic or animal subjects).
IRENE GUSTAFSON  University of California, Santa Cruz
Facing the subject
This paper forms part of a panel that addresses the languages through which multispecies investigations
and critical animal studies approach their central topic of concern: nonhuman life. Utilizing a variety of
media, including the spoken and written word, the moving image and audio, this panel questions the
underlying capacities of each to think with animals. Whether through ekphrasis, theoretical
investigation or filmic observation, the abiding concern of letting animals into the lecture hall will be
examined from a variety of standpoints. My paper investigates the processes of subjecting nonhuman
life to a visual accounting. Utilizing the conceit of the test – a common and routinized practice of both
scientific and documentary inquiry alike – I pose questions about the possibility of seeing the ‘what is’,
the ‘what could be’ and the ‘what can’t be’ of a nonhuman visual presence. The final product of our
panel will be the integration of such techniques not only as the subjects of critical analysis, but also as
the very method through which such analysis is performed.
OLIVIA HEANEY  McGill University
The contemporary (regional) Canadian dog movie
Since Guy Maddin debuted his short film Spanky: To the Pier and Back (2008), there has been a wave
of Canadian shorts that feature dogs as central characters. This paper examines two such films, Life
Doesn’t Frighten Me (Stephen Dunn, Newfoundland) and Chef de Meute (Chloé Robichaud, Quebec),
both of which were highly praised and widely circulated in the 2012 Canadian and international film
festival circuits. Chef de Meute tells the story of the solitary Clara: when her aunt dies, Clara’s family
convinces her to adopt the pug left behind because they feel that she ‘needs company’. Life Doesn’t
Frighten Me is also about a young woman and her dog: when Esther has a terrible thirteenth birthday,
she turns to the family pug for comfort. For both Clara and Esther, dogs act as peers within the delay of
the impasse; however, the dogs also facilitate eventful moments of growth. As films that explicitly
locate themselves within the respective filmmaking traditions of Newfoundland and Quebec, Life
Doesn’t Frighten Me and Chef de Meute highlight relations of difference and cultural borrowing
between their local filmmaking practices and between the regions themselves.
TATIANA HEISE  University of Glasgow
From shock tactics to green sensibility: the environmental turn in animal-advocacy
films
Thirty years ago The Animals Film shocked audiences by revealing on film for the first time the many
ways in which animals are abused in factory farms and scientific experiments. The film had a
considerable impact and raised the exploitation of animals as a serious political issue. Also in the
1980s, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) initiated the first of its many controversial
campaigns with Unnecessary Fuss, a documentary made by piecing together stolen footage from a
laboratory in Pennsylvania. The wave of protests that followed the film’s release led to significant
changes in legislation. Since these two landmark films, animal advocacy documentaries have
proliferated and become something of a genre in their own right, characterized by independent modes
of production and ‘guerrilla’ tactics of distribution. The strategies used for mobilizing audiences have
diversified, and the staple use of clandestinely captured imagery of animal suffering is now tempered
by, and sometimes replaced entirely with, more ‘viewer-friendly’ methods. It is the changing spectrum
of discursive and marketing strategies used in animal-advocacy films and their shift towards a more
environmentalist orientation that this paper will examine.
ANKE HENNIG  Central Saint Martins / University of the Arts, London
Frogs, birds and dogs: locating the human in technologically charged times
Revolutionary Russian cinema had more in mind than managing a new technological condition, which
was the dramatic upsurge of mass media, and the technological progress of which they were the preeminent force. They had even more in mind than revolutionizing society. Instead, the cinema meant to
revolutionize human nature. But what constitutes human nature? What might look astonishing today is
the fact that Russian avant-gardist cinema addresses the question of the nonhuman and turns its
attention more often to things, and even more often to animals, instead of scrutinizing the human. We
just have to think of the horse in Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) that accompanies the revolutionary hero’s
death or the frogs, birds and dogs in Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain (1926) to feel puzzled by the
unique sensibility of animal nature toward the shifts in the human condition that came along with
political, technological and economical change in the Russian revolutionary society. This paper aims to
examine the ways in which animals in early Soviet avant-garde cinema mirror the human under
specific historical circumstances, and reflect on the human in a way that is highly relevant for the
technological, economical and societal changes under the digital networked condition of our times.
CLAIRE HENRY  University of Melbourne
Frankenweenie and Disney’s dog discourses
Charting the representation of dogs in Disney films from Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957) to
Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012) illuminates the evolving relationship between humans and their
canine companions. This paper examines the Disney discourses on dogs, including the role of a
companion dog in a boy’s transition to adulthood; dogs as symbols for ideals of home, family, love and
loyalty; dogs as conduits for heroics and adventure; and the foregrounding of the loss and death of
dogs. As one of the most recent and self-reflexive of the Disney dog-focused films (alongside Bolt
[Chris Williams, Byron Howard, 2008]), Frankenweenie crystallizes these values and the cultural
construction of the human–canine relationship. Through its playful homage to the classic Frankenstein
(James Whale, 1931) and kaiju films within the framework of a 3D stop-motion-animated family film,
Frankenweenie highlights the wholesome, heartwarming, fun and adventurous aspects of the Disney-
constructed human–canine bond, while also reflecting the common darker themes of human
manipulation and decision-making about life and death for dogs. Disney values converge with Tim
Burton’s auteurism and the intertextual references in Frankenweenie to offer a fascinating lens on our
relationship with dogs.
STELLA HOCKENHULL  University of Wolverhampton
Horseplay: personal expression and idiosyncrasy in The Turin Horse
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, 2011) opens with an image of a horse pulling a cart through the bleak
Hungarian landscape. Seen in closeup, and from a low angle, the animal walks towards the camera, her
ears set back and the whites of her eyes on show, signalling unease. Despite the narrative’s focus on the
horse’s illness, and the film language shaping such readings of the film, at no juncture is the animal
provided an anthropomorphic treatment. Furthermore, neither is she presented with what Emmanuel
Gouabault, Annik Dubied and Claudine Burton-Jeangros term a superindividual status. Instead she
produces discernible individual gestures which, while informing character animal, also grant her
independence and choice. Indeed, as Brenda Austin-Smith suggests, when analyzing the performance
of the donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966), what might ordinarily seem insignificant
physical actions can contribute to ‘memorable film characterization’, and animal performance is valid
and ‘counts for something’. This paper analyzes the performance of the horse in The Turin Horse, and
suggests that while the she is neither personified or starified, her presentation can be understood as
‘privacy, defined as personal freedom, the right to idiosyncrasy and the wish for perfect personal
expressiveness’ (Stanley Cavell).
CHRISTOPHER HOLLIDAY  King’s College London
Animation, animism, animality: new modes of anthropomorphic subjectivity in digital
animation
One of the prevailing orthodoxies concerning the construction of animated characters is their cohesion
around dominant personality traits and predictable humanlike behaviour. At the root of this continuity
sits anthropomorphism, a creative and interpretive model working to index recognition and
identification through a familiar human vocabulary. With etymological origins as far back as sixthcentury Greece – combining ánthrōpos, defined as human, and morphē meaning shape or form – the
endowment of inanimate objects or animals with human ability, proportion and purpose remains the
defining register of animated cartoons. This paper, however, rethinks anthropomorphic representation
and animated animality within the context of the computer-animated feature film. By interrogating the
fractured identity of the anthropomorph as a hybrid figuration, I suggest how computer-animated films
exploit the nonhuman morphē element to manipulate virtual space through anthropomorphic
subjectivity. The anthropomorph is refined into a more prescriptive and functional agent, absorbing the
audience into a spectatorial game that sharpens their awareness of the digital realm. Drawing on Gilles
Deleuze’s notion of ‘gaseous perception’ to elucidate this articulation of enlivened space, this paper
argues the computer-animated film anthropomorph is implicated in a hierarchical switch away from
humanlike behaviour to embrace the possibilities of its morphē, nonhuman identity.
BRIAN HOYLE  University of Dundee
‘Exit pursued by bear’: scripting animal performers
Animal performers are notoriously unpredictable, yet this has not stopped screenwriters attempting to
write very complex actions for them to perform. This paper will examine the shooting scripts of several
films, including The Big Country, The Searchers, The Wizard of Oz and The Thin Man, and
demonstrate the way in which screenwriters have written for animal performers. At the most basic
level, the scripts explain how the animals should move and interact psychically with their human costars. However, many scripts which involve significant roles for animal performers go much further
and begin to anthropomorphize the animal character by implying their reactions and emotions.
Moreover, some scripts even include ‘dialogue’ for these nonhuman characters. The writer, however, is
limited only by his imagination. It is the director who must eventually find practical solutions to
working with the animal actor. The shooting scripts will therefore be compared to excerpts from the
finished films in order to show the ways in which directors have tried to respond to the scriptwriters’
demands and how the animals themselves performed when in front of the camera.
ANTHONY ILES  Middlesex University
Viktor Shklovsky in the film factory
This paper discusses Viktor Shklovsky’s work in the nascent Soviet film factory, his role as a
screenwriter, cine-worker and critic of early cinema. Discussing some key sequences from Po Zakonu
(1926), Bed and Sofa (1927), The House on Trubnaya Square and Turksib (1929), the paper reflects on
the mediation of Shklovsky’s critical thoughts about the cinematic medium through his practical work
in the film industry and the function of animals in relation to the films he worked on. Animals abound
in Shklovsky’s literary, critical and cinematic work. Whilst animals are used to allegorical and
humorous effect in his prose and criticism, in the films listed above they are often deployed as elements
of plot delivery, enabling the human actors a greater elasticity. Animals have a dynamic and organizing
function, leading the action rather than diverting it; they assist in making things strange, but are less
enigmatic. If animals direct things in a linear yet chaotic direction, other devices (such as intertitles)
interrupt, reverse and generally redirect the story. This paper will reflect on Shklovsky’s bestiary in
different media and modes of writing and consider the critical role of their presentation in these early
filmic experiments.
NESSA JOHNSTON  University of Glasgow
The voiceless acousmêtre: Paranormal Activity’s digital surround sound demon
Paranormal Activity’s (2007) ‘found footage’ conceit hinges upon the efforts of yuppie Micah to use
his digital video camera to capture proof of his girlfriend’s supernatural visitations. Micah concentrates
on capturing visual evidence but the demon remains elusive. Only ephemeral effects of its presence are
captured visually – instead, the invisible demon is embodied sonically. This paper will concentrate on
this sonic embodiment within the broader context of found-footage horror’s cultural significance,
demonstrating how Paranormal Activity uses 5.1 digital surround sound to three-dimensionally invade
the exhibition space beyond its ‘home video’ digital screen. Michel Chion’s recent work on millennial
horror’s ‘acousmatic sound presences’ that ‘drift through the movie theater via the play of speakers’
builds upon earlier discussions of the acousmêtre as an unseen diegetic character whose audible voice
is thus imbued with a mysterious power. Referring also to work by Mark Kerins on digital surround
sound, I argue that Paranormal Activity audiovisually transposes the ubiquitous domestic digital screen
into cinematic representation, and opens up a space beyond the screen for the digital surround sound
demon to sonically ‘haunt’ the exhibition space as a voiceless acousmêtre.
MISHA KAVKA  University of Auckland
It’s Her: Scarlett and the inhuman
Since Clara Bow, the ‘it girl’ has been synonymous with Hollywood feminine celebrity, at once
seductive and dangerous, alluring and alienating. The contemporary manifestation of the ‘it girl’ is
arguably Scarlett Johansson, a diva of piercing eyes and pouty lips dubbed the ‘thinking man’s jailbait’
(Vanity Fair). Interestingly, Johansson has recently been crafting a metanarrative that reveals the alien
kernel of celebrity, its fantasmatic enclosure of the inhuman, where the ‘it’ girl can be read as ‘I.T.’
Focusing on her 2013/2014 corpus, I trace a double meta-narrative across the films Under the Skin
(Jonathan Glazer), Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014), in which Johansson plays an
alien seductress, an alluring operating system, and an enhanced human-turned-supercomputer and
‘original’ human animal. At one level, these films overlap to tell the same story: the ‘it girl’, both
comfortingly human and alienatingly other, arrives from an extra-terrestrial, extra-biological dimension
with superior powers – to consume, to love, to kill – before disappearing with a valediction to humanity
into extra-technological space. At another level, this is a narrative about celebrity and the inhuman,
which relies on femininity to serve as a vehicle for our simultaneously liberatory and fatalistic fantasies
about technology.
FIONA LAW  University of Hong Kong
Pet-animals in the concrete jungle: tales of abandonment and sentimentality on
Chinese-language screens
With the increasing concern over animal abuse and animal welfare found in local media, there have
been a rising number of screen representations on this subject in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the PRC in
recent years. Among them the SPCA initiated the ‘Care for Life’ short film series in 2012 in order to
advocate animal welfare in the three regions. Popular Taiwanese writer Giddens Ko also produced
Twelve Nights (2014), a documentary that chronicles the final days of homeless dogs in the shelter
before they are euthanized or adopted. Through a comparative study of selected images on Chineselanguage screens, this paper attempts to map out the topography of an affective sphere mediated by the
visual narratives between animals and human. It is found that images of abandonment and
sentimentality concerrning these hapless animals have often been used as tools for improving public
awareness of animal rights. Under this didactic discourse, how do we critically reflect on the gloomy
conditions of these pet-animals and their agency? This paper aims to provoke contemplation of the
impact of urban development on the wavering yet intimate relationship between animals and human
beings, as well as examining the potential susceptibility of such representations.
MICHAEL LAWRENCE  University of Sussex
Herds and biopower: on the stampede spectacle
While the Western has attracted considerable attention, the cattle so central to the genre are routinely
marginalized if they are mentioned at all. Stampede sequences, in which the cattle are temporarily
foregrounded for dramatic effect, will provide the basis here for a reconsideration of the genre focused
explicitly on its representation of the management and movement of the nonhuman multitude that is the
herd. Stampede sequences will be examined as cinematic spectacle and understood in relation to
biopower. Cattle-drive Westerns are usually set during the ‘beef bonanza’ of the 1860–70s; the
sourcing and sale of the cattle required for such films – and the difficulties of shooting stampede –
complicates their relationship to the industry whose origins – the dangerous early drives – they
dramatize. As the stampede disrupts the drive, threatening profits, so the stampede sequence, providing
standard thrills, interrupts the film on a number of levels, since they were regularly the responsibility of
the second unit, were dependent on stunt doubles and usually utilized stock footage. This presentation
will consider the stampede sequence as biopolitical spectacle by referring to a range of films, including
The Big Stampede (1932), Stampede (1936), Cattle Stampede (1943), Red River (1947) and Stampede
(1949).
ALICE LEROY  University of Paris Est / French National Library
The animal turn of contemporary documentary film (Sweetgrass, Leviathan, Grizzly
Man)
A number of recent documentary films have crossed the boundary between humans and animals,
exploring the hybrid condition which Deleuze and Guattari have defined as ‘becoming-animal’.
Sweetgrass (2009), directed by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and Leviathan (2012), which
the latter co-directed with Verena Paravel, have experimental dispositions which convey an experience
of animality through the manifold heterogeneity of sensory perceptions. It is somewhat paradoxical that
these filmmakers who are also anthropologists attempt in their works to dislodge the anthropos from its
hegemonic position within the order of representation. Neither observational documentaries nor
pastoral fictions, these films are hybrid objects, in a similar vein to Werner Herzog’s portrait of
Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man (2005). Herzog’s editing of and comment on Treadwell’s video
footage substitutes a Bazinian realism for a Disney-like anthropomorphism. But it also makes
Treadwell’s performance a completed metamorphosis: an act of transgression, in Bataille’s words.
Whereas animality used to signal a divide between human and nonhuman, culture and nature, it now
designates a hybrid community of humans and animals. This paper explores the aesthetic and
epistemological turns entailed by these new modes of hybridity on screen.
ALISON LOADER  Concordia University
Silk screens, caterpillars and animating an interspecies collaboration
Bringing together science and art, human and animal, subject and object, En Masse is an
interdisciplinary and interspecies media art project made by an animator (Alison Reiko Loader), an
entomologist (Christopher Plenzich), and hundreds of forest tent caterpillars. Though initially inspired
by Brakhage’s Mothlight, which uses insect bodies as filmic material in a narrative that identifies
cinematic experience with the suicidal captivation of moths, their project explores the agential potential
of caterpillars as social bodies that are innately creative, communicative and oriented towards life.
Forest tent caterpillars spin communal silk mats and forage together – forming queues and clusters as
they prepare for transformation to adulthood. For En Masse, insects and humans made cartographic
drawings and living painting of caterpillar choreography that were filmed and edited for projection
onto screens made of cocoon silk. Complicating connections between observer and observed, Loader
and Plenzich study and care for insects hatched alongside their video displays, inviting viewers to join
them, ask questions and engage directly with their media and its bugs. Loader will present
documentation from their Montreal exhibition (FOFA Gallery, April–May 2015) and discuss the
aesthetic and epistemological potentials of interdisciplinary practice, as well as the ethical possibilities
of asymmetric collaborations between animals, both human and not.
MOYA LUCKETT  New York University
Animal celebrity and social media: performativity, upwards mobility and transcendence
Often seen as a recent phenomenon, animal celebrity spans circuses, vaudeville, early films and
Classical Hollywood cinema, as well as viral/social media. While animal representations typically
address difference, innocence, power, ecology, embodiment and transcendence, I argue that animal
celebrity constitutes a discourse on social mobility, audience belief and public knowledge of media’s
operations. Using examples from early cinema to social media, I distinguish two forms of animal fame:
figures defined purely as animals, even those approaching the anthropomorphic, like Lassie, Bambi,
Jean the Vitagraph Dog or the Blue Peter pets, and those personae barely masking a human
performance, like Sockington, Boo and Grumpy Cat. In a fame-conscious era, such digital animal
celebrity seemingly offers a faster route to mass visibility than other forms of internet fame. But why
animals? Embracing/creating an animal persona establishes a space of innocence, bypassing harsh
online interactions, while enabling recognition of the person behind the image. Furthermore, public
awareness of this charade testifies to audience knowledge of mass media institutions and their modes of
representation, pointing to their inherently participatory character. Finally, digital animal celebrity
points to the difficulty of (human) upwards mobility, particularly in austerity, while pointing to
historical changes in stardom and celebrity.
DAVID MCGOWAN  Savannah College of Art and Design
This Is Your Life, Donald Duck: cartoon stars and the live aesthetic of early television
This paper will discuss the phenomenon of animated stardom, in which American film studios
regularly publicized their cartoon creations not as mere characters, but as complex personalities with an
implied off-screen ‘existence’. With the rise of television in the 1950s, previous models of promoting
stars were challenged: whereas Hollywood had traditionally privileged the glamour and ‘superiority’ of
its film performers, early broadcasting placed a focus on ‘liveness’ and intimacy. This presentation will
argue that animated star images, like their live-action equivalent, were altered during this period.
Television networks encouraged appearances from cinematic performers (whose pre-existing fame
could attract viewers), but also aimed to give the impression that more of the actual ‘person’ (behind
the apparent veneer of stardom) was being revealed and shared to the viewer than in previous
discourse. A broadcast such as This Is Your Life Donald Duck (tx 11 March 1960) sees Donald make
various revelations about his pre-fame life and express humility – attributes that were highly valued by
the aesthetics of early broadcasting. Despite the self-reflexivity and parodic qualities often associated
with animation, it is suggestive how often these shows tended to reproduce, rather than denounce,
television’s markers of authenticity.
SUSAN MCHUGH  University of New England
One or several dogs? Filming multispecies multitudes
Reviewers of Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2015) praise its non-CGI execution of a mass streetdogs’ revolt, but express confusion about its meaning: is the uprising metaphorical, like a canine
Spartacus (1963)? Or is it just more evidence of the impossibility of animal revolutions, The Birds
(1960) gone to the dogs? The uncertainty arguably flags an even more revolutionary shift taking place
for animals in film, a change that is captured in viewers of White God’s shifting perceptions of one or
several dogs. Drawing comparisons with two contemporary films that link canids to historical acts of
mass killing, The Last Dogs of Winter (2011) and Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths (2010), this project
examines how attention not only to content but also to formal aspects helps to track the halting
emergence of multispecies multitudes in film.
LAURA MCMAHON  University of Cambridge
Leviathan’s resource politics
Drawing on recent theorizations of screen animals (Burt, Pick, Shukin), this paper explores the ethical,
political and ecological stakes of Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel, 2012), an experimental
documentary featuring a commercial fishing boat off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Shot
on multiple miniature GoPro cameras attached to fishermen and filmmakers, capturing life in nets and
images, the film reveals a ‘material-semiotic’ entanglement of species beings and visual technologies
(Haraway). Yet this entanglement – central to the film’s immersive aesthetics – is shaped by a violent
asymmetry whereby human labour results in animal death. Leviathan thus makes visible the ‘resource
politics’ (Bozak) not only of fishing but of film – what Shukin has described as a biopolitical logic of
rendering that enacts ‘a transfer of life from animal body to technological media’. Yet Leviathan also
unfolds a mode of durational attentiveness to nonhuman lifeworlds, as unremittingly long takes reveal
fish slowly dying – scenes that assume a particular ethical, political and ecological charge. Working
with and against resource extraction, Leviathan highlights the importance of temporality in attending to
lives beyond the human; it intimates how cinematic duration might work to question biopolitical
regimes.
APRIL MILLER  Arizona State University
Hear her roar: gender, transhumanism and becoming/transcending the animal
From Frankenstein to The Fly, Hollywood is teeming with monstrous bodies that simultaneously warn
against scientific hubris and laud the possibilities of a posthuman world. While transhumanism often
emphasizes the need for humanity to capitalize on technology in order to exceed our ‘natural’ form,
some renderings of the movement indulge in a romantic vision of animality, suggesting a need to
coopt, or reclaim, powers found in less ‘civilized’ creatures. In scrutinizing the double-edged sword of
such scientific endeavours, I examine three recent renditions of transhumanism, Splice (2009), Hanna
(2011) and Lucy (2014). My paper assesses the respective fantasies and nightmares of transhumanism
found in each film, considering how their transhumanist vision blurs the boundaries between animal
and human. By linking the feminine, the monstrous and the animalistic, these films’ female
protagonists suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms by which bodies are culturally defined – human
and animal, male and female, and so on. Often honouring the connection between the technologically
enhanced human and the natural powers of the unadulterated animal, I consider how these films
challenge transhumanism’s anthropocentric prejudices and contemplate what it means to embody both
the human and animal in an increasingly posthuman world.
BRETT MILLS  University of East Anglia
‘If this was a human …’: pets and vets on television
Reflecting on the quick recovery of a Labrador he recently completed major surgery on, vet Noel
Fitzpatrick remarks, ‘If this was a human, you would not be walking around a field the day after your
hip replacement. Dogs are amazing.’ Fitzpatrick is the star of The Supervet (Channel 4, 2014– ) and
The Bionic Vet (BBC1, 2010), and a pioneering surgeon known for his development of innovative
forms of animal surgery. Veterinary programmes offer an interesting subgenre for the discussion of the
representations of animals because the patients are nonhuman. Firstly, decisions about medical
treatments cannot be made by the patients, and so humans always speak on their behalf. Secondly, an
option commonly absent from discussions of human medicine – euthanasia – is often present. Thirdly,
the owner–pet relationship is centred on ‘dominance and affection’ (Tuan) symbolic of the broader
human–animal divide. This paper will outline how these three function within The Supervet, and the
contradictions that exist ‘when species meet’ (Haraway). By noting what would be different ‘if this was
a human’, Fitzpatrick notes the particularity of the dog he has treated, and this paper will examine the
implications of this for debates about the representations of animals on television.
RACHEL MOORE  Goldsmiths, University of London
Kalatozov’s animal eye
This paper looks at the fragility of the human in Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (1929). The traditional
historical materialist notion of progress, which is to replace that which is animal, nonhistorical and
cyclical with the technological runs parallel with one in which the animal takes on a transgressive role.
In so doing, it interferes with normal revolutionary fare at key moments. The emergence of sweat,
excrement, and the final ride of the horse to its death derails the narrative of progress, the historical
materialist story told, but does so through montage and imagery. Considered a failure for its
‘formalism’ in its own time, this paper delves into the reasons why it is now championed today for that
formal excess.
ROBERT MORACE  Daemen College
What’s Under the Skin?
Originally conceived as a faithful ‘rendering’ (as it were), Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation not only
transforms Michel Faber’s satirical novel Under the Skin into a dark fable of uncertain meaning, it also
creates, in conjunction with its source text, a continuum along which animal, human, android and alien
lose their fixed positions, while nonetheless retaining trace elements of their former selves. Equally
importantly, the relationship between Glazer’s evocative and destabilizing film (an exercise in various
forms of estrangement) and Faber’s darkly satirical, at times grimly funny, novel mirrors the
relationship between film adaptations and source texts more generally. In this sense, Faber’s novel
functions as both original and natural, and Glazer’s film as the novel’s technological other. Despite its
sci-fi premise, Faber’s novel is closely associated with nature: its central character Isserley is the alien
as sheep- or llama-like animal (her natural self), surgically and grotesquely transformed into human
form but still possessing her original consciousness and self-awareness. Glazer’s film is, like film itself,
a technological/manufactured product: its unnamed femme fatale is the alien as android whose artificial
intelligence develops beyond the merely programmable to the recognizably human.
KATIE MOYLAN  University of Leicester
Uncanny moments in Les Revenants
In this paper, I argue the French miniseries Les Revenants (Canal+, 2012– ) produces moments of the
uncanny within a televisual aesthetic that deliberately unsettles the viewer. I suggest the series employs
formal strategies, particularly the televisual moment, to produce a textual ‘labyrinthian space’ (Cixous)
enabling a diegetic and dialectical preoccupation with the failures of the rational in an increasingly
irrational place. Uncanny moments function as ruptures in the narrative and as jarring moments of
realization, producing multiple meanings in fragments of narrative excess. I argue that Les Revenants is
built on such moments; taken together, they foreground the abject nature of the ‘returned’ and the
strangeness of ‘home’ as central themes of the series. At the level of aesthetic form, each uncanny
moment draws us more deeply into the storyworld of Les Revenants, in which rational logics and
procedural practices are ultimately subsumed by the familiar made strange. Across the levels of
narrative, plot and style, I suggest Les Revenants is about the uncanny, focusing on a village’s
negotiations with its manifestation as performed by its televisual aesthetic and revealed in standalone
televisual moments. Les Revenants produces moments of reflection which refer back to past shared
histories and forward to the possibilities of abject subjectivity, but which offer no avenues for escape.
MATILDA MROZ  University of Greenwich
Reflections in and on the animal eye: Of Horses and Men and its equine encounters
The shared look between human and animal, though frequently rendered as a site of mutual
incomprehension, is a privileged motif in theory and visual culture. The aim of this paper is to delineate
the ways in which the look of the animal, as an active and directed gaze, and the eye of the animal, as a
material image of vulnerability, structure cinematic encounters between animal and human, and the
implications such structures have for an ethics of spectatorship. Making reference to the films of Bill
Viola and the writing of Anat Pick, the paper examines Of Horses and Men (Benedikt Erlondsson,
2013), an exploration of the imbrication of horse and human in an Icelandic rural community. The film
is punctuated by the recurring closeup of an equine eye, in which the landscape and its human figures
are reflected. These images highlight the animal’s material vulnerability, which finds its echo in our
own embodied acts of viewing, while inverting the usual relationship of dominance that human figures
hold in the visual space between the animal and the human. The paper traces the implications of such
an image to an understanding of cinema as a ‘creaturely medium’ (Pick) of ethical reflection.
ADAM O’BRIEN  University of Bristol / University of Reading
Fishwater: The Bay and its hyperobject
‘A species does not discover an environment waiting for it’ (Sean Cubitt). Timothy Morton’s
Hyperobjects (2013) argues for more sustained and creative attention to those things that are
‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’. Impatient with notions of localism and
presentism, Morton believes that hyperobjects must provoke ‘a sense of asymmetry between the
infinite power of cognition and the infinite being of things’. They challenge our capacities of
interpretation and articulation, and present particular difficulties to the medium of film, which
invariably deals with units of presently unfolding time in clearly delineated space. In The Bay (Barry
Levinson, 2012), a small seaside town with a polluted water supply is ravaged by flesh-eating isopods.
I wish to argue that its found-footage premise and media-collage aesthetic can be understood as
grappling with some of the conundrums set out by Morton’s writing. More specifically, Levinson’s
film explores the phenomenon of contamination as something which collapses together cause and
effect, local and global, victim and culprit, fish and water. Our assumption of a complete symbiosis
between fish and their habitat, combined with their global presence, gives fish a special potential for
the impossible but vital task of hyperobject representation.
GILAD PADVA  Beit Berl College, Israel
Animated queerdom: animalistic performativity as transgressive allegory in Queer
Duck: The Movie
The animated film Queer Duck: The Movie (Xeth Feinberg, 2006) criticizes and ironizes contemporary
queer subcultures by personified animals (a queer duck, a ‘gaytor’ alligator, a bi-polar bear, and so on)
that echo Aesop’s fables, Krylov’s tales, Orwell’s book Animal Farm and icons like Bambi, Mickey
Mouse and Angry Bird. Such iconography not only mocks the Biblical association of sodomy and
bestiality, but queerly problematizes the relationship between sexual dissidence and the hegemonic
sexual order. This film demonstrates the power of queerdom in deconstructing, destabilizing,
subverting and transgressing the straight and narrow (and often homophobic) anthropocentrism.
Through animated characters such as Oscar Wildcat and Bi-Polar Bear, this film negates the
dichotomous relationship between nature and aestheticism, sex drives and culture, instincts and
respectability. If the orgasmic body cannot be identified with the organic body, but is more an
interference in and displacement of the body of ‘nature’, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests in her
groundbreaking essay ‘Animal sex: libido as desire and death’ (1995), than the queer body, which is
lively animated and celebrated by Queer Duck: The Movie, denaturalizes heterocentric assumptions
about love, relationships, intimacies and libidinal ‘animalistic’ needs, as much as the prevalent
machismo, body fascism and sissyphobia within the gay male community.
KATY PEPLIN  University of Michigan
Studio magic, animal secrets: archival perspectives on the AHA’s Hollywood office
Robert Craven was the first head of the Hollywood office, American Humane Association, and worked
closely with both studios and the Production Code Administration to ensure that animals were being
treated well on set. However, correspondence within the PCA files suggests that his tenure, and the
office he represented, was caught between serving the interests of the AHA and maintaining the magic
and allure of Hollywood. This paper uses these letters, as well as studio and AHA archival material, to
argue that animal bodies carry unique burdens of realism, and that the AHA had to work up, against
and through the audience expectation that animals are vulnerable, and that even simulated images are
dangerous to animal actors. Drawing on Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics, I demonstrate that animal
bodies are viewed as both representation and reflection of the universal embodiment of vulnerability,
and that the AHA was forced to demonstrate that animals were being protected even as the images
claimed otherwise. To be on set was to observe that the animals were (often, but not always) safe, but
to guarantee that to the public often required divulging of ‘trade secrets’, and Craven's shifting
alliances do much, the paper contends to demonstrate the AHA's tenuous position.
ANAT PICK  Queen Mary, University of London
Why not look at animals?
Revisiting John Berger’s seminal essay on the visual animal, ‘Why look at animals?’ (1980), I invert
Berger’s title in order to explore instances where the visibility of animals is at stake and where seeing
is intricately linked to forms of surveillance and control. In the context of advanced optical and
tracking technologies that render animals permanently visible, the possibility of not-seeing emerges as
a progressive modality of relation to animals. My talk is concerned with the implicit connections
between looking and extinction, where rare or endangered animals are fatally observed, and where
animal sighting acts as a lure and reward against the backdrop of animal vanishing. Not-seeing does not
merely alter the optics of the human–animal encounter but mitigates human desire to make animals
unconditionally visible. It is not a matter of endorsing the censorious attitude to images implicit in
Berger’s critique that seeks some primordial intimacy with animals. Nor does not-seeing reinforce the
mystery and otherness of animals that mythologizes them in the human imaginary. Unseeing is
attentive to the notion of animal privacy that denies human eyes and their technological proxies
unlimited access to other lives. In its ultimate guise, not-seeing belongs to the repertoire of gazes of
what I call ‘vegan cinema’, a cinema that approaches the vulnerable objects of the gaze without
devouring them.
MARIA PRAMAGGIORE  National University of Ireland, Maynooth
The taming of the Bronys: animals, autism and fandom as therapeutic performance
The Brony fandom, an online and embodied community populated by men and boys devoted to the
Hasbro reboot of the My Little Pony franchise with Lauren Faust’s Friendship is Magic animated series
(2010), initially met with denunciations related to age and gender inappropriateness. It has
subsequently witnessed not merely a public reappraisal but something more like a warm embrace.
Documentaries (A Brony Tale [2014] and Bronycon [2012]) link FIM’s parable-style homilies about
friendship and personal growth to the anti-cynicism ethos of the now-tame Brony ‘herd’. This paper
argues that the recuperation of the Brony fandom, and the celebration of the allegedly ground-breaking
gender dynamics it represents, is achieved through the subtle appropriation of the discourse of equine
assisted therapy (EAT). With EAT, the horse’s dance-like movements are understood as remediating
the neural underconnectivity of those with autism spectrum and anxiety disorders, two conditions
associated with the Brony demographic (Edwards and Redden). This paper forms part of a larger
project on the horse and modernity that begins with Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms; as such, it
contributes to a larger argument concerning the role of the horse as a signifier and a material enabler of
physical and spiritual transport.
THOMAS PRINGLE  Brown University
Of grids and parasites: governmentality, energy infrastructure and the mediation of
habit
The uniquely British phenomenon of the ‘TV Pickup’ illustrates a collective human behaviour that is at
once social and individual. Millions of spectators simultaneously activate electric kettles following the
broadcast of EastEnders every week. This synchronized power demand requires governmental
anticipation, vigilant monitoring and the preparation of energy infrastructure and hydroelectric power.
The technological coevolution of two networks involved in the phenomenon– television and energy
grids – demonstrates how technical ensembles develop a nonhuman rapport over time, and these
historical relations are effaced as human habits develop. This paper analyzes methods of scientific
videography and new media art visualizing the imperceptible effects of electrical transmission, and
traces how media devices have evolved according to the frequency of the grid. Drawing from Michel
Serres’s understanding of governmentality as parasitic, where ‘the Leviathan’ is at once a social
contract and a ‘bestial’ model of informational relationality, I contend that those collective habits that
emerge from media relations – like those apparent in the ‘TV Pickup’ – are coopted in the move to
‘educate’, network and synchronize machines (smartphones, smart TVs and the ‘smart grid’). The
habitual is increasingly integrated in green energy initiatives, signaling a shifting political relationship
between the social and the machine.
CHRISTOPHER PULLEN  Bournemouth University
Queering the mother board: artificial intelligence and the singularity in science fiction
film
The mainframe computer programme forms a central narrative archetype within many science fiction
films. As an artificial intelligence that lacks a physical mobile form, its gendered presence is complex.
While the mainframe computer is often coded as maternal and/or paternal, implying artificial
intelligence founded on procreation, at the same time it is inherently queer. This is evident in its
potential to become the singularity, a post-human queer consciousness, beyond the corporeal world.
This paper considers this representational potential within mainstream film, foregrounding case studies
such as: Forbidden Planet (1956), where the alien Krull computer replicated the psychological Id;
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the onboard computer Hal worries about death and the eternal
dream state; Alien (1979), where Mother the main frame fails to protect her own; and Transcendence
(2014) where the post-human and the human coexist in order to save humanity. I argue Lee Edelman’s
notion of the queer death drive is central here, in denying the need for a reproductive futurity. Within
these films the post-human potential of the queer mechanistic world, offers a way save ‘the world’,
becoming a displaced, but useful, form of queer and alien consciousness.
JOHN DAVID RHODES  University of Cambridge
Human flesh, porcine love: Pasolini’s animals and the limits of allegory
This paper attempts to think through the figurative properties of the animal by exploring Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s film Porcile/Pigsty (1969), in which animal life and death, and the human love of the animal
all figure prominently. Pasolini’s practice is marked by an obsession with realist referentiality, but at
the same time his films tend towards a mode of allegorical critique. Porcile cuts back and forth
between two stories. The first narrates the story of Julian (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who is in love with pigs;
the second shows the wanderings of an unnamed man (Pierre Clementi) who (fictionally) kills and eats
other humans, and also actually kills nonhuman animals. The real animal life expended in the film
subtends the allegorical dimensions of other animal–human and human–human relationships. The
equivalence that the film has notionally granted human and animal bodies – as both being susceptible
to exploitation, sacrifice and ingestion by humans – is not borne out by the real economies of life and
death onscreen. Thus, despite its allegorical ambitions, the film disrupts its own investment in
allegory’s chain of equivalences. Porcile sketches the limits of any allegorical critique of capitalism,
insofar as capital and allegory both trade in equivalence.
ARIEL ROGERS  Northwestern University
Special effects, synthetic space and the inhuman in King Kong and Bringing Up Baby
Special effects proliferated in Hollywood in the 1930s, when rear projection and optical printing
pervaded the majority of studio productions, from the most fantastic to the most unobtrusive.
Considering the diversity of roles effects played, my paper explores their function in two otherwise
dissimilar canonical films that revolve around uniting human characters and dangerous creatures.
Moving away from the focus on realism and spectacle that tends to guide scholarship on effects, I
argue that the use of rear projection and optical printing contributed to the construction of particular
forms of cinematic space in this period. Mirroring contemporaneous developments in theatre design,
which increasingly sought a seamless integration of theatre and image space, Hollywood films
employed effects to create synthetic diegetic spaces constituted by the assembly of heterogeneous
fragments, often figured as layered planes within the image. Within that context, the human–creature
interactions in King Kong and Bringing Up Baby emerge as particularly thrilling experiments with the
new possibilities opened up by this synthetic space. Moreover, since the films articulate the
relationships among characters, in significant part, through their construction of that space, this
exploration provides a new perspective on their portrayal of humanness and its intersection with race
and gender.
NICOLA RUNCIMAN  University of Manchester
The (un)natural habitats of Alicia Scherson's animals
A key filmmaker of Chile’s post-dictatorship generation, Alicia Scherson’s feature debut Play (2005)
and her follow-up Turistas (2009) construct intimate inventories of the worlds which surround their
protagonists – Cristina, a maid from Southern Chile living in Santiago, and Carla, a middle-class
woman abandoned by her husband in a national park. Amid this attention to the material and sensory
experiences of the city and nature alike, nonhuman animals are frequently encountered, observed,
imagined and dreamt; unsurprisingly, perhaps, as Scherson originally studied as a biologist. This paper
explores how the presence of animals (both real and imagined) becomes a means through which to
confront questions of habitat, belonging and being ‘at home’ in the world. The juxtaposition of
‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ modes of animal life, as well as the often unsettling or uncanny dimension of
the human–animal encounter, opens up space fraught with the uncertainty and anxiety that
accompanies the noncoincidence of self and world. If, in Donna Haraway's words, we ‘polish an
animal mirror to look for ourselves’, then this paper seeks to demonstrate how Scherson’s creatures are
a reflection of our misplacement.
AMY RUST  University of South Florida
Media, ecology and the long take
This paper explores the long take in three areas of 1970s American media practice in order to trace the
ecologies it foments among living and nonliving things. More specifically, I put James Benning’s long
take aesthetic in experimental works such as One Way Boogie Woogie (1977) and 11 x 14 (1977)
alongside the first uses of Steadicam in Rocky (John Avildsen, 1976) or Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby,
1976) as well as films made by the Environmental Protection Agency to document air and water
pollution during the 1970s. In each case, I argue, long takes mediate relationships to perdurance and
change that prompt spectators to consider their encounters with perceptible environments as well as the
ultimately unrepresentable experiences of nonhuman entities. The result thus not only offers the long
take as an approach to ecological questions, but also understands the device as organizing ecologies in
its own right. Such a conclusion proves particularly meaningful in the context of the 1970s, when both
neoliberalism and the modern environmentalist movement were on the rise.
MARIA SAN FILIPPO  University of the Arts in Philadelphia
Captive viewers: learning in/humanity through film in Dogtooth and The Wolfpack
Though one is fictional and the other a documentary, Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009) and The
Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, 2015) tell fascinatingly concurrent stories: in both, teenagers kept in
captivity since infancy by their parents discover, through watching films, an alternative reality that
presents them with a simultaneously promising and threatening means of escape. In gesturing at the
liberating potential of encountering film, both works suggest that films effectively function to make us
human, by constructing our sense of individuality and agency. Yet in the absence of other humanizing
forces, namely the cultural referents acquired through socialization that equip us to distinguish reality
from representation, these young people lack the necessary ability to contextualize what they watch. As
a result, film’s aptitude for modeling empathy alongside self-preservation is compromised, with film
instead enabling a continuation of the inhumane violence and vulnerability imposed by their captors.
This paper ponders the representational and ethical questions raised by these works’ troubling of the
binaries real/unreal, nature/culture, and human/nonhuman. In so doing, these films self-reflexively
engage critical issues in screen studies and animal studies to offer sobering observations on the link
between our interactions with screens and with one another.
KEVIN SANDLER  Arizona State University
‘Scooby-Doo, where aren’t you?’: Time Warner, Cartoon Network, and synergizing a
Great Dane
As a forty-five-year-old product with fifteen original series, Scooby-Doo is a microcosm of American
television history. Debates about the nature of children’s entertainment, battles over a free-market
approach to regulation vs. governmental censorship, and the impact of media concentration and
conglomeration upon diversity, quality and consumerism all play out alongside the Scooby-Doo texts.
Once a little Saturday morning series produced by Hanna-Barbera, Scooby-Doo is now a top-selling
global brand for Time Warner. In line with the conference theme ‘Screening Animals and the
Inhuman’, Scooby-Doo’s success is not simply attributable to the series themselves but to the brand’s
ancillary properties that go across a range of media, formats and industries. Whether the Ice Capades or
video games, these consumer products and experiences are an integral part of the brand’s commercial
profitability, historically reflecting the larger industrial apparatus surrounding Scooby-Doo. This
presentation examines Time Warner’s synergistic deployment of Scrappy-Doo via recontextualizations
of the character on Cartoon Network. Series like The Venture Bros. and Robot Chicken as well as
various network bumpers have all satirized the character under Time Warner’s blessing, enabling the
Scooby-Doo brand to remain hip, relatable, and spreadable for adult consumers and fans who despise
the 1980s cartoons featuring Scrappy-Doo.
CECILIA SAYAD  University of Kent
Monsters and everyday life
This paper addresses the topic of ‘Screening Animals and the Inhuman’ through a discussion of the
coexistence between supernatural phenomena and the documentary mode both in mock found-footage
horror films and in ghost-hunting reality TV shows. Here the ‘inhuman’ relates to demonic figures,
even though this investigation also includes the more arguably ‘human’ ghost. I draw from studies
about the relationship between new technologies and the occult by Tom Gunning, Jeffrey Sconce,
Annette Hill and Karen Williams in order to investigate, within the boundaries of genre studies, new
articulations of the relationship between horror and the documentation of reality, and more broadly, the
ways in which the connection between supernatural themes and documentary modalities change our
relationship to the filmic and televisual image. I argue that the confusion between fiction and fact
within both found-footage horror and reality TV blurs the boundaries between the films and the
surrounding world, removing horror narratives from the exclusive domains of the symbolic, the
unconscious and the escapist, embedding the ‘monster’ in everyday experience. Discussed works
include the Paranormal Activity movies and the Paranormal State and Ghost Hunters reality shows.
COREY SCHULTZ  University of Southampton
The simian gaze: examining the human and nonhuman gazes in Visitors
Godfrey Reggio’s film Visitors (2013) is composed primarily of gazes. It begins with a gorilla’s direct
gaze as it emerges from darkness, and this initial gaze is quickly followed by a series of human gazes.
The gorilla’s gaze haunts the film, however, as it reappears in the middle of the film and also concludes
it. These gazes are affective; the viewer spends almost the entire duration of the film being stared at,
and thus quickly becomes sensitized to these gazes and their idiosyncrasies, as well as their effects.
This paper examines these gazes and how they are experienced in the film. Focusing primarily on the
gorilla’s gazes, I review theories surrounding the human gaze in regards to affect and power, and
compare these theories to how the animal gaze has been examined, including concepts such as gaze
sensitivity and its socioecological context and the effects of mirror neurons, arguing that this simian
gaze acts as a bridge that combines, yet challenges, both. I ask: how do the gorilla’s gazes problematize
how the human gaze has been theorized and its effects? How can theories of the animal gaze be
incorporated in existing anthropocentric theories on the gaze?
BENJAMIN SCHULTZ-FIGUEROA  University of California, Santa Cruz
Ideas in the flesh
Our proposed panel addresses the languages through which multispecies investigations and critical
animal studies approach their central topic of concern: nonhuman life. Utilizing a variety of media,
including the spoken and written word, the moving image, and audio, this panel questions the
underlying capacities of each to think with animals. Whether through ekphrasis, theoretical
investigation, or filmic observation, the abiding concern of letting animals into the lecture hall will be
examined from a variety of standpoints. My portion of the panel investigates the methodologies of
experimental physiology as it approaches the animal subject. Taking Lisa Cartwright’s work as a
springboard, the presentation asks how her history of onscreen bodies might shift when we focus on
animal bodies. Specifically, the famed, and in some circles notorious, vivisectionist Claude Bernard is
highlighted as the progenitor of certain methodology of abstraction still employed in scientific
filmmaking. The presentation weaves between found footage from numerous educational films, as well
as new material of hundred-year-old animal specimens, shot at the Grant Museum in London. The
audience is invited to consider the mediated processes through which living animals are transformed
into scientific ideas and facts, as well as the corporeal remainders that are left behind.
ZOË SHACKLOCK  University of Warwick
Kinaesthetic empathy and the creaturely gaze in NBC’s Hannibal
In NBC’s Hannibal, Will Graham suffers from what Hannibal Lecter describes as ‘pure empathy’,
which allows him to perfectly ‘assume the point of view’ of the murderers he profiles for the FBI.
However, Will’s empathic gaze is never simply an adopted visual perspective; rather, it always
necessitates a re-enacted performance, suggesting that empathy involves an embodied understanding of
the physicality of another. This paper presents such kinaesthetic empathy as a spectatorial paradigm
that transcends the anthropocentric gaze. Combining work on kinaesthesia with the theory of
Einfühlung, it argues that the experience of ‘feeling into’ a foreign other involves a sensitivity to bodily
comportment. Yet while current scholarship on kinaesthetic empathy retains a human focus,
Hannibal’s striking animal imagery establishes the moving body as the locus of recognition for all
types of creaturely bodies. Indeed, although Will worries about losing himself in his empathic
intersubjectivity, his companion animals – his pack of stray dogs and the stag of his nightmares –
always return his gaze and mirror his movements, kinaesthetically anchoring his embodied sense of
self. Kinaesthetic empathy thus shifts the gaze from an axis of projection-subordination to one of
creaturely, bodily accompaniment, opening up a new ethics of screen spectatorship and representation.
SHARON SHARP  California State University, Dominguez Hills
Domesticating the wild: fictional animal US television programming in the 1960s
While the representation of animals in documentary and wildlife television programmes has received
sustained scholarly attention, the representation of animals in fictional television programming has
received comparatively little consideration. This paper examines the cycle of fictional live-action
animal-related television programming produced in the 1960s in the USA by Ivan Tors Studios. I
analyze animal representation and performativity onscreen in programmes featuring trained animals in
children's programming such as Daktari (CBS, 1966–68), Flipper (NBC, 1964–67), and Gentle Ben
(CBS, 1967), which feature exotic and wild animals as companions to young children and families. In
addition, I consider how animals are represented off-screen in promotional material about Tors’s
California wild animal park ‘Africa, USA’ and in Tors’s ‘affection’ animal-training discourse. Using a
human animal studies-informed historical research method, I argue that these representations of human
and wild animal encounters circulate an understanding of the wild animal as pet and conservation as a
form of animal domestication. Further, I argue that the domesticated wild animal as pet image
circulated by Tors on- and offscreen would inform both conservation discourse and later televisual
representations of wildlife.
CHI-YUN SHIN  Sheffield Hallam University
Pigeons, rooftops and heterotopia in On the Waterfront and Ghost Dog: The Way of the
Samurai
Rooftop pigeon coops prominently feature in Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront and Jim
Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). For the protagonists in both films –
dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) and a contract killer Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), caring
for pigeons on the rooftop space provides ‘another’ world, far away from what they do for a living. Yet
what they do down below has a devastating impact on the rooftop coops, the pigeons suffering a
reprisal for their actions. Drawing upon the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia, this paper illustrates the
ways in which the rooftop pigeon coops in these films constitute heterotopias, being in relation with all
the other places by both representing/mirroring and at the same time suspending/inverting them.
Exploring pertinent juxtapositions between pigeons and the protagonists in the films, the paper also
discusses the ways in which the tradition of rooftop pigeon breeding/flying (once ubiquitous in the
working-class neighbourhood in NYC) links these two films.
SUVADIP SINHA  University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Animality and conjugality in Bombay cinema of 1970s
Often having a major influence on the narrative but sometimes simply providing comic digressions,
animal characters have made recurring appearances in Bombay cinema since the 1950s. While such
interspecies coexistence certainly adds an element of cinematic attraction, it also creates a register that
transcends the human–nonhuman binary. This paper will specifically look at two mainstream
melodramas – Haathi Mere Saathi/Elephant My Companion (1971) and Gaai Aur Gori/The Cow and
the Damsel (1973) – to analyze how they effectively provoke the spectators to receive the animal not as
an ontological lack, but as a cine-ethical rejoinder to their humanist position. Released at a historical
moment when the Indian political community was going through a momentous phase of selfevaluation, Haathi Mere Saathi, with an orphan protagonist who forms a community of creaturely
fellowship with his animal companions, and Gaai Aur Gori, in which a village girl is forced to desert
her bovine companion in order to be with her husband in the city, project human–animal relationships
as a possible alternative to dominant familial and juridicial structures. Touching upon social issues such
as class difference, caste hierarchy and patriarchal prejudices, these films imply that a human–
nonhuman sociality can offer a way out of the structures of injustice created by humanist
predispositions.
MEREDITH SLIFKIN  Concordia University
Towards a queer posthumanism: blurred boundaries of animal melodrama in Wendy
and Lucy
This paper will examine the queerness of the human–animal relationship, using as a case study Kelly
Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008). Kathryn Bond Stockton in The Queer Child asserts that the
presence of the animal is a surrogate for the sideways growth of the child and a metaphor of queerness.
I intend to question whether this reading is either contradictory or conducive to a queer posthumanism.
Posthumanist scholar Donna Haraway asserts that the human–animal relationship is objectified by
relegation to metaphor, and claims rather that the animal deserves equal agency in its ‘significant
otherness.’ Haraway’s and Stockton’s respective stances on the nature of the human–animal
relationship seem initially in contradiction to each other, but I will determine whether there is not
actually a degree of commonality in these pieces located in the inherent queerness of posthumanist
philosophy. Wendy and Lucy presents an opportunity to reconcile the queer and posthuman
perspectives on the human–animal bond, as the film privileges both in its depiction of the two title
characters. I will furthermore examine the degree to which Wendy and Lucy’s bond is articulated and
mediated by melodrama, with an eye to the affective power of animal melodrama.
BELINDA SMAILL  Monash University
Marmot Licks GoPro: the posthumanities and reflections on agency, the digital and
documentary
This paper is concerned with animals, representation and questions of agency in the digital era. Its
methods align with the posthumanites, an endeavour that, for Cary Wolfe, signals the possibility of
rethinking the humanities in relation ‘to the human’s entangled, complex relations with animals, the
environment, and technology’. I begin by proposing Grizzly Man as a film that sits at the cusp of a new
epoch in documentary that is influenced by changing manifestations of agency, digital technology and
ecological interconnectedness. This epoch sits against the background of both a ‘green wave’ of film
and television and Deborah Bird Rose’s notion of ecological existentialism. I expand on this new era,
considering the case of online examples from nature cams (Crittercam and WildCam) to YouTube clips
(Marmot Licks GoPro, Elephant Takes Selfie & Films His Family and Last Tasmanian Tiger,
Thylacine). These examples disturb traditions of anthropocentrism in moving-image culture and
contribute to a rethinking of human and animal agency, principally through the work of observation
and repetition. This paper sits within a larger project that explores how human entanglements with
nonhuman animals are rethought and affirmed though the codes, conventions and traditions of the
documentary moving image.
DAVID SORFA  University of Edinburgh
Dead metaphors: killing animals in art house cinema
A number of art house films employ the killing of animals as a metaphor. Usually this metaphor works
as a comment on the exploitation of humans by economic or political powers. From Eisenstein’s Strike!
to Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to many of Michael Haneke’s films, the death of the animal stands in for
human suffering and is in itself often merely a vehicle for this other message. The death of the animal
is largely anthropocentric. Seldom is the death of the animal anything more than a parable and I will
explore the way in which metaphors more generally may, or may not, work in film and the extent to
which the ‘reality’ of film death may interfere with metaphoric function. I will concentrate on films in
which an actual living animal’s death is recorded on screen and expand on Richard Rushton’s
discussion of the supposed difference between the killing of cows in analogue and digital cinema.
Using the work of J. M. Coetzee and Jacques Derrida on the erasure of the animal, I will map a certain
metaphoric tendency in art house cinema and I will also develop Dylan Trigg’s recent work on the
‘unhuman’ in film and phenomenology.
KIRSTEN STROM  Grand Valley State University
Human entomology: the influence of Darwin in the films of Buñuel
Though Marx and Freud are the major touchstones in most discussions of Buñuel’s films, close
inspection rewards the consideration of Darwin’s influence as well. Indeed, Buñuel has cited reading
On the Origin of Species as one of the major turning points in his life, and he spent two years studying
entomology in Madrid before deciding that he was more interested in the ‘life and literature’ of insects
than in their anatomy and classification. The influence of Darwin and the study of natural history in
general plays itself out in his films in two important ways: not only do insects and many other
nonhuman animals play a conspicuous role in his works, often in ‘uncanny’ interspecies confrontations
that highlight both sameness and difference, but his treatment of his human characters often stresses
their animality, as they must compete, and sometimes collaborate, in struggles to ‘mate’ and/or survive.
Darwin identified Eros and Thanitos as the two major vehicles driving evolutionary change, and indeed
both play a peculiarly significant role in Buñuel’s films, as does the near heretical Darwinian assertion
that humans are also animals. Films to be discussed include Un Chien andalou, The Exterminating
Angel, and That Obscure Object of Desire.
THOMAS STUBBLEFIELD  University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Animality and machinic vision: drones in film and media
The history of drones is typically read in terms of a technological evolution which begins with the
advent of aerial reconnaissance in World War I, moves through the use of remote-control vehicles by
the Germans in World War II and culminates in modern, networked applications such as the Reaper
drone. However, what is often left out of this technologically determined narrative is the role that
animals played in forging the relationships between automated vision and military technology that
animate the contemporary drone. From Dr Julius Neubronner’s World War I system for fitting pigeons
with lightweight, double-lensed cameras to B. F. Skinner’s ‘Project Orcon’, which sought to train birds
during World War II to guide missiles towards their targets, the animal served as an integral part of the
drone’s prehistory. Using works such as Mato Atom’s short film Seagulls (2013), this presentation will
consider the ways in which this overlapping history sheds light on the technical capacities and cultural
position of the contemporary UAV. Of particular interest is the way in which this lingering animality
informs the specific relations of sound, visibility and identification in the filmic representation of
drones and their unique mode of vision.
PAO-CHEN TANG  University of Chicago
Of dogs and hot dogs: dialectics of image and language in early short films
In the concluding paragraph of his monograph Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues when
animals, philosophically lacking language as per traditional western thought, become ‘filmic
organisms’, they are ‘transformed into languages, or at least, into semiotic facilities’. My paper takes
up Lippit’s insightful but perhaps underdeveloped claim and poses three related questions. First, is
Lippit referring to the cinematic animal in general or specific kinds of onscreen animals? Second, how
does cinema enact this process of signification? Third, are animals as filmic elements necessarily
turned into languages or signs? I will address these questions by tracing the appearances and functions
of animals, especially dogs, in early commercial shorts, in relation to Tom Gunning’s now
paradigmatic account of early cinema as medium of attractions. Certain dogs on film, I argue,
complicate Lippit’s claim. By no means mere languages or signs, they function as contingent events,
vaudeville gags, and syntheses of attractions and narratives. The films I will examine include: Dickson
and Heise’s Athlete With Wand (1894), the Lumière brothers’ La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon
(1895), Méliès’s Une partie de cartes (1896) and Porter’s Dog Factory (1904) in the context of a
peculiar film genre: the ‘sausage-making’ film.
ANDREW UTTERSON  Ithaca College
Water buffalo, catfish and monkey ghosts: the materiality of reincarnation in Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
This paper analyzes Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Loong Boonmee raleuk chat/Uncle Boonmee Who
Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) in terms of its representations of animal-to-human and human-toanimal reincarnation, with a particular focus on the use of Super 16mm film at a time in cinema history
when physical film experiences its own existential transformation. In Weerasethakul’s narrative of the
cycle of life, the titular Boonmee inhabits human as well as nonhuman forms – a water buffalo, a
catfish, a monkey ghost … – in an endless cycle of birth, death and reincarnation. ‘I don't know if I was
a human or an animal, a woman or a man’, he notes of one such past life, placing it within the context
of transmogrification. The use of Super 16mm film manifests a materiality whose visual qualities have
become increasingly associated with the past, and which now carry a series of potent signifiers
concerning ageing, mutability and indeed death. This paper discusses this representational strategy as
both an aesthetic corollary of the film’s central themes and as a broader historiographic exploration of
the very nature of cinema at the point of its evolving film-to-digital representational base and its own
historical cycle of birth, death and reincarnation.
YIMAN WANG  University of California, Santa Cruz
Regarding the agential nonhuman life
My paper, as part of the panel ‘Facing the Subject,’ specifically addresses the issue of animals’ faces
and gaze as captured on camera. I ask: how do we understand the cinematic aporia when a nonhuman
animal appears on camera, or reacts to things both visible and invisible to the human-cum-camera eye?
What kinds of transaction emerge from film and other media figurations of nonhuman animals and
their interactions with an environment (humans included)? What representational limits do they
confront? How might we recognize and ‘speak nearby’ (as Trinh Minh-ha suggests we do) agential
otherness through the lenses of multiple media? Working with thematized and contingent (close-up)
images of animals’ faces and gaze drawn from Sinophone documentaries and fiction films, I probe
ways of letting animals into the lecture hall through ekphrasis, theoretical investigation, and filmic
observation/ intervention. By interweaving media performance and critical analysis, I strive to open up
film and media (re)presentation to address nonhuman agency beyond our anthropocentric and
anthropomorphic perspective, and to create venues for nonhuman animals to speak for themselves, and
for us to ‘speak nearby’ nonhuman life.
OWEN WEETCH  University of Warwick
Koba’s lie: Capturing and performing animality in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
This paper closely analyzes a key sequence from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014)
in which the renegade bonobo Koba acts like an ignorant circus animal to deceive two humans whom
he intends to murder and rob. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that performance capture technology
allows human actors (with the help of technicians and animators) to perform animal characters
convincingly in order to construct meaning. It argues that this sequence is particularly notable for
showing an animal performing its own animality. This paper closely analyzes how such deceitful
performativity is constructed through movement and gesture alongside framing and 3D shot
composition. It investigates how the representation of Koba’s deception relies on gestural and
compositional conventions that are often associated with slapstick cinema to create tension. The paper
therefore analyzes how these ‘circus-like’ representational strategies spatially connote a hierarchy of
knowledge between the animal and the humans in this sequence. To this end, the paper delineates how
3D and motion capture work together to connote this disparity, charting how the animal’s mastery of
the situation – invisible to the human characters – is made clear to the viewer.
SIMON WELCH  University of Strasbourg
The dog who knew too much: animal representation and performance in the films of
Alfred Hitchcock
[This is a filmed presentation as Simon Welch cannot attend in person.]
At the Screen Studies Conference in 2010, I gave a presentation concerning the high incidence of
animal signifiers in British cinema, the argument being that certain particularities of English language
and British social history related to animality are echoed in popular cultural forms such as the cinema.
However, my subsequent research revealed that a similar phenomenon is equally present in American
cinema. It is therefore possible to regard this question as pertaining to English-language cinema as a
whole. I therefore propose to revisit the question of cinematic animal representation by concentrating
on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, in which the representation of animals is particularly rife. Hitchcock
also had the distinction of being both a British and an American film director. This twenty-minute film
presentation will explore the nuances of the multiple usage of animals in Hitchcock’s films in symbolic
terms (by referring to social class, gender, nature, good and evil, and so on) as well as in cinematic and
linguistic terms. It will also examine the role of animal representation as a form of self-representation
in the Hitchcock oeuvre. The film will also consider the ways in which the unpredictabilty of animal
performance challenged Hitchcock’s highly controlled approach to filmmaking.
WINIFRED WOOD  Wellesley College
Emus in France: Chris Marker’s bestiaries
The degree to which media artist Chris Marker engaged the animal is well known; Marker’s totemic
fascinations with cats and owls draw frequent comment. The broad body of his work reflects the full
range of human–animal relationships so elegantly articulated by John Berger in ‘Why look at animals?’
Marker was not a nature photographer and he did not openly decry zoos: in his work, animals emerge
not from ‘out there’ but from ‘in here’; wild or domesticated, they share our world (our historical world
and our representational world) and we share theirs. Marker’s explorations of cultural ‘otherness’
extend to reflect on how others represent animals, and include his own continual return to ‘the gaze’,
both human and animal, a gaze insistently coaxed by his camera. For Marker, the question of the
animal is always already there, percolating up from remote consciousness to interrupt his ongoing
(human) questions of memory and time: ‘By the way’, his narrator asks in Sans Soleil, ‘did you know
there are emus in the Île de France?’ ‘An animal looks at me’, writes Derrida; then, ‘What should I
make of this sentence?’ This presentation examines how Marker translates ‘this sentence’ into the
grammar of cinema.
GWENDA YOUNG  University College, Cork
‘I shot Bambi’: death and the animal in The Yearling
Recent studies of conceptualizations of animals and ‘animality’ in film/visual culture have explored
associations between animals, life and death (see Lippit; Burt; Pick; McMahon) – the ‘irreducible
dimension of nonliving at the heart of life’ (McMahon) – and the ‘transformative potential’ of
‘attachments between human and animals’ (Burt). Such theorizations provide useful starting points for
my paper, which analyzes the 1946 adaptation of The Yearling. Clarence Brown’s film, based on
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel, focuses on a young boy’s love for a fawn that he hand-rears
following the killing of its mother. MGM’s promotional campaign, which emphasized the film’s
themes of frontier family values and the rewarding, though difficult, transition from childhood to
manhood, employed appealingly ‘cute’ images of the human and nonhuman stars in a bid to appeal to a
jaded postwar audience. However, drawing from archival sources and unpublished interviews, I will
argue that this represents a profound evasion of the dark and complex themes – of the animal as
facilitator (and victim) of the child’s development; of corporeality (human and nonhuman); and of what
Burt calls the ‘impossible spectacle’ of the death of an animal on screen – that the film explores.
LINDSAY ZACKEROFF  Brown University
Biomimetic jellyfish: animating the micro through scientific imaging
Information has the biological and evolutionary capacity to construct life from the bottom-up. I
examine the intersection between the reinvention of life and the mimetism of life in the information age
through scientific imagery of biomimetic movement. Considering velocimetry visualizations of a
synthetic jellyfish engineered to replicate human heart muscle, I ask about the capacities for scientific
imaging to animate the life of information through a different approach to mimesis that looks to
mutation. Exploring the relationality between micro and molar opens the question of animistic
propulsion and political emergence in screen culture. Throughout this paper, the synthetic jellyfish
questions the paradoxes of conjoining life and information. Looking to how this paradox has been
central in the life sciences, biomedia, and in Tiziana Terranova’s account of biocomputing, I
investigate how scale and mimetism transforms life in biomimetic scientific research. By analyzing
how recreating human heart ‘propulsion’ through the bioengineering of jellyfish propulsion affects
movement and sensory experience, I propose a transformative potential growing within the virtual. The
uncertain relationality between the micro and the molar promises virtual flexibility and the possibility
of political resistance based on shifting durations, small scales and flowing sensoria.