2015/1 – #Animals

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Animals, images, anthropocentrism
Creed, Barbara; Reesink, Maarten (2015) , S. 95-105
Anthropocentrism is central to the nature of discourse across all disciplines, from science to philosophy and the arts. We argue that anthropocentrism has become particularly marked in modernity despite the avowal by some theorists that modernity signified a radical break with traditional approaches. A powerful strategy, invoked by such discourses, and designed to cement the anthropocentric perspective, is that of contradiction. Media theorists and scholars working in the broader field of (human) animal studies have begun to unravel and demystify such discourses, questioning the nature of these contradictory perspectives and the anthropocentric point of view at work in visual texts. This is particularly evident in the current work of contemporary theorists who are researching the representation of animals in media texts. For it is the figure of the animal, as represented in visual discourses, from film to photography and new media, that offers a powerful challenge to the dominant anthropocentric worldview.
Cinematic slowness, political paralysis? Animal life in BOVINES, with Deleuze and Guattari
McMahon, Laura (2015) , S. 163-180
Deleuze elaborates accounts of cinematic time and of becoming-animal quite separately, without addressing potential links between these accounts. Drawing on a range of works by Deleuze and Guattari, this article allows these accounts to intersect through a reading of the aesthetics of slowness in the documentary art film Bovines ou la vraie vie des vaches (THE TRUE LIFE OF COWS, Emmanuel Gras, 2012) and its generative focus on (de)territorialisation, becoming, and affect. In privileging what Peter Hallward calls ‘virtual creatings’ over ‘actual creatures’, Bovines implicitly proposes a celebration of biovitality rather than an interrogation of biopolitics, pointing to the possible political limitations of the film and of the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework deployed here.
Cows, clicks, ciphers, and satire
Tyler, Tom (2015) , S. 199-208
The social network game FARMVILLE, which allows players to grow crops, raise animals, and produce a variety of goods, proved enormously successful within a year of its launch in 2009, attracting 110 million Facebook users. However, the game has been criticised for its mindless mechanics, which require little more than repeated clicking on its colourful icons. By way of parody, Ian Bogost’s COW CLICKER permits its players to simply click on a picture of a cow once every six hours. In this essay I extend Bogost’s critique and suggest that COW CLICKER highlights not just the soulless inanity of FARMVILLE gameplay but also the paucity of that game’s portrayal of the painful reality of a dairy cow’s punishing daily existence and untimely end.
Editorial Necsus
NECSUS Editorial Board (2015) , S. 1-2
Horseplay: Equine performance and creaturely acts in cinema
Hockenhull, Stella (2015) , S. 181-198
Throughout Béla Tarr’s latest and reputedly final film THE TURIN HORSE (2011), the horse (Ricsi), as the title of the film indicates, leaves the spectator in no doubt that she is an important, if not the most important, individual within the narrative. However, unlike most films which feature animals as central protagonists, at no juncture is the horse’s behaviour articulated in human-driven semantics. Furthermore, she is never presented with what Emmanuel Gouabault, Annik Dubied, and Claudine Burton-Jeangros describe as a superindividual status. This stated, neither does the director devalue the role of the animal. Instead, Ricsi’s performance can be analysed in what Brenda Austin-Smith argues is ‘memorable film characterization’, whereby animal performance is valid and ‘counts for something’. While it cannot be suggested that Ricsi deliberately acts as a character her performance is equally valuable for analysis both within and outside the context of the narrative. Applying performance theory and film theory to a study of the role and performance of the horses in two films, THE TURIN HORSE and OF HORSES AND MEN (Benedikt Erlingsson 2013), this essay proposes an alternative and more fitting approach to the study of animals in film. The contention here is that neither film humanises or ‘starifies’ the horses, yet all of the equine presentations are significant, as well as examples of what Michael Kirby terms simple acting. This essay begins by examining the ways in which animal performance has predominantly been represented and discussed in media and film before proposing Kirby’s notion of simple acting as a mode of analysis.
Tasmanian tigers and polar bears: The documentary moving image and (species) loss
Smaill, Belinda (2015) , S. 145-162
In this essay I explore how two divergent examples of the nonfiction moving image can be understood in relation to the problem of representing species loss. The species that provide the platform for this consideration are the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, and the polar bear. They represent the two contingencies of species loss: endangerment and extinction. My analysis is structured around moving images from the 1930s of the last known thylacine and the very different example of ARCTIC TALE (Adam Ravetch, Sarah Robertson, 2007), a ‘Disneyfied’ film that dramatises climate change and its impact on the polar bear. Species loss is frequently perceived in a humanist sense, reflecting how we ‘imagine ourselves’ or anthropocentric charactersations of non-human others. I offer a close analysis of the two films, examining the problem of representing extinction through a consideration of the play of absence and presence, vitality and extinguishment, that characterises both the ontology of cinema and narratives about species loss.
When Lulu met the Centaur: Photographic traces of creaturely love
Pettman, Dominic (2015) , S. 127-144
The brief triangular love between Nietzche, Salomé, and Rée – as crystallised in the famous photograph of kitsch (literal) horse-play, where the woman is depicted as treating the two men as beasts of burden – allows us to consider the role of ‘creaturely love’ in our more general understanding of the lover’s discourse. That is to say, through such images we can explore the role and figure of the animal within ‘the anthropological machine’, itself designed to produce a sense of the human from the inhuman (especially through mediated forms of intimacy). Further, in the different intermedial relationships between photography, poetry, and philosophy, the Centaur – in the letters and texts circulated by this group (later including Rilke) – provides a charged specific totem for a libidinal ecology of souls, striving to understand themselves as simultaneously creaturely and spiritual. Such a figure allowed both a recognition and a disavowal of the nonhuman basis (and telos) of human affections.
Why not look at animals?
Pick, Anat (2015) , S. 107-125
Revisiting John Berger’s seminal essay WHY NOT LOOK AT ANIMALS? (1980), this essay inverts Berger’s title in order to explore instances where the visibility of animals is at stake and where seeing is 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 that takes seriously the notion of animal privacy and the exposed animal’s resistance to the human gaze.

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