2015/1 – #Animals

Features

Browsing 2015/1 – #Animals by Title

Now showing 1 - 20 of 27
  • Article
    Animals, images, anthropocentrism
    Creed, Barbara; Reesink, Maarten (2015)
    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.
  • Article
    The audiovisual essay as art practice
    Álvarez López, Cristina; Martin, Adrian (2015)
  • Article
    Cinematic slowness, political paralysis? Animal life in BOVINES, with Deleuze and Guattari
    McMahon, Laura (2015)
    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.
  • Article
    Club Video
    Brophy, Philip (2015)
  • Article
    Cows, clicks, ciphers, and satire
    Tyler, Tom (2015)
    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.
  • Article
    Dancing in the sun: The musical as touristic hook in HONEYMOON
    Merás, Lidia; Wright, Sarah (2015)
    The British/Spanish co-production HONEYMOON (LUNA DE MIEL, Michael Powell, 1959) is a curious case of an export for foreign audiences that won the Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival yet was a commercial failure. Taking this now forgotten film as a case study, we will investigate the musical genre from a transnational perspective. Recently restored to its original length, Honeymoon includes compositions by Manuel de Falla and Sarasate, as well as performances by ballet dancer Ludmilla Tchérina and Spanish dance star Antonio (Ruiz Soler), both choreographed by Léonide Massine. We examine the interplay between national and transnational elements in a musical that tries to emulate the success of THE RED SHOES (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1948) by putting it in the context of the Spanish cultural and economic policies of promoting the country.
  • Review
    David Reeb: Traces of Things to Come
    Torchin, Leshu (2015)
  • Review
  • Review
    The documentary film book
    Wahlberg, Malin (2015)
  • Review
    Dossier: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015
    de Valck, Marijke; Baars, Fanny; Bower, Molly; Butt, Marina; Celeste, Aidan; Gialitis, Aleksas; Maciver, Frances; Schumacher, Anne; Suchá, Lenka; Vandergeerde, Sarah (2015)
  • Article
    Editorial Necsus
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2015)
  • Review
  • Article
    Feminist film studies 40 years after VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA, a triologue
    Mulvey, Laura; Rogers, Anna Backman; van den Oever, Annie (2015)
    Forty years after the publication of her seminal essay VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA in Screen, Laura Mulvey, together with Anna Backman Rogers, has edited Feminisms: Diversity, Difference, and Multiplicity in Contemporary Film Cultures, which is the latest instalment of The Key Debates series. NECSUS invited Laura Mulvey and Anna Backman Rogers to join Annie van den Oever, editor of NECSUS and series editor of The Key Debates, in a ‘triologue’, which in part reflects and re-emphasises the topics publicly discussed during the Feminisms symposia.
  • Article
  • Review
  • Article
    Horseplay: Equine performance and creaturely acts in cinema
    Hockenhull, Stella (2015)
    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.
  • Article
    In search of Godard’s SAUVE LA VIE (QUI PEUT)
    Witt, Michael (2015)
    This article examines a little-known compilation film titled Sauve la vie (qui peut) that Jean-Luc Godard created in 1981 within the framework of a series of lectures on cinema history that he delivered in Rotterdam in 1980-1981. To make this compilation film he combined sections from his Sauve qui peut (la vie) with extracts from four other films. Based on archival research, the article considers the context for the screening, the film’s structure, Godard’s wider engagement with the filmmakers whose work he incorporated, the prints he used, my attempts to reconstruct the film, and its reception in 1981 and today.
  • Review
  • Article
    Oppositional banality: Watching ordinary Muslims in LITTLE MOSQUE ON THE PRAIRIE
    Chao, Jenifer (2015)
    This essay interrogates how the globally-syndicated series LITTLE MOSQUE ON THE PRAIRIE (2007-2012) mobilises one of the most beloved television formats – the situation comedy – to insert a banal and normalised gaze toward Muslims and contest hostile representations of Islam in Western media. Through what I have termed ‘oppositional banality’ the show relocates Muslim identities to the realm of everyday life and out of the confines of global terrorism. Rather than being under the scrutiny of news cameras and viewed through cataclysmic international events the Muslims in LITTLE MOSQUE are made comical and timeless, subjected to the emotional entanglements of ordinary life.
  • Review