Animal Life and the Moving Image 9781838711467, 9781844578993

Citation preview

Acknowledgments Our deepest thanks to our authors for their contributions and their patience. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to Jenna Steventon. Thanks also to Sophia Contento, Lucinda Knight, Malcolm Le Grice, Allyn Hardyck and Vibeke Madsen. This book is dedicated to the animals.

Notes on Contributors RAYMOND BELLOUR is a researcher, writer and emeritus research scientist at the CNRS (CRAL, Paris). He has been responsible for the edition of the complete works of Henri Michaux in the Pléiade (1996–2004) and co-curated in 1990 the ‘Passages de l'image’ exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou. His books include: L’Analyse du film (1995), L’Entre-Images: Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo (2002), L’Entre-Images 2: Mots, Images; Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, Émotions, Animalités (2009) and La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions (2012). He is a founding member of the film journal Trafic. JONATHAN BURT is the author of Animals in Film (2002) and Rat (2005). He is the creator and editor of Reaktion’s prize-winning Animal series, which has been translated into many languages, and is also the author of numerous articles on different aspects of animal history. JAMES LEO CAHILL is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and French at the University of Toronto and a co-editor of the journal Discourse. He is presently completing a book manuscript on ‘Cinema’s Copernican Vocation: Science, Surrealism, and the Early Wildlife Films of Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon’. His writing appears in Discourse, Empedocles, Framework, Journal of Visual Culture, Kunstforum International, Spectator, as well as the edited anthologies Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human (2013), Martin Arnold: Gross Anatomies and The New Silent Cinema. CYNTHIA CHRIS is Associate Professor in the Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island. Her research interests are in film and television studies, gender and sexuality studies and critical animal studies. She is the author of Watching Wildlife (2006) and co-editor of Cable Visions: Television beyond Broadcasting (2007) and Media Authorship (2013) and, from 2014–16, co-editor of the journal WSQ.

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

GEORGINA EVANS is a College Lecturer and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at St John’s College, Cambridge, and an Affiliated Lecturer of the University of Cambridge. Her book Cinema’s Inter-Sensory Encounters: Krzysztof Kies´lowski and Claire Denis is forthcoming. Her current research is focused on the cinematic representation of non-mammalian perception. ROSALIND GALT is Reader in Film Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (2011) and The New European Cinema: Redrawing the Map (2006) and co-editor of Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (2010). Her recent publications address sexuality, economic crisis and world cinema. MICHAEL LAWRENCE is Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Sabu (2014) and the co-editor, with Laura McMahon, of Animal Life and the Moving Image and, with Karen Lury, of The Zoo and Screen Media: Images of Exhibition and Encounter. AKIRA MIZUTA LIPPIT is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005), Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000) and Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012). He is currently completing two books, one on contemporary Japanese cinema and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics. ADAM LOWENSTEIN is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also directs the Film Studies Program. He is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (2005) and Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (2015). SUSAN McHUGH, Professor and Chair of English at the University of New England, is the author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (2011) – which was awarded the Michelle Kendrick Book Prize by the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in 2012 – as well as Dog (2004). She co-edited Literary Animals Look, a special issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (2013) with Robert McKay, and The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Studies (2014) with Garry Marvin. McHugh serves as managing editor of the humanities for Society & Animals and she is a member of the editorial boards of Antennae, Animal Studies Journal, Environment and History, H-Animal Discussion Network, and Humanimalia: A Journal of Human–Animal Interface Studies. With McKay and John Miller, she is co-editor of the book series Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature.

viii

Notes on Contributors

ROBERT McKAY is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. He has published widely on the politics of species in post-war and contemporary literature and film and wrote the interdisciplinary collection Killing Animals (2006) with the Animal Studies Group. He is series co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, associate editor (Literature) for Society and Animals and co-convened the Millennial Animals and Reading Animals conferences at Sheffield in 2000 and 2014. LAURA McMAHON is College Lecturer in French at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is the author of Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (2012) and the co-editor, with Michael Lawrence, of Animal Life and the Moving Image. Her current research project explores relations between cinema, politics and the nonhuman. JULIAN MURPHET is Scientia Professor in English and Film Studies in the School of Arts and Media, UNSW, where he also directs the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia. He is the author of Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-garde (2009), co-editor of Modernism and Masculinity (2014) and Literature and Visual Technologies (2003) and edits the new journal in modernism studies Affirmations: of the modern. CECILIA NOVERO has a PhD in German Studies from the University of Chicago. After positions held at the University of Michigan, Vassar College and Penn State University, she joined the University of Otago in 2008. Her book entitled Antidiets of the Avant-garde: From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art examines the temporal relations between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde. She has published scholarly articles on Dada, the cultural history of food, Viennese Actionism, artists Daniel Spoerri and Antoni Miralda, travel writing, and German and European film. Cecilia’s research and teaching interests encompass aesthetics and critical theory, European cinema, travel literature, the former GDR, gender theories and, recently, animal studies. SARAH O’BRIEN is a Marion L. Brittain postdoctoral fellow in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She completed her PhD in comparative literature at the University of Toronto in 2012. Her current book project, tentatively titled Slaughter Cinema, examines how interspecies violence, pain and death are inscribed in the temporal forms of both old and new film technologies. Her article, ‘Nous revenons à nos moutons: Regarding Animals in Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep’, recently appeared in Cinema Journal. ANAT PICK is Senior Lecturer in Film at Queen Mary University of London. She works at the intersection of continental philosophy, film and animal studies, and is the author of Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and ix

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Film (2011) and co-editor of Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human (2013). Her new book project is titled Vegan Cinema: Looking, Eating, and Letting Be. NICOLE SHUKIN is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Victoria and faculty member of the graduate programme in Cultural, Social, and Political Thought. She is the author of Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009). By way of tracing the cultural and material politics of animal life and death through particular histories of modern and late capitalism, her work explores things like the securitisation of animal touch in relation to pandemic fears of zoonotic disease, old and new forms of pastoral power that govern both human and nonhuman populations, and the affective labour of animals in post-industrial settings. She is presently at work on a manuscript that theorises the ‘feeling power’ of animals as a form of labour and source of value in militarised market economies of the early twenty-first century. LYNN TURNER is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. She writes on deconstruction and animals, sexuality, feminism, film and science fiction. She is the editor of The Animal Question in Deconstruction (2013), co-author of Visual Cultures as … Recollection (2013) and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. PAUL WELLS is Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University. He has published widely in Animation Studies including Understanding Animation (forthcoming), Animation: Genre and Authorship (2002), Animation and America (2002) and The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture (2009). He is also an established writer and director for radio, television and theatre, and conducts consultancies and workshops worldwide based on his book Scriptwriting. He is Chair of the Association of British Animation Archives.

x

Akira Mizuta Lippit

Medium Foreword

A field opens up, at once before and all around, without end in every direction. This field, an expanse, is both space conceived and projected outward – a field of inquiry – and the very ground that makes possible a field, this and all other fields. From every angle, one sees another horizon, situating one always in the middle, even when standing before, outside or at the edges of this field. This field of fields, that fields, noun and verb, takes place here and now, immediately, while signalling the possibility of a space to come, imminently. This field is never merely there but is opened by those who traverse it, by those in turn made visible by their passage across it. Such a field appears in Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon’s Animal Life and the Moving Image, a field that opens outward from this work, but one that also forms the ground that makes this anthology, this assemblage possible in the first place. This field is already there, and still follows from the intervention. A before and below, to come and already close, and yet always still afield. Before what? What is to come that is already here? How can one be both at once? By nature, a field, and this field in particular, has had to exist already in order for it to come. It happens because it already is, there. The field opens up on and from a field; the field makes possible a field: it fields. Jacques Derrida understood this when he inscribed the subtitle of his first organised intervention on the subject of animals parenthetically: ‘more to follow’, à suivre. The animal that therefore I am (‘l’animal que donc je suis’), determines a mode of being as following; being defined by following, être and suivre converging in the homophonic conjugation suis, a field that forms between being and following another (that I therefore am and become by following). The self-determination implied in Descartes’ formulation is undone by the animal that Derrida names (one or more animals, animot) autobiographically (‘I am’) and as precedence (‘I follow’) in his rearticulation of the Cartesian cogitatum. To be is also to follow, to come after, therefore. Derrida’s temporality is critical to understanding the formation of a field, being and following, being (becoming) by following, following as a mode of being. And if to follow is always to come after, how then to stand before, and speak before that which always arrives in advance, afield? How to write a foreword (the

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

task at hand) from behind or from within? The genre suggests that one write without, before the work one foresees. What kind of word is a foreword, a word or sequence of words that come before what follows? This is the paradox, spatial and temporal that the law of fields works through. There is no field without a field in place already. Here, already, all around. A field always comes before and after that which makes the field visible. It produces itself in hindsight, and looks forward by looking backward. In this instance, the questions taken up by the many brilliant interventions that constitute Animal Life and the Moving Image, make visible in retrospection what is to come: the evolution of animal studies across the field of what might have once seemed at the other side of the world, film and media studies, like physis and technê, separated by a metaphysics. Between these two ends, a field that serves both as a destination and a point of departure. In the middle, midfield, medium. Between the two, a field of dreams, a series of questions fielded, the field of law and law of fields. Here, the field is also simply the ground below, the surface of the earth, a grassy field for roaming and grazing. With no beginning in sight, it flows outward in every direction, making both beginning and end seem impossible. Animal studies has always been thus, a field with no proper origin (art, biology, philosophy, law) and outer limits; it was always there, as many have noted, a field already there where and when it began. In a strange way, the study of film and its offspring, named collectively here ‘the moving image’, has also been a field without beginning or end, a field of inquiry that began long before the advent of cinema (from the prehistoric caves at Lascaux and elsewhere to the philosopher’s cave, to many more cameras en route to the cinema’s prehistory) and extends into an unforeseeable and perhaps barely imaginable future. Like the study of animals and animality, the study of the moving image exceeds the objects and bodies it names. That is animal studies, like film studies just before it, speaks to epistemic shifts in ethics and aesthetics, sexuality and its practices, to the core of the natural and everything unnatural therein, to the grounding of subjectivity as well as the shadows that form within such totalities; they are both fields of lines or forces framed but never bound by an object. And as such, there can be no conventional spatiality in the field, no standing before or beyond, but only degrees of within. This is its paradox and dilemma. Which stands before which (who before whom), animal studies or moving image studies? Animal life or animation, which movement follows which? Does the dialectic of being and following require sequencing? One could attempt to narrate a history of the animal life transformed by and to moving image, as if such a narrative could name a moment of evolution, binding one to the other and naming between them a subject. A subject that becomes one by being two distinct forms of life and movement, animal and animation; together an image that follows one from another. But isn’t the point (certainly here in this collection) that one is always framed within another, animal life and moving image, inseparable, neither possible in some fundamental manner, without the other. xii

Medium Foreword

The convergence of animal and moving image studies also frames a redundancy or duplication, a doubling of forces that moves through an object without ever reaching its end in that object. Animals and films, objets petit a, here and elsewhere, always in the middle, both a medium rather than an end. Doppelgängers, one to the other, which open onto fields of inquiry, forcing open such fields, force fields. Objects, words and moving images and bodies that open a field by moving across it. Gilles Deleuze understood this economy of formation in the figures of animals (in Kafka’s medium), in becoming-animal but also in the movement and time images he identified as the basis of cinema. A cinema formed and performed by the time and image movements it engenders. They are always there, animals and moving images, because as signifiers, they are formed (embodied) by the fields they traverse and which traverse them, by the forces that constitute them as objects beyond themselves – beyondness a constitutive feature of animals and moving images and not their transgression. What happens when these two forcefields collide, synthesis or negation? Do they form a monstrous whole or disappear into each other, one foreclosing the other? Or do they produce something that exceeds either force, something that exceeds the excess already determined by each force? An excess of excess, an extension of the intensity that moves both inward and outward, toward the centre and the margins at once. A movement made possible by an image, by the animation of an image whose very movement determines (and overdetermines) a field. The field of animal moving image studies, amiss. A movement that allows one to stand before and follow, to stand in the middle, as medium, at once. A field understood as medium, neither before nor after, neither being nor following in any configuration of être or suivre, or even of surviving, but rather of transmitting, of moving between. (One is rendered medium in this field, becoming-medium.) A conduit, a channel. Movement made possible by the force between two fields, animal studies and moving image studies, between animal life and animated images. What is amiss, perhaps, astray or inappropriate before animal moving image studies, what is out of place could be the foreword that tries to speak before, therefore, in advance of something that cannot be spoken of beforehand, and whose words are destined to follow, arriving later, afterward. Backword. From behind and below, following, the afterword pushes the field foreword, producing between them a word in-between, a word in transit, medium. The superimposition of one onto another, the assemblage or montage of animal and moving image studies generates a field unique to this heterogeneity, to the combination of heterogeneities already at work in each. And from this field of fields, of forces, emerges a new field whose movements are defined by two elements, two objects that are themselves defined by their particular relations to movement. Such are the multiplications, expansions: two words become four. Toward animal life and the moving image, two words, and then four, foreword. How then to stand before a field, to see the field ahead without already being inside it, within it already from the start? xiii

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Forward. Can one move forward in an expanse that has no beginning or end? How to distinguish forward from backward, leading from following, living from living-on, surviving? Does it matter? Perhaps the proper direction for a field is every direction, which would render no position before or after, nowhere forward or backward. Every place then within a field defined by perspectives that render such points before and after any other given point in the field. And what name to give this field, these fields, this fertility that yields everything which comes to pass on and across fields? What to name such transversality? Animal studies? The fantastic discipline that exceeds biology and zoology, and which encompasses the human and every life that comes before and after, but also the animality that makes possible humanity and its negation? As well as that which comes before and after humanity, ‘before the law’, as Cary Wolfe says following Kafka and many in-between who have followed Kafka before the law, of humanity to its other side and afterword, ‘post-humanity’? To stand before this field is already to stand in its middle. Before the field is already its middle, a medium. Because this field, animal film studies is constituted along a series of borders, frames that make the field possible. Along and through a series of media. Every limit is its centre, at the edges its medium. And what lies beyond the field, where does it end? The law of the parergon and of framing more generally, according to Derrida, the work at the edges of work, at once outside and constitutive, the work that falls to the margins and yet without which the centre is unimaginable, unsustainable, defines such a field, an exterritorial site from which the work becomes visible. Beyond this field, only fields. The field fields. A forcefield, a pressure or movement that directs one forward, toward that which comes to form the very ground from which it begins again, afterward. Foreword or forward; which comes first, which follows? How to step forward onto the field of animal studies, which is not one? Neither a field nor only one field. An assemblage or gathering, a pack that takes place on a field, in lieu of a field. How to speak in advance, before, as it were, with no shared language? In what language, a foreword? Who or what speaks before the language that comes? But this is already the question posed in these fields, the question that can be said to constitute these fields. Among the many concerns in the field of animal studies, and perhaps even more so in the field of animal film studies is the status of language, of a language denied animals throughout the history of much philosophy. The inability to name as such and to respond. For the shrouded animal that Heidegger imagines, the weltarm animal haunted by a life nearby but unlived, unlivable because it fails to reach its closure in death. The poverty of animal life for Heidegger follows from the foreclosure of language in animals, from the experience of death made possible by language. Without such articulation, life is never lived as life, as such, but only as life foreshadowed by life, life postponed by a language not yet articulated. But such unarticulated language exists elsewhere, beyond the purview of philosophy, in the space between physics and metaphysics, between life and death, in the middle. Medium. xiv

Medium Foreword

Such is the advent of the medium, and its proliferation in all directions, media. Always a middle but never central, the medium language facilities a transmission between places on the spectrum of various metaphysics; but the medium itself is a language that never comes into its own. A language neither created nor extended, the medium language or word is always as such another’s language. A language given; what precedes me and which I follow. There before me. And wouldn’t this disavowal of my own conceit, this language toward which I arrive (take place), in which I discover myself face to face with another, in another’s eyes, name one of the invaluable contributions of both animal studies and film studies? Namely, subjectivity discovered elsewhere, in the other, as a response and responsibility to the other, in the middle between myself and an other? If the field of animal studies is not one but many, does it share a common ground across the many species that constitute it? Is there a shared space across which the multitude moves? A word, perhaps, in the absence of a language to come – ‘animal’ – that comes before everything else. A foreword, animal that stands before whatever might follow in the form of a field or discipline. And maybe more than one word before. ‘Animal Life and the Moving Image’, four words, ‘animal’, ‘life’, ‘moving’, and ‘image’. Four words bound together in a virtual book that moves the series along from body to body and image to image, toward a word yet to come, the one that always arrives later, at the end and in hindsight, ‘life’. For as every chapter in this remarkable book reveals, it is toward life that animals and cinema converge, not only in it. Life foreshadowed. No life is revealed in this study, no life secured or saved, no life lost or spent. The only possible life, animal life, is one that is shared, that forms the very field from which life as such might be one day possible. And there is no life for us, whoever such an us might name, without another we call in advance, and for lack of a better word, ‘animal’. ‘Animal’ is the name for what is not yet named or nameable in life, which is to say in advance, ‘life’. Always before and therefore, foreword. The menagerie of authors collected in this volume alone illustrates the complexity and diversity of this field that is not one but many. Among them founders and new arrivals, some of the most rigorous thinkers of this moment and of moments past; friends and adversaries, well known and soon to be known. Marked throughout by a rigorous trespass, this group traverses fields and disciplines, undisciplined but not unruly, to borrow a phrase from Vivian Sobchack, who also writes from time to time about animals and film. It must have been Jonathan Burt who first formulated the expression ‘animals and film’. And without Raymond Bellour, no modern film analysis – not merely as technique but as a mode of thought. Similarly, without Susan McHugh, no animal studies. The entire volume brings together some of the most dynamic and original thinkers in the humanities, social sciences and arts. Such is the field. A new species of scholar despecialised, to borrow a trope from Peter Kubelka. The sheer complexity and biodiversity of the group speak not only to the vast gene pool of this field, but also to the multiplicity the field appears to require. xv

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

This field opens across the movement from animal to life, the movement shared by all of us, here and near. The movement of life, of animals, of the image. This field is possible because it cannot be flattened to a uniform terrain; it demands a textured surface of differing dimensions. Who could have foreseen a field, who could have seen ahead in this field not only the emergence of a field, but a field of visuality and dreams, a field given to see, a site of animal studies transformed into a field of vision? And this visualisation is itself a medium, not only that of moving images, but of the very place where this field takes place – the field itself. Medium foreword. Between animal and life, in the movement between the two, foreword and afterword, is a moving image, not one but many: the movement of images that drives animal life, toward animal life, and which drives animal life. And there is no way to speak for, or before this field, before the law of this field which is not one. Only to speak from within, in the middle as a medium invoked by this particular session. It speaks (he, she and they) through me, a medium, in the middle. Neither foreword nor afterword, but in the midst, amiss, looking forward and backward, following the passage of this movement across the fields of animal and moving image studies. Moving through me. And so, in the end, in lieu of a foreword, in its place, neither before nor after, but in the middle, midfield and as medium, four words – animal life moving image. This field of fields renders the four words that constitute it, the forewords and afterwords that frame it and every other prescriptive force that defines one before the law of this and every field, a passage – the movement of passing itself as well as the passage between any animal being. And in this passage appears everything destined to remain within this most unique of all places, this medium in which and from which, I speak and am spoken, with so many others. And finding myself also to be this medium, I am moved. April 2014

xvi

Laura McMahon and Michael Lawrence

Introduction Animal Lives and Moving Images Nénette (2010), a feature-length documentary by the French film-maker Nicolas Philibert, opens with an extreme close-up of its eponymous female star: a Bornean orang-utan (pongo pygmaeu) who has lived for thirty-seven of her forty years in a menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.1 Wrinkled skin fills the screen; large brown eyes watch and blink. As Nénette moves her head, a light layer of dust in front of the lens comes into view, signalling the presence of glass – a surface that we will come to recognise as the glass front of Nénette’s enclosure. Nénette looks first to the left and then into or past the camera (the direction of her gaze is ambiguous). In the subsequent close-up, her mouth presses up against the glass, filling the screen; lined with bristly hairs, it is an abstract image, and only makes sense as we finally identify lips and gums (she is readying to yawn). There follows another close-up, this one focuses on her hand: a thumbnail, and the gnarled,

Nénette (2010)

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

almost cracked, skin of her finger. We have watched Nénette in silence thus far, but the cut to the next shot – a medium shot of Nénette, her body slumped over the edge of a ledge, her red hair covered in straw – is marked by the click of a camera and the echoing sounds of her enclosure (human voices, the bustle of crowds). Throughout Philibert’s documentary, the camera remains trained on Nénette and the other orang-utans living with her: her son Tübo, and two others, Théodora and Tamü. The defamiliarising extreme close-ups with which the film begins are replaced with less intimate, and more distanced views of the orang-utans, which seem more consonant with the spectatorial positions occupied by the zoo’s visitors. Over the film’s long, static shots of these four orang-utans, we hear the conversations of such visitors, who reflect on Nénette’s life (‘I think she’s depressed’; ‘Look, she’s utterly sad’; ‘She’s just bored, right?’), but the film never gives us the reverse shot that would reveal the faces of these spectators (a strategy that organises, for example, Bert Haanstra’s 1962 documentary short Zoo, which uses rapid montage sequences to present the similarities of gesture, gait and facial expression between a zoo’s human visitors and its diverse animal attractions). We are afforded occasional glimpses of the visitors, but only as reflections on the surfaces of the orangutans’ glass-fronted enclosure. Occupying the majority of the film’s screen time, Nénette is held captive – by the zoo, by the cinema and by the gaze. Philibert’s documentary poses questions that are central to the concerns of this book: how do we look at animals? How does the moving image shape those acts of looking? Is this relation only ever one of capture and appropriation, thereby reiterating dominant structures of inequality between humans and animals? Might the moving image engender other, more equitable forms of relation? How might moving images resist or refuse the objectification or anthropomorphisation of the animal and instead work to unravel hierarchies of looking and distributions of power? How might the various dimensions of moving image practice engender alternative modes of cross-species contact and attend to existential and perceptual worlds that extend beyond the human? At first glance, Nénette does not seem particularly resistant to modes of anthropocentrism or anthropomorphism. As a documentary situated in a menagerie, it appears to defer to the zoo’s own regimes of presenting the animal as spectacle for human audiences: cinema, like the zoo, captures and exhibits animal life. Sabine Nessel has argued that Nénette is ‘a kind of meta-zoo-film, because it takes up the mise-en-scène of animals in the zoo and cinema’.2 For Nessel, the zoo and the cinema are part of a cultural history of putting living things on display; both ‘are related to a historical street-show culture reaching back to the Middle Ages, which existed centuries before film technology was invented’.3 Nessel argues that Philibert’s documentary underlines the ‘mediality’ of the animal: in both the zoo and the cinema, ‘the animal is not simply “the animal,” but is always part of an order that organises the presentation and viewing to the same degree’.4 In Nénette, scenes in which the glass barrier is routinely cleaned with soapy water – disrupting and renewing what we see – draw attention to the zoo enclosure as a visual 2

Introduction

apparatus framing the animal, which is then doubled by the cinematic screen, thus foregrounding both the mediality and the mediations of the animal. As Philibert’s film exhibits these orang-utans in the present, so it evokes various layers of film history, recalling earlier animal films. The Lumière brothers’ Lion, London Zoological Garden (1896), for example, one of the very first ‘zoo films’, shows a lion pacing back and forth inside its cage, goaded into action by a uniformed keeper, and filmed by a stationary camera several feet from the enclosure; as in Nénette the spectator is afforded a view of the animal that coincides with that enjoyed by the visitors at the zoo. Nénette’s mise en scène of the exotic, endangered animal in captivity also resonates, structurally rather than generically, with early expedition films, such as those of Martin and Osa Johnson. The Johnsons’ travel adventure features Simba: The King of the Beasts, A Saga of the African Veldt (1928) and Congorilla (1932) exemplify cinema’s organisation of the wild animal through modes of capture and display, mobilising what Catherine Russell, in her examination of the films’ ‘exploitation-education context’, diagnoses as a collision of ethnographic, zoological and pornographic gazes.5 Such a convergence comes to the fore in Nénette, as, in combination with prolonged closeups of the orang-utans, we hear the visitors eroticise the animals (from a child’s remark of ‘Look at her titties!’ to various adults ruminating on the orang-utans’ sex lives) and refer to their foreignness (as another species, and from a different country). We never hear any sounds from Nénette and the other orang-utans. Gérard, one of the zookeepers, explains this silence as typical of orang-utans, even in the wild; yet the contrast between the silent animal image and the sounds of human voices seems to further entrench human–animal power relations, relegating the animal to its conventional representational status as mute, lacking in language and – following a lineage of Western philosophical thought critiqued by Jacques Derrida – devoid of consciousness too.6 In reflecting on the display of animal life in the zoo, Nénette resonates with John Berger’s 1977 essay, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, a foundational text for the study of animal images. Berger argues that as animals in modernity disappeared from public life – domesticated as pets or consigned to the slaughterhouse – so they proliferated as spectacle: in zoos, as animal toys and ‘through the widespread commercial diffusion of animal imagery’.7 Nénette plays out Berger’s diagnosis of the spectacularisation of the animal (in the zoo and in visual culture), and echoes his reflections on the asymmetrical relations between the human and the animal. For Berger, ‘The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters.’8 Nénette articulates this impossibility in formal terms through its refusal of the reverse shot, and through the division of (animal) image and (human) sound. Repeatedly framing the apparent non-response of Nénette and the other orang-utans to events on the other side of the enclosure, Philibert’s film embodies the terms of Berger’s thesis: ‘the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond. They scan mechanically. They have been immunized to encounter, because 3

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

nothing can any more occupy a central place in their attention.’9 For Berger, this behaviour is an unavoidable consequence of the zoo animal’s captivity: dependence on their keepers relegates their existence to an unvarying state of passivity. Such concerns are made explicit towards the end of Philibert’s film, in a set of (improvised) remarks by Pierre Meunier (a theatre and film director): I wonder … how one should exist to hold Nénette’s attention … . Because seeing this gallery of shining eyes … everyone drains her. She is drained of curiosity … . She has seen it all. She has seen all of us already … We all merge… .

In this context, the ambiguity of the direction of Nénette’s gaze in the film’s opening close-up – as she appears to look either at us or past us – seems particularly compelling. The film accords with Berger’s observation that in the zoo animal we can discern ‘their assumption of an otherwise exclusively human attitude – indifference.’10 Here it is precisely Nénette’s apparent apathy, her lack of curiosity that holds our attention. Perhaps what makes Nénette so emblematic of the zoo film is its emphatic staging of the zoo’s inevitable perpetuation of the violent asymmetry between human and animal: as Randy Malamud has argued, ‘[the] institutional dynamics of spectatorship as a power stance inhere in the zoo whether or not its patrons consciously opt to exercise them.’11 The terms of this asymmetry allow the film to reflect on the zoo as a space of anthropomorphic desire, projection and identification. In ‘The Secret of the Zoo Exposed’, an article published in Vanity Fair in 1927, the American poet e. e. cummings described zoo animals as ‘living mirrors, reflecting otherwise unsuspected aspects of our human character’.12 In terms similar to those used by cummings, Philibert speaks of his interest in considering Nénette as ‘a receptacle for our fantasies … a projection screen’; the film is ‘a mirror and because of that we don’t need to see any humans … . It’s a film about the projection itself, because when we see these animals we can’t help projecting our own feelings and thoughts.’13 Furthermore, Philibert considers Nénette’s species identity to be key: ‘It wouldn’t be the same if I had filmed a cow. We do not identify with a cow or with a spider. But Nénette is at the same time both close and mysterious.’14 More readily anthropomorphised than certain other species, yet ultimately unknowable, the orang-utan functions, for Philibert, as the perfect screen onto which so many anthropocentric desires, fantasies and identifications might be projected. In this sense, Nénette is a film about the workings of the cinematic apparatus. Philibert suggests: ‘This is a film on the gaze, on representation. A metaphor for the cinema, in particular for the documentary, as capturing and as capture.’15 Philibert positions Nénette as a structuralist experiment, a reflection on the operations of cinema itself. These comments suggest that Nénette displays and uses its animals merely as a means to an end: its primary focus is an exploration of cinema, spectatorship, and representation – an exploration which remains firmly within the domain of the human. 4

Introduction

In displaying the animal as silent, objectified, anthropomorphised and ‘immunised to encounter’, Philibert’s film would thus seem to have little to offer in terms of reimagining human–animal relations. If Nénette is a ‘meta-zoo-film’, as Nessel argues, it is also a kind of meta-animal-film, in that its painstaking mediation of animal lives on display distils the risks of cinema’s appropriation of the animal. Yet we want to suggest that Philibert’s film indicates a particular attentiveness to animal life that opens to more fluid, dynamic modes of cross-species relationality. The film does this in three key ways: through an engagement with the particularity of Nénette, through its use of reflected images and through a subversion of zoo time and space. Despite Philibert’s emphasis on the importance of Nénette’s species in motivating structures of identification in the film, and the reflections on the species offered by the keeper Gérard – ‘They smell like orang-utans’, he at one point explains with a chuckle – the film itself refuses to allow Nénette to stand simply for her species. Rather, it invites a consideration of the specificity of Nénette herself. This invitation takes place in auditory terms through the detailing of Nénette’s own particular history, which we learn about through the comments of the keepers. These statements provide us with certain facts about Nénette’s time in captivity (‘She’s had three husbands and wore them all out’; ‘She’s had four [babies] here’; ‘Two years ago she fell ill with a retro-peritoneal abscess’; ‘She’s alone with her son and she’s been on the pill for four years now’) as well as various opinions about her character (‘She’s always had her doleful side’; ‘She loves cameras, paradoxically’); she is thus individuated by both the concrete details of her biography and the keepers’ ideas about her ‘personality’. Yet, beyond the anthropomorphic logic of such comments, Nénette’s specificity is also emphasised in visual, material terms. The film’s tactile engagement with Nénette’s body in the opening shots described above inaugurates a mode of embodied encounter with this particular orang-utan, rather than orang-utans in general, or animals in general. As Derrida has argued, the term ‘the Animal’ functions as an undifferentiated general singular that violently reduces the multiplicity of animal life: Confined within this catch-all concept, within this vast encampment of the animal, in this general singular, within the strict enclosure of this definite article (‘the Animal’ and not ‘animals’), as in a virgin forest, a zoo, a hunting or fishing ground, a paddock or an abattoir, a space of domestication, are all the living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbours, or his brothers.16

The metaphorical connections that Derrida proposes between the ‘strict enclosure’ of the term ‘the Animal’ and the space of the zoo itself seem particularly apt here. From the enclosed, domesticating, violently reductive space of the zoo itself, from the site of ‘the Animal’, Philibert’s film forges a lived, embodied relation to the particularity of Nénette, to this orang-utan, here and now. Nénette’s singularity is conveyed by the film’s preference for long, static takes that focus 5

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

on her corporeal being – that contemplate her (for the most part) sitting and staring, occasionally yawning, stretching or scratching, and sometimes shuffling about the enclosure and swinging on the ropes – or that show her engaged in routine activities – eating carrots, slices of melon, a whole head of lettuce – or that reveal her dexterity and decision-making – pulling a yellow sheet over her head and shoulders like a shawl, then replacing the yellow sheet with a patterned sheet; drinking yoghurt from the pot (but first licking the underneath of the lid), drinking tea from a flask and pouring the tea into the empty yoghurt pot (spilling some on her foot in the process). Philibert’s film, by focusing on the orang-utan’s behaviour in this patient way, suggests how the animal’s singularity is revealed through comportment and gesture, indicating film’s capacity to disclose (even from within the restrictive space of the zoo) what the biophilosopher Jakob von Uexküll terms the Umwelt – the perceptual, purposeful lifeworld – of an animal. In her essay for this volume, Anat Pick draws on von Uexküll to discuss film’s opening to such worlds and its concomitant troubling of speciesist divisions. Nénette’s durational, material form of engagement with the orang-utan’s life-world also resonates with Pick’s earlier work on cinema’s ‘creaturely’ modes of attention. In Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (2011), Pick reflects on the ‘corporeal zoomorphic quality’ of cinema, its capacity to articulate a sense of mutual embodiment and vulnerability between humans and animals.17 As such, ‘creaturely’ cinema destabilises a clear dividing line between the human and the nonhuman. Resonating with Derrida, von Uexküll and Pick, Philibert’s film mobilises a mode of patient attentiveness to the specificity of Nénette’s embodied being and her perceptual world that works both to particularise the animal and unravel species-based hierarchies.

Nénette (2010) 6

Introduction

This troubling of species distinction comes to the fore in the scenes showing reflections of the visitors on the glass of Nénette’s enclosure, visually signalling a blurring of the terms of the animal/human divide. At the beginning of the film some visitors discuss whether Nénette can see them; a woman observes: ‘I think she sees outlines because the light’s on her side.’ We catch reflected images of schoolchildren, their movements appearing as if superimposed on the dark orange form of the orang-utan’s immobile body; at one point the reflective surface briefly captures a visitor taking a photograph of an orang-utan, either Nénette or Théodora (neither the visitor nor her friend are very sure). This identificatory confusion indicates a disruption of the visitor’s ways of knowing (and possessing) the animal through the visual technologies of either the camera and the zoo. Yet these reflected images are disorientating for the film’s viewers too: layers of virtual and actual space – and planes of human and animal being – coexist within these images, producing a composite, crystalline effect. Such images refract rather than merely reflect the human and suggest a commingling of human and nonhuman realms. And while a ‘meta-zoo-film’ in some senses, Nénette mobilises the presentational order of the zoo in order not only to reflect (on) it but also to subvert it. Nessel’s analysis risks conflating Philibert’s film and the function of the zoo by arguing that ‘[T]he exhibition configurations of the zoo and the cinema have become indistinguishable.’18 We are interested here in the ways in which Nénette’s shaping of time and space actively subverts the zoo’s presentational order, reorganising our perception of animal life beyond the limitations of the zoo’s mise en scène. Spatially, the film constrains spectatorial mobility. In zoos, visitors are free to roam from one cage to the next, to move from one species to another, ‘window-shopping’.19 Malamud argues that such freedom of movement is itself indicative of the imperialist logic of the zoo.20 Yet the prevalence of static framing in Nénette means that spectatorial mobility – and the attendant consumption of species diversity – is refused. We do not ‘window-shop’ (or ‘species-shop’) in Nénette. And while Nénette undercuts the spatialisation of species diversity in the zoo, it undermines its temporal logic too. According to a survey cited in Garry Marvin and Bob Mullan’s Zoo Culture (1987), zoo visitors typically spend an average of forty-four seconds in front of each cage.21 As Malamud suggests, zoos encourage this mode of accelerated spectatorship: ‘The fact that a cornucopia of zoo animals is so conveniently available to spectators suggests that it is … easy to digest all that the animal world has to offer, or at least its greatest hits, in a twohour excursion.’22 Yet Nénette refuses this kind of fast-paced consumption of animal life. With shots that often last three or four minutes, the film enacts a mode of durational attentiveness to animal being. Countering conventional zoo time, the film privileges duration over distraction, attention over consumption. As such, Nénette exhausts the time of zoo spectatorship. Yet Nénette also exhausts dominant temporal modes of animal film spectatorship. Documenting the orang-utan’s daily life in the enclosure, Philibert’s film 7

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

privileges the stillness and the silence that characterise Nénette’s being. Derek Bousé has argued that conventional wildlife film and television shows contribute to a ‘pervasive media image of nature as a site of action and excitement’, despite the ‘torpor’ that generally characterises animal being: a documentary that accurately represented the life of a lion, he contends, would probably only appeal to fans of Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964).23 Bousé observes: ‘As technologies, film and television are perfectly capable of depicting … animals that rest 80 per cent of their time. As social and economic entities, however, neither film nor television exists to reproduce this kind of reality.’24 As one of the keepers in Nénette explains: ‘Orangutans in general don’t move much … . Even in the natural world, an orang-utan can spend hours at the top of a tree watching the world around it.’ Foregrounding extended periods of apparent inactivity, Nénette thus functions as a quasiWarholian portrait of an individual orang-utan, and works in direct contrast to the dominant media image of animal life Bousé describes. Nénette imposes duration; it privileges (cinematic) dead time as (nonhuman) lived time. In place of action and excitement, we witness the animal enduring time, and in this time that we share with Nénette, a set of questions – about captivity, suffering and display – are implicitly posed. Nénette thus undermines the zoological and cinematic structures of voyeurism, fetishism and surveillance that it simultaneously animates. It limits these viewing structures in spatial terms and exhausts them in temporal terms. In Nénette, looking is too close-up and takes too long, refusing spectatorial mobility, mastery and consumption: Philibert’s film prolongs the time yet restricts the space of our encounter with this particular animal to the point at which the conventional ‘impossible’ encounter associated with the zoo collapses in on itself and opens to a different mode of relation, one marked by attention and consideration. Nénette’s

Nénette (2010) 8

Introduction

resistant visual practices, therefore, suggest how the temporal and spatial dimensions of film might not only interrupt and subvert the logics of the zoo and of conventional wildlife narratives, but also invite us to see the animal (and its mediation by moving image technologies) anew. *** In response to a recent surge of interest in the question of the animal across the arts, humanities and the sciences, Animal Life and the Moving Image examines the crucial role that moving images play in both the recognition of and our engagement with nonhuman animal life.25 It is the first edited collection of essays to offer a sustained focus on the relations between moving image technologies and their various representations of the nonhuman animal. The essays consider a broad range of issues and concerns related to the presentation of animal life in moving image media and address the theoretical, philosophical, political and ethical questions raised by images of animals appearing in diverse contexts. The collection proceeds from the position that the animal (and human–animal relations) now cannot be understood without considering modern moving image technologies, and, furthermore, that such media similarly cannot be understood without recourse to the figure of the animal. Our relations to animal life are shaped by moving images, particularly in the contemporary terrain of hyper-mediatised animal visibility. If for Akira Mizuta Lippit, following Berger, ‘the cinema developed, indeed embodied, animal traits as a gesture of mourning for the disappearing wildlife’,26 then the ubiquity of animal videos online might be seen as the latest stage in this double movement of animal (dis)appearance. At the same time, however, animals appear to be the necessary precondition for cinema’s humanist (that is, anthropocentric) conditions, concerns and claims. Jonathan Burt, in Animals in Film (2002), suggests ‘there is no doubting the significance of the visual animal body to the technologies of modernity, particularly those such as film, which also shape modernity’s sense of itself’, and avers that it is ‘impossible to disentangle direct and mediated aspects of human–animal relations’.27 Animal life, we propose, is arguably both constituted by and also constitutive of moving image ecologies. Just as moving images configure animal worlds, so animals actively shape moving image worlds. Berger suggests that ‘the first subject matter for painting was animal’; the animal was likewise integral to the development of motion capture technologies and time-based media.28 Beginning with the protocinematic sequencing of animal motion by Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey in the nineteenth century, the ontologies and histories of animal life and the moving image are deeply interlocked: indeed, Julian Murphet has recently asserted that ‘[the] origins of the [cinematic] apparatus in the rational analysis of animal movement are too well known to need repeating’.29 And, significantly, animals have also played a key role in how we theorise the moving image. Recent work by Pick, Jennifer Fay and Seung-hoon Jeong, for 9

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

example, has revealed the central place of the animal in André Bazin’s reflections on cinematic specificity.30 Lippit has traced metaphorical links between animality, physiology and the unconscious in Sergei Eisenstein’s theorisation of montage in ‘biomorphic’, organic terms.31 Raymond Bellour has highlighted hitherto unexplored points of contact between Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming-animal’ and Deleuze’s philosophical reflections on cinema.32 Such work points to the significance of animal life and of animality for some of the foundational claims of film theory itself and also suggests potential ways in which film theory – and the study of moving images more broadly – might revisit and reimagine sites of meaning in relation to animals both on screen and off. The first section of the volume, ‘Animal Life and Cinematic Specificity’, introduces the question of the animal’s significance for theoretical and philosophical accounts of our experience of moving images. How might media specificity be reconsidered via a privileging of the animal? How might attending to the animal require us to revise our understanding of the image, and of image technologies and ecologies? Drawing on a range of critical and conceptual paradigms, and referring to a wide variety of film and new media texts, the authors in this section argue that looking at and to the animal can reveal much about both historical and contemporary experiences of moving images. James Leo Cahill examines film culture of the inter-war period, focusing on both theatrical programming and theoretical writing that was concerned with organising and elucidating cinematic encounters with animal life. In ‘Animal Photogénie: The Wild Side of French Film Theory’s First Wave’, Cahill provides a ‘critical inventory’ of the discourse on ‘animal photogénie’ prevalent in the film theory of the 1920s, exploring various critics’ reflections on the aesthetic significance of the animal ‘in, on and for film’, which the novelist Colette referred to as the ‘photogénie des bêtes’. For Cahill, the interest in and commitment to cinema’s anti-anthropocentric potential – its capacities for expanding the horizons of human perception – demonstrated by the work of filmmakers and critics such as Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac and Louis Chavance, among others, anticipates in important (and hitherto unacknowledged) ways the fascination with filmed and film animals that characterises the theoretical writings of Bazin in the 1940s. Furthermore, Cahill proposes that the popularity of animal videos on the internet – an ever-expanding archive of contingent animality, or animal contingency – should also be reconsidered in relation to ideas associated with ‘animal photogénie’. The animal’s capacity for illuminating continuities between early and contemporary moving image cultures is also the concern of Rosalind Galt’s chapter. In ‘Cats and the Moving Image: Feline Cinematicity from Lumière to Maru’, Galt argues that the proliferation of images of animals – specifically cats – in online visual culture represents only the most recent manifestation of a special relationship between feline life and moving image media. Historicising the phenomena of internet cat videos by referring to a wide range of films which focus our attention on the unpredictability of feline motion, or the tactility of feline form – from Lumière’s La Petite fille et son chat (1899) to the avant-garde films 10

Introduction

of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann – this chapter proposes that ‘cat love is a viral behaviour transmitted by screen cultures’. Following Derrida, Galt regards the cat in order to consider how networks of cross-species looking are mobilised by moving image media, and to promulgate a less anthropocentric account of spectatorship. Adam Lowenstein also examines the possibilities of affective and embodied cross-species contact afforded by digital media cultures by considering the animal’s relevance for contemporary reconfigurations of spectatorship. In ‘Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion: Surrealist and Digital Posthumanisms’, Lowenstein explores the relationship between the post-cinematic and the posthuman by attending to the significance of the animal in exemplary instances of what he terms ‘spectatorship’s digital present and surrealist past’: the popular YouTube video Christian the Lion and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950). The chapter assesses the anthropomorphic impulses that are either embraced or erased by these representations of the animal–human relation in order to address how the mediation of interspecies contact can foster or foreclose opportunities for posthuman awakening. In ‘Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film: Malcolm Le Grice’s Berlin Horse’, Michael Lawrence reconsiders an early ‘materialist’ work by the British experimental film-maker – which comprises original and early footage of horses, manipulated in specific ways – by exploring its evocation of the material and symbolic dimensions of historical relations between horses and humans, including the horse’s significance for the development of moving image technologies. Lawrence examines the connections between Le Grice’s ideological and aesthetic opposition to the cinema of industrial capitalism and his imaging of animal movement, and argues that the film functions as ‘a moving documentation of the “livingness” of both human and animal being’. The chapters in the first section thus consider film spectatorship by asking how the specificity of our encounter with a moving image is illuminated – and, perhaps, even exemplified – by an attentiveness to the materiality of an animal being both general and particular, whether nonhuman or human. The chapters which comprise the second section, ‘Cross-species Identifications’ consider how films can either generate or present such identifications by deploying particular modes of representation, including animation and dramatic performance, and by utilising specific cinematic conventions and technologies, such as point-of-view editing or flashbacks. In ‘“You Can See What Species I Belong to, but Don’t Treat Me Lightly”: Rhetorics of Representation in Animated Animal Narratives’, Paul Wells examines how the distinctive language of animation is exploited to interrogate cultural discourses of animality, and to disclose human– animal relations in terms of continuity, communion or complementariness. Discussing the animated creatures that feature in mainstream films such as Bolt (2008), Ponyo (2008) and Avatar (2009), as well as those found in more experimental works by Geoff Dunbar and Nathalie Djurberg, Wells returns to and expands the concept of ‘bestial ambivalence’, first developed in his The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture (2009), to suggest that animation’s 11

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

‘intrinsic vocabulary of expression liberates humans to find a fundamental essence of themselves in animal identity’. Georgina Evans turns to nonhuman subjects in documentary film and in particular the representation of insects in Marie Pérennou and Claude Nuridsany’s celebrated Microcosmos (1996). In ‘A Cut or a Dissolve? Insects and Identification in Microcosmos’, Evans attends to the cinematographic procedures deployed by the film that seek to produce modes of cross-species identification which, while resisting the anthropomorphising tendencies associated with conventional nature films, nevertheless suggest that for these directors ‘[the] quest to present a truth about insect life does not necessarily imply a rejection of its resemblance to the human’. Drawing on the writing of Stan Brakhage, and specifically his argument that in cinema we might ‘inherit worlds of eyes’, Evans shows how Microcosmos examines human visual realities through its rendering of insect point of view.33 The private worlds of insects (and those of other nonhuman animals) are also the focus of the next chapter, in which Cynthia Chris examines the performances of Isabella Rossellini in her recent television series. In ‘Subjunctive Desires: Becoming Animal in Green Porno and Seduce Me’, Chris draws on the famous concept of Deleuze and Guattari, but also from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), to explore how in these films Rossellini presents a mode of ‘becoming animal’ in which she is ‘not quite the worm’ – for example – ‘and not quite not the worm’. Rossellini’s performances, which involve an imaginative identification with the sexual behaviour of nonhuman animals, are for Chris ‘acts of recognition’ in which ‘becoming is nothing if not the articulation of a relationship between the human and the animal’. The final chapter in this section considers a very specific kind of human–animal relationship – the bond between man and dog – at the heart of Toa Fraser’s 2008 feature-length adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella Dean Spanley. In ‘Animal Melancholia: On the Scent of Dean Spanley’, Lynn Turner explores the film’s representation of relationships between men, and particularly those between fathers and their sons (whether living or dead), and the bonds of affection which connect men to their dogs (and dogs to their masters, but also to other dogs). The eponymous Dean’s recollections of his life as a dog enable a father to accept the death of his son: the film utilises flashbacks to represent both the Dean’s ‘memories’ of his canine life and the father’s fantasies of his son’s death. Engaging with the work of Freud and Kristeva (on cannibalism and incest), and Derrida (on mourning and ethics), Turner argues that by privileging an exclusive homosocial fraternity – a primal horde of sorts – the film does not (and cannot) ‘welcome animality’: its human–animal relations remain organised according to the law of ‘domesticated totemism’ (but perhaps invite us to consider alternative arrangements). The essays in this section consider how films invite their human audiences to identify with and as animals, or watch such identifications take place, so as to contemplate cross-species continuities, revealed by the peculiarities of desire and sexuality, or the bonds of affection and loss. The third section, ‘Animal Economies’, explores the animal in relation to histories, economies and politics, locating cinema’s representation of animal life at 12

Introduction

intersections of capitalist crisis and accumulation, Cold War legislative and moral agency, and biopolitical regimes of labour and feeling. The chapters examine how the ethical and ideological registers of animality vary across a range of cinematic forms, from Soviet montage to stop-motion animation, and from experimental documentary to narrative cinema. In ‘King Kong Capitalism’, Julian Murphet explores the original 1933 film in relation to capitalist productive relations and Fordist labour processes. Drawing on the thought of Theodor Adorno and Antonio Gramsci, as well as the writings of Frederick W. Taylor, and specifically his notorious suggestion (in Scientific Management, 1914) that gorillas might be trained to replace human workers, Murphet considers how the labour-intensive stop-motion animation techniques deployed to produce the motion of the giant gorilla resulted in a profoundly moving ‘image of unalienated labour in the guise of animal movement’. The following chapter also examines a film’s ability to address the impact of industrialisation on American society, focusing specifically on the political, economic and technological dimensions of biopower relations. In ‘Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-War Cinema: Velma Johnston, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller and John Huston’s The Misfits’, Robert McKay explores the film’s depiction of the decline of mustanging (wild horse hunting) in the context of industrialised food production in the United States (and especially pet food), and argues that it functions as ‘an indictment of the violence against both human and animal life, which are not exclusive to modernity but nevertheless become ever more present in it’. The presence and performance of Marilyn Monroe in Huston’s film, McKay suggests, raises questions about the possibility of (subjects or films) articulating an ethical rejection of ‘the sacrificial logic of post-war morality’. The killing of animals for food is also the focus of the next chapter, which addresses the (aesthetic) biopolitics of cinema’s depiction of slaughter. In ‘Being Struck: On the Force of Slaughter and Cinematic Affect’, Nicole Shukin and Sarah O’Brien examine what they call ‘traces or residues of the sovereign power of slaughter in the aesthetic registers of cinema’. Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, the authors are concerned with how cinema might protect an ‘intransigent distribution of the species’, and perpetuate the partitioning of humans and animals. Turning first to Eisenstein’s Strike (1925), and then to Louis Psihoyos’s 2009 documentary The Cove, the authors explore the profound paradoxes that shape the films’ presentation of animal death by attending to the way cinematic devices deployed to organise their ‘affective economies’ ultimately perpetuate the sovereignty of the human. The final chapter in this section continues the exploration of cinema and slaughter. In ‘Screening Pigs: Visibility, Materiality and the Production of Species’, Laura McMahon examines the biopolitical economies of moving image representations of pigs as meat animals. Against the backdrop of the reifying logic of a promotional video for a global pig breeding company, McMahon explores two documentaries that reimagine the place of the pig within biopolitical regimes of representation: Jean-Michel Barjol and Jean Eustache’s Le Cochon (The Pig, 1970) – an example of ‘Direct Cinema’ that unfolds a material, durational attentiveness 13

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

to the slaughter of a pig – and Jean-Louis Le Tacon’s Cochon qui s’en dédit (1978)34 – a surreal ethnography that affirms, from within a nightmarish vision of industrialised farming, an opening to instances of cross-species relationality and nonhuman agency. As McMahon argues, such examples indicate ‘the role played by moving images in the (re)framing of species being’, as film practices work here both to shape and disrupt biopolitical taxonomies. As the chapters move from the dynamism of the monstrous body of King Kong to the ‘striking’ logic of slaughter both on screen and off, this section traces the connections between visual, affective and political economies of animal life. The chapters in the final section explore a set of dialogic exchanges between moving images and animal life, framed variously in terms of ornithology, rhizomatics, creaturely equitability and communicability. ‘Towards a Non-anthropocentric Cinema’ includes discussions of classical Hollywood film, wildlife documentary, European art cinema and avant-garde film; the authors are concerned with how moving images allow for questions to be posed both for and by animals. Anat Pick considers cinema’s aptitude for indicating the co-presence of creaturely universes or ‘life-worlds’ belonging to nonhuman and human beings. In ‘Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt’, Pick extends the elaboration of zoomorphic realism developed in her book Creaturely Poetics in order to address films that engage with ‘interior animal worlds’ and in so doing ‘[assert] the multiplicity and situatedness of worlds’. Her analyses of the cinematic dwelling-worlds presented by specific scenes of dextrous labour in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) and Nuridsany and Pérennou’s Microcosmos draw on Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt to examine how the films challenge anthropocentric conceits through their universalising of ‘the biosemiotic striving of organisms’. In ‘Bear Images: Human Performativity and Animal Touch in Grizzly Man’, Cecilia Novero discusses Werner Herzog’s 2005 documentary and focuses on the relationship between the ‘hyperbolic dramatization of the human’ presented by its subject Timothy Treadwell and the film’s staging of the possibility (always tentative) of interspecies contact, both between Treadwell and the bears (in the film) and between the bears and the spectators (of the film). Novero argues that by presenting what she describes as Treadwell’s ‘becoming with’ the bears – an encounter (one ultimately fatal for Treadwell) between ‘unknowing species’ – the film reveals ‘the technicity of existence as always already co-existence’. In ‘The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky: The Movement of Birds and Film’s Ornithology’, Jonathan Burt asks whether a consideration for species specificity enables ‘a qualitatively different kind of thinking about animal images’, one which might distinguish the particular animal from what he describes (following Deleuze) as the ‘any-animal-whatever’. Reflecting carefully on the recent work of Raymond Bellour, as well as the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Burt examines the relationship between motion and stillness in the technological constitution of the film image (as well as the production and reception of such images) as revealed or embodied by birds, before considering the ‘ornithological’ aspects of a medium that requires and rewards ‘a particular stance 14

Introduction

of stillness on the part of the observer in the face of a fleeting object’. Birds are also examined in the following chapter, which asks how the representation of particular species might challenge traditional understandings of identity as well as conventional narratives of sexuality. In ‘Unknowing Animals: Wild Bird Films and the Limits of Knowledge’, Susan McHugh considers how films which focus on ‘the visual spectacle of flocking’, such as The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2005), The March of the Penguins (2005) and The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos (2009), resist (or fail to resist) anthropomorphic modes of cross-species relating, and subsequently invite (or refuse to invite) audiences to ‘unlearn’ their ‘sense and sensibilities of the social’. For McHugh, the aesthetic strategies deployed by wild bird films to depict avian ‘life-ways’ reveal cinema’s capacity to conceptualise, visualise and even valorise alternative modes of collective animal life that might potentially pertain to human populations. In ‘Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death’, Raymond Bellour considers the distribution of the animal motif, and particularly the ‘duality’ of the animal image – an embodiment of life as well as death – in a number of the director’s films, and concludes with an analysis of The Birds (1963).35 Drawing on Deleuze, Bellour attends to the ‘violence and grace of the bird representing the excellence of the animal body’, whose ‘inseparably natural and simulated’ movements in Hitchcock’s film refer us – due to a ‘deceptive naturalism’ based on ‘invisible but appreciable intervals’ – to the technological basis of the moving image itself. The final section, then, examines how film’s formal strategies might reach beyond anthropocentrism in their attentiveness to and imaging of animal life. Bazin writes that ‘animal films reveal the cinema to us’:36 for Bazin, Bellour and Lippit, among others, the animal is ontologically and enigmatically bound to the cinematic. This volume probes this bond yet also moves beyond it to complicate ontologies of both ‘the animal’ and ‘the moving image’ by considering the various differences, distinctions and mutations signalled by those terms. These essays ask us to think differently about animals through the moving image – to be alive to the specific worlds of animals and to renewed forms of cross-species relations. Yet these essays also revisit familiar moving image concepts – time, space, materiality, affect, spectatorship, identification, perspective, perception – to suggest how, through paying particular attention to animals, we might think differently about the moving image. In November 2010, eight months after the release of Nénette in France, a screening of the film took place next to the orang-utan enclosure in the Jardin des Plantes, fulfilling a promise made by Philibert to ‘show the film to his heroine’.37 The screening is documented by an eight-minute film, ‘La Projection’ (included as an extra on the DVD issued by E´ditions Montparnasse). The short film shows Nénette looking on as the screen and projector are set up. Yet once the film begins, she appears to lose interest – towards the end of ‘La Projection’, she turns to fiddle with a piece of purple string, dexterously threading it through a swing in her enclosure. 15

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

‘La Projection’ acts as an intriguing paratext, supplementing Nénette by destabilising it. As the spectators at the screening stand in a line, looking up expectantly at the enclosure, seeking any sign of response to the images projected on the screen, Nénette reveals that her attention is resolutely elsewhere. Nénette, the film that so fascinates us – while also promising an ethical and political reconsideration of animal life – holds no fascination for her. As Nénette turns away from the cinematic screen, she frustrates Philibert’s desire to ‘show the film to his heroine’. ‘La Projection’ discloses, in this instance, cinema’s failure to enable any meaningful form of cross-species exchange. If Nénette is a ‘projection screen’, as Philibert suggests, then here she projects back to us the deadening effects of a failed fantasy of reciprocal recognition. Studies of animal life and the moving image must contend with such failures, with the challenges presented by the animal’s lack of interest in our interest. This (academic, aesthetic) endeavour, the opening of the ‘field’ signalled by Lippit in the Foreword, might never be recognised as such by the beings it attempts to respond to. As Derrida suggests, an abyssal asymmetry remains at work. If the studies collected in this volume form part of the ‘animal turn’, ‘La Projection’ serves to remind us that the animal will not turn to us in recognition of our attention in the ways we might narcissistically desire. Nénette’s dexterous work with the purple string does not accord with the spectator’s fantasy of cross-species communication. Rather, it suggests a world that extends beyond our own.38

Notes 1. It is to this menagerie, established in 1795, that the Bornean orang-utan in Poe’s famous detective story ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841) is eventually sold. See Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. David Galloway (London: Penguin, 1986), pp. 189–224. 2. Sabine Nessel, ‘The Media Animal: On the Mise-en-scène of Animals in the Zoo and Cinema’, in Sabine Nessel, Winifried Pauleit, Christine Rüffert, Karl-Heinz Schmid and Alfred Tews (eds), Animals and the Cinema: Classifications, Cinephilias, Philosophies (Berlin: Bertz and Fischer, 2012), p. 43. 3. Ibid., p. 37. 4. Ibid., p. 46. 5. Catherine Russell, ‘Zoology, Pornography, Ethnography’, in Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 141. For another discussion of the Johnsons’ work, and other travelogue expedition films such as Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) and Bring ’Em Back Alive (1932), see Greg Mitman, ‘Science versus Showmanship on the Silent Screen’, in Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1999), pp. 26–58. 6. See Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wells, ed., MarieLouise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); originally published as L’Animal que donc je suis in 2006. 16

Introduction

7. John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, in Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 35; originally published in 1977. 8. Ibid., p. 30. 9. Ibid., p. 37. 10. Ibid., p. 35. 11. Randy Malamud, Reading Zoos: Representations of Animals and Captivity (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 230. During one sequence, the conjunction of image and sound becomes ironic: as we watch the orang-utans in their enclosure, a nearby public demonstration can be heard; a male voice announces that they are protesting, among other things, against an increase in video surveillance in Paris (‘1,226 new cameras’). 12. e. e. cummings, ‘The Secret of the Zoo Exposed’, in George J. Firmage (ed.), E. E. Cummings: A Miscellany (London: Peter Owen, 1966), p. 175; originally published in Vanity Fair, March 1927. 13. Nicolas Philibert, quoted in John Lichfield, ‘Ready for Your Close-up, Nénette?’ Independent, 3 April 2010, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/ features/ready-for-your-close-up-n-nette-1934736.html; and Adam Woodward, ‘Interview with Nicolas Philibert’, Little White Lies, 3 February 2011, http://www. littlewhitelies.co.uk/features/articles/nicolas-philibert-13864. 14. Philibert, quoted in Catherine Shoard, ‘The Future’s Orange’, Guardian, 27 January 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/27/nicolas-philibert-nenette. 15. Philibert, Director’s Comments, Artificial Eye website: http://www.artificial-eye.com/ film.php?dvd=ART525DVD&dir=nicolas_philibert&plugs&qt=true&wm=false. 16. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 34, emphasis in the original. 17. Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 106. 18. Nessel, ‘The Media Animal’, p. 46. 19. Randy Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 115. 20. Ibid. 21. Garry Marvin and Bob Mullan, Zoo Culture (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1987), cited in Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture, p. 122. 22. Malamud, Reading Zoos, p. 122. 23. Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), pp. 6, 7. 24. Ibid., p. 7. 25. Significant publications concerned with animals and the moving image include Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); Bousé, Wildlife Films; Mitman, Reel Nature; Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000); Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory 17

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Media (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); Cary Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Paul Wells, The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009); Claire Molloy, Popular Media and Animals (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Pick, Creaturely Poetics; Ron Broglio, Surface Encounters: Thinking with Animals in Art (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Kari Weil, Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture; Steve Baker, Artist Animal (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013); Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (eds), Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013); Adrienne L. McLean (ed.), Cinematic Canines: Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2014); Patricia MacCormack (ed.), The Animal Catalyst: Towards Ahuman Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2014); Laura McMahon (ed.), ‘Screen Animals Dossier’, Screen vol. 55 no. 1 (Spring 2015); Michael Lawrence and Karen Lury, (eds), The Zoo: Images of Exhibition and Encounter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 26. Lippit, Electric Animal, p. 196. 27. Burt, Animals in Film, pp. 112, 121. 28. Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, p. 16. 29. Julian Murphet, ‘Pitiable or Political Animals?’, SubStance vol. 37 no. 3 (2008), p. 102. 30. Jennifer Fay, ‘Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin’s Posthumanism’, Journal of Visual Culture vol. 7 no. 1 (2008), pp. 41–64; Pick, Creaturely Poetics, pp. 103–17; Seunghoon Jeong, ‘Animals: an Adventure in Bazin’s Ontology’, in Dudley Andrew with Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (ed.), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 177–85. 31. Lippit, Electric Animal, pp. 192–5. 32. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma. 33. Stan Brakhage, ‘The Camera Eye’, in Bruce R. McPherson (ed.), Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking (New York: Documentext, 2001), p. 19. 34. As discussed in Chapter 12, this translates idiomatically as ‘it’s a done deal’ and literally as ‘he who goes back on his word is a pig’. 18

Introduction

35. An earlier section from Bellour’s book appears in English as ‘From Hypnosis to Animals’, trans. Alistair Fox, Cinema Journal vol. 53 no. 3 (Spring 2014), pp. 8–25. 36. André Bazin, ‘Les Films d’animaux nous révèlent le cinéma’, Radio-CinémaTélévision vol. 285 (3 July 1955), p. 126; cited in Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 537. 37. See http://www.france3.fr/emissions/libre-court/nenette-la-projection-la-nuit-tombesur-la-menagerie_51601. 38. Barbara Creed has recently discussed Philibert’s documentary in relation to anthropocentrism, attention and absorption, contending that the film works to ‘diminish the boundary between human and animal’ and thus challenge traditional humanist and speciesist positions (rather than the spatial and temporal logics of the zoo itself, as we have suggested). Drawing on Agamben’s work on (human) gesture in the cinema, Creed argues that Nénette compels spectators to endow the orang-utan’s ‘bodily movements and expressions’ with meaning, and thus ‘to interpret her behaviour through her body language’. For Creed, the results are unambiguous: ‘I am made fully aware by Nénette’s recorded glance that she has endured a tortured existence.’ See ‘Nénette: Film Theory, Animals and Boredom’, European Journal of Media Studies no. 3 (Spring 2013), available online at http://www.necsusejms.org/nenette-film-theory-animals-and-boredom/. Creed continues her exploration of the centrality of gesture to the cinematic representation of the animal in ‘Films, Gestures, Species’, Journal for Cultural Research vol. 19 no. 1 (2015), pp. 43–55. John Blewitt has considered how Philibert’s documentary represents Nénette’s ‘actual and mediated celebrity’ in ‘What’s New Pussycat? A Genealogy of Animal Celebrity’, Celebrity Studies vol. 4 no. 3 (2013), pp. 325–38. Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann discuss Nénette (alongside Wiseman’s Zoo) in their useful overview of zoo films, ‘Hatari Means Danger: Filmic Representations of Animal Welfare and Environmentalism at the Zoo’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video vol. 31 (2014), pp. 621–34.

19

James Leo Cahill

1 Animal Photogénie The Wild Side of French Film Theory’s First Wave Animal films reveal the cinema to us. André Bazin1

In autumn of 1925 the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, the Parisian avant-garde and repertoire cinema directed by Jean Tedesco, announced that the novelist Colette would appear on 13 February 1926 as part of its forthcoming lecture series ‘Création d’un monde par le cinéma’ (Creation of a world by cinema). Although Colette’s lecture was cancelled at short notice (Marcel L’Herbier spoke in her place), its alluring title, ‘Photogénie des Bêtes’ or ‘Animal Photogénie’, indexes a trajectory of inter-war French film theory that merits revisiting.2 Given Colette’s zoophilia, the lecture topic is not surprising. The author of Dialogues des bêtes (1904) and an unproduced film scenario for two dogs, signed a body of film criticism peppered with enthusiastic praise for ‘the extravagance of reality’ and ‘unbridled fantasy of nature’ on display in plant and animal documentaries from the silent era. She celebrated such films as ‘marvelous witnesses to the enigmas of life, the habits of shrimp, the victorious combats of the dodder, the birth (éclosion) of flowers, insects, and cells’.3 Far from being the idiosyncratic trait of a single eccentric thinker, Colette’s proposed lecture belongs among a subset of reflections on photogénie that addressed the aesthetic and theoretical significance of animals (and beasts) in, on and for film. Colette’s undelivered lecture may serve as a relay point between the available texts of contemporaneous critics and film-makers such as Jean Tedesco, Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Pierre Porte, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Musidora, Marcel Defosse, Émile Vuillermoz, Germaine Dulac, and Louis Chavance, on the one hand, and reflections on the afterlife of this constellation of critical and theoretical interventions on the other. Each of these thinkers addressed the importance of cinematic animals in their speculations on the new medium. What follows provides a critical inventory of some of the paths covered by French thought on animal photogénie during the 1920s. Photogénie has once again become an object of critical interest.4 My emphasis on photogénie’s wild side addresses a dimension of this thought that has received

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

almost no critical commentary, and also attends to its untimely resonances for contemporary theory. While it would be imprudent to retrospectively impose a critical consensus upon these otherwise diverse thinkers, their writings on photogénie frequently emphasise the importance of the indifferent gaze of the camera lens and its processes of automatic inscription, as well as film’s potential for producing upheavals in human perception and perspectives. This attention to cinema’s inhuman properties was matched by frequent assertions that footage of nonhuman beings and things tended to produce the most striking and attractive moments in the cinema, revealing something about the filmic medium’s special or specific capacities. The discourse on animal photogénie opens up concerns for medium specificity to an exploration of cinema’s Copernican dimensions and the productivity of an eccentric, decentring vision for applying critical pressure not only upon understandings of the cinema, but also upon the pervasive anthropocentrism in Western thought and culture. The popularity of animal films from the earliest days of the medium nourished critical interest in the photogénie. Animal films had been a very popular genre in the pre-war era. One has only to think of the crowds that flocked to François Bidel’s Théâtre zoologique (Zoological Theatre) at the foire du Trône in Paris, where animated views of animals accompanied Bidel’s live animal performances, or the popularity of the comedies and jungle films of Alfred Machin, such as Madame Babylas aime les animaux (Madame Babylas Loves Animals, 1911), Max Linder’s Max a peur des chiens (Max’s Fear of Dogs, 1912), Jean Durand’s Onésime aime les bêtes (Onésime Loves Animals, 1913), Louis Feuillade’s Bout de Zan vole un éléphant (Bout de Zan Steals an Elephant, 1913) as well as the many animal documentaries by Éclair, Gaumont and Pathé.5 Several studios even had their own small menageries, such as the ones at Jean Comandon’s scientific cinema lab at Pathé and Alfred Machin’s Les Studios Machin (formerly Pathé-Nice).6 This popularity continued into the 1920s with the creation of feature-length films such as Machin’s comedy Bêtes… comme les hommes (Animals… Like Men, 1922), the heroic exploits of the animal performers Strongheart, Kazan, Rin Tin Tin and Rex the Wonder Horse, and films organised around safari adventures, such as Machin’s De la jungle à l’écran (From the Jungle to the Screen, 1928) and Martin and Osa Johnson’s Simba (1928). Although the pre-war practice of starting an evening at the cinema with a series of actualités and documentaries – frequently featuring animal subjects – had begun to taper off in the 1920s as feature-length films became the standard, the contemporaneous emergence of ciné-clubs, speciality theatres, screening and lecture series held at the Musée Galliera, and private salon-style screenings, such as those hosted by Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète, kept the exhibition of animal films alive, if slightly at the margins of France’s film culture.7 The film programming of Jean Tedesco – the director of the Théâtre du VieuxColombier cinema, co-editor of the film review Cinéa-Ciné pour tous, and the one responsible for soliciting Colette’s lecture – fostered the wild moments of the criticism and theory of the era. Tedesco incorporated an explicitly critical and pedagogical 24

Animal Photogénie

element to programmes at the Vieux-Colombier in the form of a film repertory. In the programme guide for the inaugural season in autumn 1924, Tedesco explained the theatre’s mandate as a literal refinement of the hunt for photogénie: ‘How many habitués of the Vieux-Colombier have not dared to venture into a cinema for fear of being tormented too frequently by film serials … only to learn, often too late, that amongst so much nonsense was something beautiful?’8 Tedesco’s repertoire programmes distilled films to their photogenic moments, while also snobbishly elevating their reception by removing them from the rowdier context of the popular theatres: ‘Numerous are the beautiful films that have been morally sabotaged by the usual methods of presentation. Our spectators will rediscover them here, in a dignified setting and sympathetic atmosphere.’9 The repertoire was comprised of brief passages from films deemed by Tedesco to be either ‘classic’ (his term) or particularly endowed with photogénie. Tedesco’s mission statement made explicit reference to the projection of scientific and documentary films as a pivotal part of this repertoire: ‘We will choose with particular care these films of great interest, these slices of life and nature, distant voyages, slow-motion and highspeed cinematography, underwater cinematography, etc.’10 In the context of the intensified spectatorship fostered by the Vieux-Colombier, Tedesco frequently featured moving images of animals that were presented as pivotal to the history of the medium and its future aesthetic development. In addition to projecting high-speed and time-lapse laboratory films on the locomotion of insects by Étienne Jules Marey and Lucien Bull (the subject of a lecture by Tedesco delivered on 26 February 1926), and the scientific studies of plant life by Jean Comandon, Tedesco presented a series of films on animal and plant life bearing the imprimatur ‘Film of the Laboratory of the Vieux-Colombier’.11 The laboratory was part of the micro-studio Tedesco installed in the theatre’s attic. Films bearing its label appear to have been either financed or acquired and recut by the Vieux-Colombier. The laboratory films often produced strange filmic encounters in their titles, many of which include the conjunction and. Among films advertised under this label were Etoiles et fleurs de mer (Starfish and Sea Flowers), La Vie secrète du grillon des champs (The Secret Life of Field Crickets), La Mante religieuse et l’araignée (The Praying Mantis and the Spider), La Vie invisible du sang (The Invisible Life of Blood), Papillons et chrysalides (Butterflies and Chrysalises), Les Poissons transparents et les poulpes (Transparent Fish and Octopuses), La Vie sensible des végétaux (The Sensitive Life of Plants), La Vie d’une plante à fleurs (The Life of a Flowering Plant), and Les Animaux photogéniques (Photogenic Animals), a film possibly compiled to accompany Colette’s undelivered lecture.12 The Vieux-Colombier considered itself a school for film spectators. Explicitly engaged in canon formation, the Vieux-Colombier cultivated a discerning taste for film and a taste for film’s eccentric vision. The programming practices of the Vieux-Colombier and particularly its laboratory films may also be understood as an experiment in cinema and cinematic spectatorship charmed by what Colette called the ‘photogénie des bêtes’. 25

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Photogénie … Photogénie – literally generated by light – entered popular use shortly after the emergence of photography to describe the capacity of people, places, beings and things to be translated by photography in a captivating manner: hence the adjective photogenic (photogénique).13 The filmic sense of photogénie encapsulates this understanding of photogenic, but also exceeds it. The critics most associated with photogénie, Louis Delluc and Jean Epstein, emphasised its elusive nature, suggestively placing the concept beyond even their own efforts at prescription and calculation. For Delluc there were as many versions of photogénie as there were film-makers, suggesting a strongly personal and subjective aspect that was difficult to quantify.14 Jean Epstein, reluctant to concretise the fleeting visual phenomena he initially associated with photogénie, admitted ‘one runs into a brick wall trying to define it’.15 Photogénie names an unassimilable difference between systems of representation – mobile photographic images and words – that brings critical language, as Monica Dall’Asta has suggested, to a crisis point, due to the challenges of describing or translating visual sensation into logos.16 Epstein insisted upon the sense of ineffability, crisis and ambiguity in his use of the term. He maintained a plastic and dynamic conception of photogénie throughout his texts, developing his explorations of the concept into a cinematic critique of the principle of identity (the philosophical maxim A = A and not B) over the course of the 1940s and early 50s. The cinematograph, in Epstein’s view, had an ‘indifference’ regarding ‘appearances that remain identical to themselves’ or that claim a ‘permanent character of things’. Conversely it ‘is extremely inclined to highlight any change or evolution’.17 At its most radical, photogénie foregrounds cinema’s capacity for transvaluation: for sparking a critically re-evaluative vision of the world. The discourse on photogénie addressed ontological, quasi-phenomenological and medium-specific technical dimensions of cinema. Critics used photogénie to refer to qualities of the profilmic world revealed by film, the spectator’s cinematic experience (Epstein’s ‘intermittent paroxysms’ ‘measured in seconds’),18 and the effects of the cinematic apparatus in animating relays between world, spectacle and spectator.19 Pierre Porte, in his 1924 essay ‘L’Idée de photogénie’ (The Idea of Photogénie), defined it simply as ‘the aptitude of a thing to be filmed’, and distinguished the ‘absolute photogénie’ of specific forms from the ‘relative photogénie’ of certain states.20 Porte’s account sets up an ontological assertion that regards only a particular set of entities as possessing it. Photogénie, for Porte, is a quality that only comes into visibility by being filmed, revealing another aspect or dimension of reality not immediately apparent to the naked eye. He contrasts absolute photogénie with relative photogénie, which results from situations in which a cinematographer may be able to produce photogénie, like a spiritualist might produce ectoplasm, through the skilled use of her or his instruments. A month after Porte’s article appeared, Epstein specified in ‘De Quelques conditions de la photogénie’ (‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’) that photogénie is defined by its plasticity: ‘only mobile aspects of the world, of things and 26

Animal Photogénie

souls, may see their moral value increased by filmic reproduction’. Photogénie, Epstein insisted, was the ‘consequence of [an object’s] variations in space-time’.21 According to Epstein’s clarification, photogénie reveals the non-identical nature of things, their perpetual becoming rather than their identity as fixed entities. The film-maker Dimitri Kirsanoff adapted a perspective similar to Epstein’s, suggesting that the term ‘reproduction’ might be inaccurate with regards to cinema, since photogénic revelations presented the world in a manner outside of our habituated standards of measure and from a perspective definitely ‘not of our nature’.22 If photogénie, as Epstein suggested, participated in an amplification of moral values, it was certainly not in a conventionally moralising manner. To the extent that photogénie increases moral value, this value must be considered through cinema’s capacity for transvaluation and the reinvention of moral sense. A pivotal aspect of photogénie is the cinematic apparatus’s capacity to confront but also to expand the limits of human perception. Delluc’s and Epstein’s accounts of photogénie celebrate the indifference of the camera and its lens to the intentions and values of the artist. In the opening pages of Photogénie (1920), Delluc praised the manner in which the camera intervened against the volition of the artist to the profit of the spectator: ‘The gesture captured by a Kodak has nothing at all to do with the gesture one wished to secure. We generally benefit from this.’23 A year later, in Bonjour Cinéma, Epstein also emphasised the importance of automatic inscription and contingency to this new aesthetic: ‘The click of a shutter produces photogénie … . The artist is reduced to pressing a button. And his intentions are unraveled by chance.’24 Trond Lundemo notes of Epstein that his theoretical writings frequently treat the apparatus as a ‘center of indetermination’ whose effects are less predictable than mechanical reproduction would suggest.25 The contingencies of the real are never fully tamed by the cinematic apparatus. Almost contemporaneous with Colette’s lecture on animal photogénie in early 1926, Epstein published a set of articles that coupled the benefits of the camera’s automatic inscription with the importance of the alterity of its vision. Epstein championed this alterity as the key to revealing the existence of a world beyond anthropocentric perspectives, and he encouraged film-makers and spectators to embrace this. In ‘L’Objectif lui-même’ (The Lens Itself) he offered a thesis on medium specificity based upon the vast potential of cinema’s inhumanity. Why not profit from one of the rarest qualities of the cinematographic eye, that of being an eye outside of the eye, that of escaping from the tyrannical egocentrism of our personal vision? Why oblige the sensitive emulsion to only replicate the functions of our retina? Why not eagerly seize an almost unique occasion for organizing a spectacle through relation to a centre other than our own line of sight? 26

In ‘Le Cinématographe vu de l’Etna’ (The Cinema Seen from Etna) (1926), Epstein effused that the camera lens was not simply the producer of a decentred vision, but 27

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

one ‘without prejudices, without morals, exempt from influences’, in short, anthropologically indifferent.27 Epstein developed this line of thought in an interview published in the theatre weekly Comœdia near the end of March 1926. He expressed his disappointment with the tendency of directors to ‘enslave the lens’ to the norms of human perception, and thereby simply reaffirm what and how we already see. Epstein seemed to be most excited by the wild aspects of this most modern of technologies. I am a partisan of using the lens in a savage state (état sauvage) so that it unveils for us the prodigious things of which we have until now been unaware because our eyes could not reveal them to us.28

The extrasensory attributes of the cinematograph expand the horizons of the perceptible world beyond that of human-centred vision, purportedly revealing new dimensions of the real. The untamed lens could make even the most familiar of faces into strange, moving landscapes. Epstein’s programme for cinema advocated the pursuit of an uncanny, unhomely, homme-less (personless) vision that displaces us not only from the shelter of ourselves – suggesting spectator positions based upon non-identification – but also from our habituated sense of the world. Epstein summarised this double displacement in his posthumously published study ‘L’Alcool et cinéma’ (Alcohol and Cinema): ‘The cinema is a marvelous apparatus for taking us outside of ourselves and outside of the world in which we believe ourselves to live.’29

… des bêtes The cinematograph’s ‘savage’ eye, with its anti-anthropocentric, Copernican potential – drawing together a spirit of radical discovery and a sensation of displacement – was well matched by what Colette and the other theorists believed was a special sensitivity of the apparatus to the secret lives of animals and plants. This helps explain why their critical writing so often turned to animal films when discussing the medium and its ineffable qualities. In the case of Epstein’s work in particular, it suggests a second register of film’s potential wildness. Epstein’s films contain a rich cinematic bestiary. In addition to the many experimental subjects depicted in Pasteur (1922) – sheep with anthrax, chickens with fowl cholera and a rabid rabbit subjected to vivisection – animals frequently featured in the periphery of Epstein’s images. Pasteur includes a kitten in the salon of the scientist’s boyhood home, and catches a stray cat and stork in its views of Strasbourg. La Glace à trois faces (The Three-sided Mirror, 1927) features a cockatiel, a monkey, aquarium fish, dogs and a homicidal bird. The director showed equal enthusiasm for natural phenomena at the scalar limits of the microscopic and the oceanic, including the extreme close-up footage of various microbacteria in Pasteur, the eruption and flowing lava of Mount Etna purported to be depicted in 28

Animal Photogénie

his lost documentary La Montagne infidèle (Unfaithful Mountain, 1923) and the slow-motion shots of crashing waves in Finis Terrae (End of the Earth, 1928), which present forces beyond the complete control of the director. Why else place the kitten on a table to leap off in Pasteur, or set a monkey and dog in a playpen in the middle of the sculptor’s salon in La Glace à trois faces, or spend so much time training the camera on the sea crashing against the rocky shoreline if not to introduce forces of indeterminacy into the scenes? Epstein’s writings frequently referenced microscopic imagery, animals and geological events, which interested him precisely for having ‘little in common with human life’ and for being ‘alien to human sensibility’.30 This difference, which complements that of the camera lens, suggests the potential for a double displacement of the human spectator in their filmic encounters with animals, plants and stones. The doubled alterity of perspective and of the image’s content – to the extent it forestalls identification – may activate moments of voluntary, or just as likely, involuntary suspension in judgment. The caesura between perceptual experience, cognition and evaluation produced by such moments of cinema force an adjustment or recalibration of the senses. Paroxysms of a primal, wild, untamed perceptual experience overtake the spectator during those fleeting instants when the faculties scramble to find points of reference (hence the importance of the brevity of photogénie for Epstein). Few of Epstein’s contemporaries developed the same radical implications from their interest in animals and wildness on screen, but they nevertheless found animal films to be a privileged site of theorising. Delluc, in Photogénie, credited marginal films as the ideal sights for encountering photogénie. Documentaries featuring the ‘lives of monkeys and the deaths of flowers’ (the very sorts of films subsequently featured at the Vieux-Colombier) and glimpses of naked flesh (chair) were rich sources of photogénie.31 Musidora, famous for her role as Irma Vep in the serial Les Vampires (The Vampires, 1915), emblematised a highly condensed and provocative version of these ideas in a full-page photograph and textual inscription published in the 8 July 1921 issue of Cinéa (the precursor to Cinéa-Ciné pour tous). The photograph features the actress Musidora à poil (naked like an animal) in a tree-lined garden seated at a slight angle to the camera on what appears to be a marble bench with carved lions for support. Lacsalé, her pet chow, rests in the shade beneath the bench and Musidora tightly holds in place a strategically positioned lamb. Accompanying the photograph, Musidora wrote in her own hand: ‘One must be “photogenic” from head to toe. After that it is permissible to have talent.’32 Musidora’s enigmatic piece stages an encounter between the two gazes at play in the photograph: one all too human, the other the cold gaze of a machine. These two gazes generate a set of readings at conflict with each other. At first glimpse, the photograph fulfils the fetishistic impulses of photogénie (and the editorial politics of Cinéa). The spectacle of Musidora’s naked body, peeled from her trademark black bodysuit and caught at a slight angle, would seem to be an allusion to the series of nineteenth-century academic paintings inspired by the voyeuristic 29

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

© The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

30

Animal Photogénie

scene in James Thomson’s eighteenth-century poem ‘The Seasons’, when the suitor Damon comes across and watches the young maiden Musidora bathing in the nude, and his discretion at the sight of her nudity is taken by her as proof of his love.33 While the angle of Musidora’s body (tilted approximately 40º from the camera’s line of sight) suggests the modesty-preserving gestures of her namesake, the tilt of her thrown-back head and her hearty smile (as opposed to her namesake’s downcast eyes in the poem and paintings) suggests that her modesty is a gestural parody in response to a prurient and moralising male gaze, rather than a genuine concern for such imposed virtues. From a humanist perspective, the photograph and its legend risk a condescending conflation of woman and nature to the benefit of neither, a voyeuristic reduction of this woman to her animal body, while also anthropocentrically asserting human anatomy (head to toe and everything in between) as the primary unit of evaluative measure. The presence of another gaze, aligned with the expansive sense of photogénie, suggests that the dehumanisation discussed above may also have a potentially affirmative sense that challenges the anthropocentric and phallocentric gazes critically implicated through the revision of Thomson’s Musidora. The twentieth-century Musidora aligns herself with her fellow creatures as well as with the democratic revaluations enabled by the camera’s disinterested regard for everything within its field of view. For the open gaze of the camera the movie star, the dog, the lamb, but also the stone lions, the grass, the trees in the distance and the light caressing them all, potentially possess photogénie rooted not in ontological fixity, but in varied dynamic elements. Photogénie displaces talent in a new system of values. The hallmark of classical conceptions of art rooted in the long-refined and welltutored gifts of an individual genius now becomes a vestigial quality of secondary importance. The photograph and its caption, expressive of a shared exposure but also a vivacious audaciousness, suggest that different methods of measure and valuation are needed for such instantaneous appearances, ones that unsettle the anthropocentrism of traditional practices of looking. Musidora’s performative commentary on the photogenic seems to have sufficiently impressed Delluc. In a subsequent review of the canine adventure film Kazan, chien-loup (Kazan, 1921), he praised the photogénie of the ubiquitous snow as well as the animal cast members, whom he believed to ‘have much more talent’ than the human actors in terms of their appearances on screen and benefit from purportedly remaining unaware of this fact.34 Talent here has been revised by Delluc along Musidora’s lines as an aspect of photogénie, which calls for a reconsideration of the way that we view an environment, a fellow creature and a film. Germaine Dulac’s work also bears the mark of animal photogénie. She made frequent allusions to slow-motion studies of animal locomotion and to Comandon’s time-lapse documents of plant growth in her critical writing and films.35 Her 1928 film Thèmes et variations (Themes and Variations) compares the sinuous movements of a ballerina with uncanny footage of plant growth grafted 31

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

from La Vie d’une plante à fleurs. Dulac saw the moving images of plants and animals as a possible way for film-makers to escape from the narrative trappings of literature and theatre and their ‘all too-human meaning.’36 Even when utilised in the most abstract examples of pure cinema, footage of animals and plants triggers a semiotic collapse of their representational and referential qualities. The vital movements of nonhuman life thus offered Dulac a field for the exploration of rhythm, motion, sensation and affect engaged with a more-than-human world. The critic Marcel Defosse summarised these strands of thought in his essay ‘Une certaine photogénie’, published in Cinéa-Ciné pour tous in September 1927.37 Like Delluc and Dulac, Defosse was fascinated by the moments in cinema when the discipline of professional acting and the perceived constraints of narrative conceits slacken, and film’s capacity for revealing the spontaneity of the real and unleashing flashes of perceptual wildness come to the foreground. And Defosse’s perspective articulates a vision of the medium that, like Delluc’s and Epstein’s, profits from the reduced interventions of the artist. He defines photogénie as the aspects of film’s aesthetic pleasures that are least reliant upon the intervention, interpretation and intentionality of the artist; they come into view by merely being transcribed by automatic processes of the camera.38 Defosse notes that if the predominant examples of photogénie privilege nonsentient phenomena, such as the reflection of light off running water or the workings of machines, this is due to the fact that such objects, much like the animals Delluc saw in Kazan, chien-loup, do not appear to consciously alter their behaviour before the camera. This unaffected quality ‘fortifies the spectator’s double impression of naturalness and discovery’, producing an interplay of immediacy and of re-encountering the world through mediation.39 Using examples of films regularly featured at the Vieux-Colombier, such as the undersea images of the Williamson brothers, the ‘inhuman geometry’ of transparent sea creatures in the UFA documentary Jardin de la mer (Sea Garden) and the ‘moving spectacle’ of an octopus eating in Rex Ingram’s otherwise fictional film Mare Nostrum (1926), Defosse contends that footage of wild animals intensifies photogénie by adding an element of contingency unbridled by the constraints and prejudices of human consciousness. Photogénie requires perpetual reinvention lest it become commonplace. For this reason, Defosse suggests that the absence of intervention must ultimately be counterbalanced by the aesthetic treatment of this absence. The point remains that much of cinema’s promise lay in its coordination of engagements with an indispensible wild side. Émile Vuillermoz, music and film critic for Le Temps and a habitué of the Vieux-Colombier, also contributed to the discourse on animal photogénie but, unlike some of his more radical contemporaries, he remained openly sceptical about the extent to which film might unsettle humanity’s ‘impenitent anthropocentrism’.40 Starting with his earliest columns on the cinema, published in Le Temps during World War I, Vuillermoz wrote about scientific and animal documentaries from an aesthetic perspective, advocating that audiences and artists could learn much about the cinema and the world through them.41 Between 32

Animal Photogénie

February and July of 1927 Vuillermoz dedicated a series of columns to the question of animal films. He published a column calling for the establishment of a speciality theatre dedicated solely to science films and, in direct reference to his friend Colette and the title of her undelivered lecture, published a column with the title ‘La Photogénie des bêtes’ that expressed regret that so few film-makers had taken full advantage of the photogénie of animals.42 Vuillermoz emphasised the revelatory powers of the cinematograph. He understood it to have a prosthetic function capable of extending the human sensorium in space and time, offering valuable lessons not just for scientists and students of science, but also for artists and philosophers. Slow-motion, time-lapse, microcinematography and X-ray cinematography show ‘that our imperfect senses only perceive a fraction of what surrounds us … . The ultrasensitive retina of a camera, on the contrary, records a much more complex and much more nuanced reality.’43 For all of his enthusiasm for the undeveloped potential of animal photogénie and its contribution to the art and theory of cinema, as well as to knowledge about the world, he distinguished himself from Dulac, and implicitly from Epstein, with regards to the issues of anthropocentrism and the principle of identity. He believed the cinema nourished rather than challenged an anthropocentric position. If the cinematograph revealed a reality heretofore unseen, it did no violence to the stable concept of reality as such. Epstein, on the other hand, saw the cinema’s greatest potential in its emphasis on permanent transformation and its articulation of a ‘geometry of the unstable’.44 Vuillermoz developed his critique in direct conversation with Dulac’s 1927 essay ‘Du Sentiment à la ligne’ (From Sentiment to the Line), which mixes an evocative use of anthropomorphism with a call for an explicitly non-narrative approach to film-making.45 Dulac promoted the idea of a pure film detached from any narrative content, which she found exemplified by Jean Comandon’s time-lapse footage of the germination of a grain of wheat. Vuillermoz, whose own enthusiastic reviews of Comandon’s films, like those of Colette, were unabashedly anthropomorphic, likened Comandon’s films of microscopic organisms to fairytales, war films, ballets and serialised ciné-romans. He believed Dulac’s desire ‘to escape from the tyranny of the passionate anecdote’ and its ‘all too-human meanings’ was doomed to be a noble failure.46 At this point the word anthropomorphism does not seem to have been a part of Vuillermoz’s critical lexicon. He may not have confused anthropomorphism with anthropocentrism, but he did tend to conflate the two, believing the latter was an immutable fact of human perception and cognition, something humans cannot escape. In his essay ‘Anthropocentrisme’ (Anthropocentrism), published in March 1927, he asserts: ‘Despite everything, we selfishly submit all natural phenomena to human discipline, and we arbitrarily manage to conduct the most abstract image symphonies to follow the supposedly fundamental rhythm of the beating of our hearts.’ 47 Returning to this point in ‘La Photogénie des bêtes’ four months later, he noted that even if natural history documentaries suffer from ‘a little too much anthropocentrism’, in the cinema ‘this interpretation only has advantages’.48 33

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Vuillermoz leaves it to his readers to determine what these advantages might be. He does not seem to believe that humans are capable of using the cinematograph’s inhuman, mechanical eye to see otherwise than in a manner that reinscribes everything in anthropocentric terms. But even in this respect, Vuillermoz’s interventions can be quite generative for confronting the limits of anthropocentrism from within such a perspective. One place where this becomes apparent is in the conclusion of his essay on laboratory films and the value of a cinema and mode of spectatorship consecrated to them. Making reference to an unnamed documentary film about the lives of insects that closely resembles descriptions of the Laboratoire du Vieux-Colombier’s Papillons et chrysalides, Vuillermoz teases the many mistakes poets have made in depicting butterflies as a symbol of ‘insouciance, frivolity, and caprice’. The cinematograph reveals them to be otherwise: ‘their existence, entirely dedicated to the law of reproduction, is dominated by the pitiless severity of the procreative mission’.49 Sounding more like a phrase from Documents than from the bourgeois Le Temps, this observation suggests that one of the effects of the perceptual expansion of well-made animal films is that they reveal the absurd idealism and romanticism of anthropocentric anthropomorphism. By accident or design, Vuillermoz produces an insight into anthropomorphism as a desire to find confirmation for human ideals in nature, so as to help ground them and make appear natural what is in fact ideological. But anthropomorphism may also stretch and deform what one believes about the human. The young journalist Louis Chavance addressed a similar set of questions two years later in his essay ‘Le Symbole du sang’ (Symbol of Blood), but suggested that rather than reaffirming the integrity of human-centred perspective, animal films confronted spectators with the terror and ecstasy of the formless (informe).50 Chavance praised film-makers who, through either fear or courage, aim to depict ‘the truly inhuman aspect of things’.51 Like Vuillermoz, Chavance believed that animal and science films, such as the UFA documentary La Nature et l’amour (Nature and Love, c. 1928) which he had recently seen at the Vieux-Colombier, revealed the porous boundary between utilitarian and poetic uses of film. Beyond the anthropomorphic projections such films solicited from spectators, they also troubled the spectator’s sense of self. This was largely an effect of the unsettling eroticism of the film’s images, from which humans have been abstracted (though humans certainly remain as a negative imprint in the films). Chavance claimed that the uncanny appearance of formless protoplasts and the other sticky and wriggling life-forms that appeared magnified on screen had a disturbing attractiveness, or ‘sexappeal’, that corresponded with the viewer’s ‘most secret desires’.52 He speculated that what frightens spectators is the manner in which the attractiveness of such charged images – ‘these palpitations, these lacunae [entrebâillements], these curves’ – foregrounds the plastic, violent, and polymorphous qualities of desire.53 The draw of these images is irreducible to a simple expression of the laws of the preservation of the species. Preservation and propagation were but pretexts for such films. The behaviour of the creatures on screen and the mixture of attraction 34

Animal Photogénie

and revulsion they trigger suggest ‘more equivocal’ instincts than preservation of the species alone.54 These films manifest a cinema of animal attraction that unsettles the self-certainty of anthropocentrism and its measure of all things according to the standards of man, while responding to an eroticism without limits. Vuillermoz and Chavance both viewed the cinematograph as providing the occasion for a recalibration of poetry as a practice aimed at more deeply engaging the world beyond the limits of the human, even as it reflects upon human being. These lines of thought echo Jean Epstein’s ‘desire for a more exact poetry’, pushing this sentiment toward a bête materialism more agnostic to anthropocentric worldviews.55 If we cannot escape anthropocentrism, we can at least learn to identify its contours and limits, which the cinematograph may reveal, if only in fleeting and peripheral instants. The discourse on animal photogénie illuminates one of cinema’s great unrealised promises, that of using the camera’s indifferent, decentring gaze to realise Nietzsche’s ‘strange and insane task’ of ‘translat[ing] man back into nature’, an operation that reveals new dimensions and possible relations between both terms, and transforms each in the process.56

Encore By the end of the 1920s, the attention and energy with which theorists explored the possibilities of animal photogénie were dissipating, even as many of these ideas found direct cinematic realisation in the films of Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon, whose popular documentaries, such as La Pieuvre (The Octopus, 1928), began appearing on screens in December 1928.57 The coming of the sound film drew critical focus toward other matters. In the realm of animal films, the addition of the human voice threatened to domesticate the wildness of images by means of anthropocentric anthropomorphism. Yet this shift in rhetorical focus did not signify the total extinction of animal photogénie. It has persisted as an undercurrent in film theory that has, once again, come into critical focus. Considering animal photogénie in relation to the history of French film theory reveals overlooked connections between the inter-war theorists and the post-war work of André Bazin, author of one of the most sustained reflections on animals and cinema prior to the present moment. Bazin’s writing during the 1940s and 50s often staged his key arguments through reflections on animals and cinema and the anti-anthropocentric potential of the apparatus. Despite the considerable differences in orientation that exist between the inter-war generation’s concerns for the status of film as an art form and explorations of medium specificity, and Bazin’s explicitly impure concerns with realist aesthetics, on the questions of animals and cinema, and of anthropocentrism, these two traditions of film theory reveal strong correspondences.58 These historical links permeate the epigraph to this essay from Bazin, which recapitulates key aspects of the discourse on animal photogénie: just as cinema may reveal something of animals to humans, animals reveal the cinema to us. Reading Bazin in light of the discourse on animal photogénie, and with and 35

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

against Epstein’s brilliant contemporaneous writings, illuminates new dimensions and new lacunae of post-war film theory. Photogénie emerged with photography, but found its conceptual development enriched in the context of another medium: film. The present migration of moving image media into new contexts – increasingly distributed and reconfigured across multiple platforms, scales and diversified modes of spectatorship – offers an opportunity to critically return to the questions inspired by animal photogénie at a moment marked by an increasing awareness of environmental fragility and vulnerability. An anti-anthropocentric perspective is no longer ‘just’ a matter of ethics. Video aggregators like YouTube and Dailymotion have exponentially expanded and popularised the impulses behind Tedesco’s and Vuillermoz’s wishes for an experimental cinema – a cinema laboratory – where animal photogénie, delivered in brief doses, would play a significant role. A vital form of amateur and professionally produced animal and wildlife videos has emerged that concentrates on the fleeting, contingent, non-narrative, untamed, wild and savage aspects of moving image media, but also presents examples of a literal photogénie des bêtes: an animal-generated photogénie.59 To name a few examples: Sea Turtle Finds Lost Camera (Sea Turtle and Dick de Bruin and Paul Shultz, 2010), wherein a camera lost in the Caribbean is turned on by a sea turtle who produces a lyrical documentation of surface reflections, hues of blue sea so deep they begin to pixilate and the fluid motions of the animal swimming above and below the sea; Octopus Steals My Video Camera and Swims off with It (Octopus and Victor Huang, 2010), which as the title suggests, shows the results of an octopus grabbing a video camera from a diver, examining it with its arms and then rapidly swimming off with it; and Crab Makes a Movie (aka Oops! I Dropped My Camera in the River) (2011), in which a crab seizes a camera dropped into the water and films the celestial arc of the water’s surface from several metres below capturing passing fish and distant swimming humans. The interest generated by these clips, often in contradistinction to Vuillermoz’s claims about anthropocentrism, suggests a growing fascination with engaging the more-than-human world on more open and contingent terms. Colette’s undelivered lecture on animal photogénie may yet have its impact on film and moving image theory. Animal photogénie, as theoretical concern, asks that we consider film and moving image theory’s relation to and reliance upon animals as figures and tropes, but also as singular, historical beings. Beyond a discourse of cinephilia or cinefetishism, photogénie offers a commitment worth maintaining: that which Epstein referred to in ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’ as cinema’s ability to focalise our relationship to the world in all its distinct particularity. Epstein notes that the grammar of the cinematograph best expresses itself not with an ideal and generalised ‘the’ of categorical pronouncements, but rather with a concrete and particularised ‘an’: ‘An eye in close-up is no longer the eye, it is AN eye.’60 Animal photogénie theorises on the side of radical singularity. As with Derrida’s critical animots, it encourages us to leave behind 36

Animal Photogénie

such undifferentiated and generalising concepts as ‘the animal’ for attention to animals, in all their diversity, singularity and fleeting and unpredictable beauty.61 For Jean-Michel

Notes 1. André Bazin, ‘Les Films d’animaux nous révèlent le cinéma’, Radio, Cinéma, Télévision vol. 285 (3 July 1955), pp. 2–3, 8. Research for this essay was supported by a Connaught Foundation New Researcher Grant and an SSHRC Insight Development Grant. I thank Éric Thouvenel, Michael Laurence and Laura McMahon for their criticism of an earlier draft of this text. Unless noted otherwise, translations from French are my own. 2. The leaflet announcing Colette’s lecture on ‘Photogénie des Bêtes’ is included in Jean Tedesco, ‘Recueil factice d’articles de presse, de programmes et de documents concernant la direction du Vieux-Colombier par Jean Tedesco: saisons cinégraphiques. 1924–1928’, Archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Richelieu, Arts du Spectacle, SR96/362. Colette’s lecture is also listed in an announcement for the entire series published in Cinéa-Ciné pour tous vol. 51 (15 December 1925), p. 5, though the title is given as ‘Photogénie de l’animal’ (not ‘Photogénie des bêtes’). The lecture seems to have been cancelled at short notice. A list of the lectures held appears in Christophe Gauthier, La Passion du cinéma: Cinéphiles, ciné-clubs et salles specialisées à Paris de 1920 à 1929 (Paris: Association Française de Recherche sur L’Histoire du Cinéma, 1999), pp. 358–9. 3. Colette, ‘Cinema’, in Alain and Odette Virmaux (eds), Colette at the Movies: Criticism and Screenplays, trans. Sarah W. R. Smith (New York: Ungar, 1980), p. 61; and Colette, quoted in Claude Vermorel, ‘Colette ferait du cinéma, si …’, L’Intransigeant (21 May 1932), p. 6. On Colette’s theory of film spectatorship and her larger place in inter-war film culture, see Paula Amad, ‘These Spectacles Are Never Forgotten: Memory and Reception in Colette’s Film Criticism’, Camera Obscura vol. 59 no. 20.2 (2005), pp. 118–63; and Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 4. From the past decade, see Monica Dall’Asta, ‘Thinking about Cinema: First Waves’, in Michael Temple and Michael Witt (eds), The French Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2004), pp. 82–90; Malcolm Turvey, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (New York: Oxford, 2008); Sarah Keller and Jason N. Paul (eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays and New Translations (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012); Christophe M. Wall-Romana, Jean Epstein: Corporeal Cinema and Film Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); and Epstein’s Écrits complets, eds Nicole Brenez, Joël Daire and Cyril Neyrat (Paris: Independencia éditions, 2014), of which volumes III: 1928–1938 and V: 1945–1951 have appeared at the time this essay was sent to press. 37

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

5. On Bidel’s Zoological Theatre see Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard, Histoire comparée du cinéma, vol. 2 (Tournai: Casterman, 1966), p. 170. On early animal films and the cinema of scientific popularisation, see Oliver Gaycken, ‘A Drama Unites Them in a Fight to the Death: Some Remarks on the Flourishing of a Cinema of Scientific Vernacularization in France, 1909–1914’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television vol. 22 no. 5 (2002), pp. 353–74. 6. See Françis Lacassin, Alfred Machin: De la jungle à l’écran (Paris: Dreamland, 2001). 7. See Jean-Jacques Meusy, ‘La Diffusion des Films de “Non-Fiction” dans les Établissements Parisiens’, 1895 no. 18, Images du Réel: La Non-fiction en France (1890–1930), ed. Thierry Lefebvre (1995), pp. 169–99; Noureddine Ghali, L’Avantgarde Cinématographique en France dans les années vingt (Paris: Editions Paris Expérimental, 1995); and Gauthier, La Passion du cinéma. On Albert Kahn, see Amad, Counter-Archive. 8. Tedesco, ‘Recueil factice …: Saison 1924–1925’, p. 5. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. On the importance of scientific methods and scientific cinema for early film theory, see Hannah Landecker, ‘Cellular Features: Microcinematography and Film Theory’, Critical Inquiry vol. 31 no. 4 (2005), pp. 903–37. 12. This list draws from Tedesco’s ‘Recueil factice …’, as well as advertisements for the Vieux-Colombier in Cinéa-Ciné pour tous and La Semaine à Paris btween 1924 and 1930. With the exception of La Vie d’une plante à fleurs, which the Archive Françaises du film lists as 1925, it is difficult at present to establish dates for these films as they have few archival traces and are presumed lost. Many were probably recut from pre-war science and animal films. 13. For an illuminating discussion of photogénie, see Wall-Romana, Jean Epstein, esp. pp. 25–35. 14. Louis Delluc, Photogénie (1920) in Écrits cinématographiques I: Le Cinéma et les Cinéastes (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1985), p. 36. 15. Jean Epstein, ‘The Senses 1(b)’, trans. Tom Milne, in French Film Criticism and Theory, vol. 1, 243; and Epstein, Bonjour Cinéma (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1921), p. 35. 16. Dall’Asta, ‘Thinking about Cinema’, p. 83. Mary Ann Doane makes a similar point in ‘The Close-up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies vol. 14 no. 3 (2003), p. 89. 17. Epstein, quoted in Nicole Brenez, ‘Ultra-Modern: Jean Epstein, or Cinema “Serving the Forces of Transgression and Revolt”’, trans. Mireille Dobrzynski, in Keller and Paul, Jean Epstein, p. 228. On the critique of the principle of identity, see Epstein, ‘L’Intelligence d’une machine’ (1946) and ‘L’Alcool et cinéma’ (1946–9) in Écrits sur le cinéma: 1921–1953, 2 vols, ed. Pierre Lherminier (Paris: Seghers, 1973); as well as Chiara Tognolotti, ‘L’Alcool, le cinéma, et le philosophe. L’influence de Friedrich Nietzsche sur la théorie cinématographique de Jean Epstein à travers les 38

Animal Photogénie

notes du fonds Epstein’, 1895 vol. 46 (2005), pp. 37–53; and Éric Thouvenel, ‘À Toute intelligence je préfère la mienne: quand Jean Epstein lisait Gaston Bachelard’, 1895 vol. 62 (2010), pp. 53–75. 18. Jean Epstein, ‘Magnification’, in French Film Theory and Criticism vol. 236; Epstein, Bonjour Cinéma, p. 94. On the embodied aspects of Epstein’s theory, see Doane, ‘The Close-up’, p. 108; and Wall-Romana, Jean Epstein, pp. 67–96. 19. Wall-Romana summarises Epstein’s concept of photogénie as attending to ‘the total relation between pro-filmic reality … filmic images, and the embodied viewer’. See ibid, p. 26. 20. Pierre Porte, ‘L’Idée de Photogénie’, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous vol. 17 (15 July 1924), pp. 14–15. 21. Jean Epstein, ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’, in Keller and Paul, Jean Epstein, p. 294; and Epstein, ‘De quelques conditions de la photogénie’, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous vol. 19 (15 August 1924), pp. 6–7. 22. Dimitri Kirsanoff, ‘Les Problèmes de la Photogénie’, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous vol. 62 (1 June 1926), p. 9. Kirsanoff defined the seductive mystery of photogénie as due to filmic images’ resistance to our modes of measure in ‘Les Mystères de la Photogénie’, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous vol. 39 (15 June 1925), p. 9. 23. Louis Delluc, Photogénie (1920) in Pierre Lherminier (ed.), Écrits cinématographiques I: Le Cinéma et les Cinéastes (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1985), p. 33. 24. Epstein, ‘The Senses 1(b)’, in French Film Theory and Criticism, 244 (translation modified); and Epstein, Bonjour Cinéma, p. 37. 25. Trond Lundemo, ‘A Temporal Perspective: Jean Epstein’s Writings on Technology and Subjectivity’, in Keller and Paul, Jean Epstein, p. 219. 26. Jean Epstein, ‘L’Objectif lui-même’, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous vol. 53 (15 January 1926), p. 8 (my emphasis). 27. Jean Epstein, ‘The Cinema Seen from Etna’, trans. Stuart Liebman, in Keller and Paul, Jean Epstein, p. 292; and Epstein, Écrits, vol. 1, pp. 136–7. 28. Epstein quoted in Yves Dartois, ‘L’Œil et l’objectif’, Comœdia (29 March 1926), p. 2. This phrase revises André Breton’s pronouncements that the eye exists in a savage and wild state in ‘Le Surréalisme et la peinture’, Revolution Surréaliste vol. 4 (15 July 1925), p. 26. 29. Epstein, ‘L’Alcool et cinéma’, p. 223. 30. Epstein, ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’, p. 295. 31. Delluc, Écrits cinématographiques I, pp. 34, 53–4. 32. Musidora, ‘Il faut être “photogénique”…’, Cinéa vol. 10 (8 July 1921), p. 17. Thanks to Annette Förster for helping me track down the name of Musidora’s chow and Maggie Hennefeld for a generative conversation on this image. Françis Lacassin mentions she named it after Pierre Benoît’s 1921 novel Le Lac salé. Françis Lacassin’s Musidora: 1889–1957 (Paris: Avant-Scène du Cinéma, 1970), p. 483. Delluc returned to this image of Musidora in La Jungle du cinéma (1921), where he wrote ‘Musidora is photogenic from head to toe: I have seen her entirely naked in a photograph, but not at the theater, and she has not invited me back to her place’ (p. 314). 39

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

33. James Thomson, ‘The Seasons’, in The Seasons (1726–30; repr., New York: T. Simpson, 1803), esp. pp. 90–1. Artists who painted scenes inspired by Thomson’s Musidora include John Opie (c. 1788), Thomas Sully (c. 1813–35) and William Etty (1846). 34. Louis Delluc, ‘Kazan, chien-loup’ (1921), in Écrits cinématographiques II: Le Cinéma au quotidien (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1990), p. 265. In A. B.’s comic article on cinema’s greater regard for dogs than men (in terms of their working contracts and their reception by audiences), he concedes that ‘the dog is the most photogenic of all animals’, and notes the canine stars Teddy, Brownie and Strongheart have earned laurels comparable with those of any star. A. B., ‘Contrats de … chiens’, Cinémagazine vol. 27 (4 July 1924), p. 14. 35. Germaine Dulac, ‘À Propos d’Âme d’Artiste’, ‘Aphorismes’, ‘L’Essence du cinéma – L’Idée visuelle’, in Prosper Hillairet (ed.), Écrits sur le cinéma (1919–1937) (Paris: Paris Expérimental, 1994), pp. 57–67. See also Landecker, ‘Cellular Features’, p. 934. 36. Dulac, ‘Du Sentiment à la ligne’ (1927), in Écrits, p. 89. 37. Marcel Defosse, ‘Une certaine photogénie’, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous vol. 93 (15 September 1927), pp. 13–14. 38. Ibid., p. 13. 39. Ibid., p. 14. 40. Émile Vuillermoz, ‘La Musique des images’, in L’Art Cinématographique, vol. 3 (Paris: Librarie Félix Alcan, 1927), p. 64. 41. Émile Vuillermoz, ‘Devant l’écran’, Le Temps (25 April 1917), p. 3. 42. Émile Vuillermoz, ‘Films de laboratoire’, Le Temps (19 February 1927), p. 6; and ‘La photogénie des bêtes’, Le Temps (9 July 1927), p. 5. Contemporaneous with the latter essay, E. L. Black penned a short text making a very similar argument for the Swiss film review Close Up. See Black, ‘Animals on the films’, Close Up vol. 1 (July 1927), pp. 41–6. 43. Vuillermoz, ‘Films de laboratoire’, p. 6. 44. Epstein, ‘Alcool et cinéma’, p. 215. 45. Dulac, ‘Du Sentiment à la ligne’, pp. 87–9. 46. Ibid., p. 89; Émile Vuillermoz, ‘Devant l’écran: La cinématographie des microbes’, Le Temps (9 November 1922), p. 3; ‘Anthropocentrisme’, Le Temps (19 March 1927), p. 5; and Vuillermoz, ‘La Musique des images’, 64. Ghali summarises aspects of this debate in L’Avant-garde Cinématographique en France, pp. 234–6. 47. Vuillermoz, ‘Anthropocentrisme’, p. 5. 48. Vuillermoz, ‘La Photogénie des bêtes’, p. 5. 49. Vuillermoz, ‘Films de laboratoire’, p. 6. 50. Louis Chavance, ‘Le Symbole du sang’, La Revue du cinéma: Revue de critique et de recherches cinématographiques vol. 1 no. 2 (February 1929), pp. 50–3. 51. Ibid., p. 50 (my emphasis). 52. Ibid., pp. 52–3. Sexappeal appears in English as a single word in the original. This equation is not so odd, given Elinor Glyn’s famous comment in 1927 that Rex the Wonder Horse was one of those rare examples of a being possessed with It (sex appeal). 40

Animal Photogénie

53. Ibid., p. 53. 54. Ibid. 55. Epstein, ‘Magnification’, p. 239; and Bonjour Cinéma, p. 103. 56. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Modern Library, 2000 [1886]), pp. 351–2. 57. For more on Painlevé and Hamon, see James Leo Cahill, ‘Anthropomorphism and Its Vicissitudes: Reflections on Homme-sick Cinema’, in Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway (eds), Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human (Oxford: Berghahn, 2013), pp. 73–90; and Roxane Hamery, Jean Painlevé, le cinéma au cœur de la vie (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008). 58. With the exception of Roger Leenhardt, Bazin rarely cites his inter-war predecessors, save for to critique their purist aesthetics. 59. See Florien Leitner, ‘On Robots and Turtles: A Posthuman Perspective on Camera and Image Movement after Michael Snow’s La région centrale’, Discourse vol. 35 no. 2 (2013), pp. 263–77; and James Leo Cahill, ‘A YouTube Bestiary: 26 Theses on a Postcinema of Animal Attractions’, in Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo (eds), The New Silent Cinema: Digital Anachronisms, Celluloid Specters (New York: AFI/Routledge, 2015), pp. 263–93. 60. Epstein, ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’, p. 295. 61. Jacques Derrida, ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)’, trans. David Wills, Critical Inquiry vol. 28 no. 2 (2002), pp. 369–418.

41

Rosalind Galt

2 Cats and the Moving Image Feline Cinematicity from Lumière to Maru In 2012, the media reported widely on an artificial intelligence (AI) study jointly run by Google and Stanford University on ‘large scale unsupervised learning’, or, in other words, whether a computer could learn to recognise types of image without first being told what to look for. In previous models, researchers would have to label images (e.g. a human face) and the computer could then detect faces based on their similarity to the labelled images.1 However, this new experiment set their computer loose on 10 million still images culled from YouTube videos and asked it to learn unsupervised – to notice recurring shapes and to build pattern recognition ability on its own. The researchers started from what are called ‘grandmother neurons’, a type of neuron in the brain that evidence suggests selects for key categories such as faces or hands. So, the thinking goes, if humans might develop the ability to recognise faces and hands because babies see a lot of these things and the brain has neurons that focus on learning such important objects, then perhaps artificial intelligence could learn similarly. So what did the AI learn was important from looking at 10 million YouTube video images? Alongside the human face it learned to recognise the cat face. The study reached a broad audience of non-scientists because it seemed to offer hard (and slightly uncanny) evidence for something long suspected: the internet is made of cats.2 Cat images and in particular cat videos are a major genre of popular web culture and are generally believed to be a common but insignificant feature of the new media landscape. From Keyboard Cat (2007) to Cat Alarm Clock (2012), cat videos are an enduring staple of internet humour but, with a few exceptions, have prompted little scholarship.3 Jody Berland has written persuasively about the iconography and posthuman implications of still images of cats circulated online, considering the ambivalent pleasures of the ‘young, furry and innocent’. 4 Berland’s article usefully resists the more radical critiques of interspecies relationships, positing the particularly intimate models of kinship offered by the human– cat bond. Cats are not domestic in quite the same way as dogs and their liminal relationship to human space creates, for her, its own cultural history and biopolitics. More recently, some media scholars have begun to pay attention to the cat video as a genre.5 But considering the centrality of the cat video to contemporary

Cats and the Moving Image

visual culture, the literature is as yet minimal. Here, I argue that the new media dominance of the cat video is neither insignificant nor random but rather that cats have a necessary and historical relationship to the moving image. We can trace the ‘cat video’ back to the earliest days of cinema, and we find in moving images of cats a specifically cinematic form of pleasure. We might say that cat videos circulate virally like the toxoplasma parasite that propels humans to like cats. Cat love is a viral behaviour transmitted by screen cultures. This essay proposes a relationship between the cat and cinema, viewed at the intersection of a series of gazes. First, there is a gaze at the cat, in which, as the Google study evidences, the cat becomes a cinematic object second only to humans. Second, there is the look of the cat within film, a gaze that experimental film-makers have found less disturbing than did Derrida, as the feline gaze forms a recurring theme in post-war experimental cinema.6 Finally, there is the gaze of the cat at cinema: the question of spectatorship. If film theory has been based largely on human concepts of psychic investment in the screen, what happens when cats look at moving images? Among these three gazes we can locate feline cinematicity. Not simply a question of representation, the cat is entwined with the broader social and psychic apparatus of cinema. The Google study bespeaks not only the predominance of cats in contemporary video culture but the strangeness of a computer viewing the endless text of YouTube, a nonhuman spectator whose gaze can be imaged, and who teaches us that human culture has the face of a cat. In this essay I argue that in cinema cats are not avatars for the human but contain a unique capacity to remove us from human vision and to capture the otherness of cinematic life.

Gazing at cats Cats emerge as the animal par excellence of the mechanically reproduced image. Although they are represented frequently enough in European painting, they do not exert the same imaginative force on earlier modes of image-making. Unlike dogs and horses, cat painting is not a significant art historical genre. The reasons for this lack are no doubt manifold: histories of domestic cat ownership and genre painting, and, perhaps, the nature of the feline body. Cats often seem to resist representation: their bodies are so plastic and their musculature often hidden by fluff, and, unless they’re asleep, they rarely sit still long enough to sketch. Although there are important instances of feline-themed art from Da Vinci’s cat sketches to Gainsborough’s Six Studies of a Cat (1765–70) and Oide To- ko-’s Cat Watching a Spider (1888–92), painted cats are often marginal to the frame, or even slightly wonky-looking (work by Dürer, Hogarth and Goya comes to mind). But in the age of photography cats take on a new cultural role, their bodies used to figure modernity’s themes of movement and the street. We see the effects of this shift in the elegant cat silhouettes of Manet but its direct appearance is in cinema, where the new figurability of unpredictable feline motion articulates the close affinity of cats 43

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

to the discourses of cinematic modernity. The relationship of animals to theories of the cinematic is well documented: from Topsy the elephant’s death in Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) to André Bazin’s essay on bullfighting, animal death has a unique place in film theory.7 However, cats are more often avatars of life: as early as La Petite fille et son chat (The Little Girl and Her Cat, 1899), cats animate discourses of cinematic contingency and vitalism. Lumière’s film might be called an early cat video and it quickly establishes the genre’s pleasures in movement and the display of unbiddable feline animation. It begins with the titular child in a chair, feeding treats to a large, bushy cat. The cat quickly gets distracted, looks off screen to the right and jumps off the chair and out of the frame. Suddenly the cat reappears, clearly having been thrown back into shot by an unseen human. Now he is happy to be fed treats, and indeed grabs the girl’s hand with a paw, pulling the food closer. But what occurs in the cat’s brief trip off screen is an early lesson in cinematic contingency. As relatively untrainable animals, cats can’t be relied upon to do what the film-maker wants. Even a pet cat being bribed with copious amounts of food is just as likely to notice something interesting elsewhere and leave, and so a cute actuality about a little girl and her cat becomes a narrative about on- and off-screen space, about desire, about the unpredictable; in short, about unbiddable life. As much as the wind in the leaves or the fly climbing up the windowpane in Jules et Jim (1962), Lumière’s wayward cat instantiates the exhilaration of a cinematic life not quite in human control. Cats recur in early cinema’s exploration of cinematic vision: in Grandma’s Reading Glasses (1900) we see a close-up of a cat’s head as one of the items grandma looks at and in George Albert Smith’s The Sick Kitten (1903) the same cat appears as the mother of the kitten tended to by a little girl and boy. Vicky Lebeau cites both La Petite fille and The Sick Kitten as examples of early cinema’s project of ‘visualizing the child’.8 I don’t think these feline appearances evince a similar attempt to visualise the cat as much as they demonstrate the extent to which felinity maps cinema’s project of self-articulation, what we might characterise as the tension between Siegfried Kracauer’s realist and formative tendencies.9 Although The Sick Kitten folds its subject into a fictional narrative of children playing doctor, it really depends on the indexical pleasures of a kitten lapping milk in close-up. Further evidence of the affinity between cats and Kracauer’s realism can be found in its opposite, The Boxing Cats (1894). Here, the formative trickery of a black background hiding people holding the cats’ leashes parallels the unnatural way the cats are forced to fight ‘like humans’ with boxing gloves. The awkwardness of these deformations suggests that forcing cats to act human is not only cruel by modern-day standards but also essentially uncinematic. The enduring appeal of the cinematic cat can be weighed by the proliferating subgenres of cat video in the age of YouTube: Ninja Cat (2008), Dramatic Cat (2008), Inception Cat (2010), etc.10 The most significant cat video series stars Maru – a Scottish fold cat whose YouTube videos (made by Mugumogu) have been viewed over 158 million times – and whose oeuvre corresponds closely to 44

Cats and the Moving Image

the qualities that Kracauer associated with the cinematic.11 For Kracauer, ‘Film…is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality’ and viewers of the Maru series take pleasure in exactly these recording and revealing functions.12 This is a real cat, living in Japan, and the videos record a transient fragment of physical reality. Beyond simply recording, they also reveal things normally unseen, giving us privileged access to an uncommon feline lifeworld. We enter this unknown world, the private domestic space of a human we never see on screen, and take pleasure in Maru’s sensate life. In Big Box and Maru (2009), the setting is a minimally decorated modern living room in which we watch Maru in a series of long takes attempting to jump into a large cardboard box.13 At first he fails to propel himself high enough, even after jumping onto a table to get a higher angle, and we see him smash comically into the side of the box. At the video’s midpoint, he makes it into the box with an impressive vertical spring, and after this point the editing speeds up, showing Maru leaping in and out of the box repeatedly. Kracauer argues that although ‘the hunting ground of the motion picture camera is in principle unlimited’, some subjects ‘exert a particular attraction on the medium’.14 These cinematic subjects include movement such as the chase, dance and nascent motion.15 Maru offers all three: he chases boxes and toys, his movements are balletic in the sense that we take pleasure in the elegant physicality of his musculature, and, most directly, we anticipate and enjoy nascent motion in his coiling, balancing, teetering and finally leaping from tabletop onto box. Another cinematic subject for Kracauer is inanimate objects: films tell stories not only with actors but with things, where the camera allows objects to become narrative players. Maru is obsessed with boxes: he will attempt to fit his entire body into smaller and smaller boxes, squashing meaty haunches into not-quite-bigenough spaces. The Maru videos produce cinematic suspense in its most primal form from the question of whether Maru will fit into a box. The box is Maru’s love object and antagonist, thwarting and rewarding him in turn. In A Box and Maru 8 (2011), he jumps repeatedly into a small cube-shaped box.16 At first, he leaps headfirst into the box, only to have the whole thing tip over so that he flips and rolls, tail in the air. It’s pure physical comedy, with Maru’s repeated wipeouts

A Box and Maru 8 (19 June 2011), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbi edguhyvM (accessed 15 June 2015) 45

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

provoking spectatorial sympathy. Finally, though, he manages to force himself into the box and sits up proudly. For a second, he looks directly at the camera. It’s a moment of triumph. Like Lumière’s cat, Maru videos deploy the affinities of cinema for what Kracauer terms the unstaged and the flow of life.17 In Mask Maru 2 (2009), we open on Maru sticking his head into a paper bag then spending a few seconds working it off again.18 After a dissolve, the bag is back on his head and he spends the next three minutes wandering his spacious apartment. We see more than usual of Maru’s home here: the white sofa, TV showing a baseball game and Japanese screens between rooms. In the video’s most cinematic moment, Maru walks through a gap in the screens to the next room and disappears out of shot. For several long seconds, we watch an empty room with the screens forming an internal frame to the room behind. It’s a moment formally reminiscent of Fassbinder or perhaps Ozu. Eventually, Maru reappears, paper bag still over his head, walking vaguely back across the internal frame, seemingly in his own world. We’re unusually distanced from Maru’s perspective here, reminded of the sheer alterity of a creature whose pleasures involve a crisp brown paper bag over the head. Maru’s owner may have set up his encounter with the bag, but what transpires is unpredictable and aleatory, a flow of life in which we take pleasure in waiting for the cat’s unpredictable return to our vision. Maru videos thus contain the central cinematic pleasures of narrative (will Maru make it into the big box?) and spectacle (just look at that cat walking around with a bag stuck on his head!) but they also fulfil the promise of the cinematic to tether technological motion to organic life. In 2012, the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis curated a cat video film festival that was in part crowdsourced, suggesting the proximity, for audiences at least, of public culture, film exhibition and new media genres.19 But if there is a large popular audience for the cute cat video, this very popularity also engenders acute anxieties. Christian psychologist and self-help guru Gregory Jantz selects Maru as an example of internet addiction: It all started with those Maru, the Japanese cat, videos. All of you ended up talking about them for weeks. People you hardly spoke to at work came up and asked you to watch them. What’s not to like about a fluffy, rotund kitty and all those crazy boxes? … It feels good. It does feel good. Each experience is like a drug hit, a thrill … . The more you do, the closer you come to that line, the line over which impulsive activity becomes addictive.20

From a conservative viewpoint, the pleasures of Maru, like those of cinema, are downright dangerous. If cat videos speak to the essential cinematicity of the cat, they also point us toward the cultural anxieties provoked by unbridled cinematic life. What could be seductive and sinful about fluff? (Read on: Carolee Schneemann has the answer …) 46

Cats and the Moving Image

Jantz speaks to an obviously reactionary moralism but the cat video also triangulates more intellectually sophisticated critiques. Steve Baker’s Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (2001) considers cultural representations of cute cats as part of the mentalité that allows us to eat meat and abuse animals; in other words, from a certain animal rights’ perspective these images constitute a symbolic violence that contributes to what he sees as real-life violence. Citing Jack Zipes, he refers to this cultural superstructure as ‘our Walt Disney consciousness’ and for Baker, following Adorno and Horkheimer, the consciousness produced by the cute cat image does the work of ideological deception.21 Here, the ‘cute cat’ is exemplary of the stereotyping within which cultural discourses about animals circulate. However, it is not straightforwardly deceptive: the cute cat forms a semiotic cluster that does the ideological work of Barthesian myth. For Baker, we are all implicated in this modern mentalité, our attitudes to animals formed within what he describes as its narrow boundaries, which makes the careful analysis of popular cultural representations all the more urgent.22 New media theorist Ethan Zuckerman takes a somewhat more positive view in his cute cat theory of digital activism, but the cat is still a signifier of, at best, non-meaning. Zuckerman argues that internet 2.0 is used first for cute cats and then for activism; by embracing the fact that people want to post cat videos, we thus build technologies that are useful for activists.23 Here, cat videos are instrumentalised as exemplary of banal user-generated content, significant only because they inadvertently create the conditions for real political speech. It’s not that Zuckerman is wrong, exactly, but that this argument is so similar to many other iterations of how popular culture is at best meaningless, at worst actively regressive. What Jantz, Baker and Zuckerman share is an attention to cat images and a recognition of their cultural potency. Decrying cute cats is thus a vector of another recurring aspect of the cinematic, viz the frequency with which critics view it as morally dangerous or ideologically suspect. Luckily, one contemporary film-maker at least has recognised the inherent cinematicity of the cat. Contrary to cute cat theory, Chris Marker insists that the cinematic cat can be political. Marker’s cats famously stand in for the director as a marker of authorship (when asked for a photograph, he would send out a drawing of his cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte), and, as Adrian Danks has described, cats appear across his films as simultaneous figures of the legibility and ungraspability of the image.24 But Marker also sees cats as markers of political activism. In his epic film of radical political movements, Le Fond de l’air est rouge aka Grin without a Cat (1977), he says ‘A cat is never on the side of power.’ In The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004) a cat makes a visual claim on droit de cité when the grafitti tag of M. Chat recurs across Paris alongside a wave of leftist political demonstrations. In the wake of Marker’s death, grieving cineastes posted images of his cats across Facebook, including M. Chat saying ‘make cats, not war’. Marker has worked in photography, film and new media, but the very low-tech form of spray paint on walls is close to his heart as a form of political image-making. 47

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Of course, M. Chat is not a real cat. But the issue of real cats speaks precisely to Marker’s understanding of feline cinematicity. M. Chat is a still image that ‘moves’ when filmed, and that moves the viewer to emotion and action. He articulates the relationship between the still and moving image that Marker’s work constantly traverses. In La Jetée (The Jetty, 1962) the relationship between still and moving is the very form of cinema: ‘real birds, real cats, real graves’. Each thing is a cinematic thing. Graves point to the essential deathliness of cinema, the image from the past, always already lost. This is the central figure of La Jetée after all, the man who foresees his own death. But it is also a film about the momentariness of life and the need to live in and for moments of movement. The film’s key moment is the woman opening her eye and, even though it is a fake cinematic life, still images run fast enough that we believe them to be real. And this is the cinematic life that the protagonist chooses to return to – not the future in which humanity has been reborn but the past of real cats. Marker returns frequently to the cat as cinematic subject. Chat écoutant la musique (Cat Listening to Music, 1990) is at once a typical Marker short and a classic cat video. It begins with close-ups of the face and paws of a cat asleep on a keyboard, continuing at a slow pace, moving from photographed cat to live one, from out-of-focus to focused image, and watching closely the small movements of paw and ear that signal feline attention and happiness. The image is full of indices. There are the photographs of cat and human propped on the back of the keyboard; there are the blinking lights that indicate sound levels; and the feline bodily signs of listening and pleasure. The subject of the film is attention; both the titular attention that the cat pays to the music and the attention that we as human spectators must pay to understand the cat. We learn to read the affective semiotics of ears, eyes and claws. Marker’s cinema insists that cats mean, and that they mean partially through our process of paying attention to them. This is as true for the real cat Guillaume as it is for the drawn M. Chat. We must pay attention to when cats appear and to what they signify.

Looking through cats American experimental cinema has paid particularly close attention to cats. If early cinematic cats and contemporary cat videos emphasise the contingency and vitalism of cinema, New American Cinema turned to cats as avatars of cinema’s sensuous materiality and its ability to see the world anew. Film-makers from Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid to Stan Brakhage and Carolee Schneemann consider what happens to cinema when cats look. Hammid’s The Private Life of a Cat (1944), which he made with Maya Deren in their West Village apartment, is the first of several attempts in experimental cinema to produce for human spectators an experience of feline vision. The film follows the film-makers’ two (unnamed) cats through the birth of a litter of kittens: no humans appear in the film and it is told entirely from the cats’ point of view (POV). It begins by suturing the spectator 48

Cats and the Moving Image

into narrative space through a play of looks – he looks at her, she looks at him – and a romantic relationship is created through point of view. The editing is utterly classical, except the looks through which we look are cats’ looks. The construction of feline point of view continues with a shot/reverse-shot structure. She seeks a place to give birth and we see her looking up followed by a low-angle shot pointed up toward some high cupboards. The camera takes up the cat’s optical POV, an ordinary strategy in classical cinema but here made strange by asking the spectator to look as a cat. We look around the room, move toward a box and hop inside. Hammid’s cat looks in a familiar way, and indeed the film’s experimental quality partly resides in applying classical narrative mechanisms to nonhuman subjects. However, cutting across this classicism, something else happens in the film’s close-up shots of the kittens. Kracauer considers the cinematic to inhere in things normally unseen, including the very small scale, and we experience this shift of scale in the sequence of two-week-old kittens.25 The effect of camera vision on tiny kittens is a disintegration of the look in favour of an emphasis on texture, furriness and sensation. The kittens are wobbly, blind at first, and the image is filled with rolling limbs and licking tongues. Scholars such as Jennifer Barker and Laura Marks have emphasised the sensory qualities of cinema and Private Life imagines the cinematic apparatus not as a human body but a cat body, offering tactile pleasures of fluffiness and muscular pleasures of climbing and leaping.26 As the kittens drink milk, close-ups create an image of rhythmic lapping, with happiness visualised in the soppy texture of milky chins. As they learn to walk we oscillate between the sensory blur of the kitten and the narrative space of the cat. The film represents feline subjectivity not only through optical point-of-view structures but also via this entrée into the tactile lifeworld of the kitten. Cinematic subjectivity is not only a question of looking relations (which Hammid accurately pinpoints as organised around the heteronormative family) but of sensory snorgling. This feline sensorium demonstrates the proximity of the cinematic to intimate life. This interest in cat perspective as sensory, tactile and proximate is extended in Stan Brakhage’s cat films, which cross his career from Night Cats (1956), through

The Private Life of a Cat (1944) 49

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Pasht (1965) to Max (2002). The best known is Cat’s Cradle (1959), which views domestic encounters among Brakhage, his wife Jane and another couple – friends Carolee Schneemann and James Tenney – through the viewpoint of Schneemann’s cat Kitch. Brakhage introduces the cat very early on in the film with a close-up of her head and blurry extreme close-ups of fur; the intersection of orangey light and fur producing rich surface patterns and textures. Kitch is like the wallpaper, bedspread and painting – all patterned surfaces we see in fragments. But she also has a POV, where the centrality of her close-ups produces a sense that she organises our vision. Unlike Private Life, though, editing does not create explicit optical POV and many shots imply the film-maker’s vision more than the cat’s. (For instance, the well-known gender critiques of the film point out that Brakhage is carefully framed lounging and looking cool while Carolee Schneemann is forced to wear an apron and work in the kitchen.) Brakhage mingles feline and human points of view, but it is the cat who offers what Brakhage terms the untutored eye. Whereas those shots most implicated in Brakhage’s vision tell culturally overdetermined narratives about gendered domesticity, Kitch centres proximities of light and shade, textile and body parts and deeply saturated colour, evoking a sensory immediacy that refuses symbolic meaning. In an interview conducted shortly before his death, Brakhage turned again to a cat to explicate the untutored eye: And all that shimmering and movement and gradations of color, imagine a world before – this is the point – imagine a world before the beginning was the word. [Max the cat enters] Hey that was a good entrance, cat! [laughs] Look at the shimmering across that cat’s body … . Look at the brown blacks and the sheen of the blue black coming up, bouncing off. Look at how he enrobes himself, Max the cat, with the beauty of all that gradation. Without giving it a thought, how do I know what he’s thinking. Huh? You like that Maxie-moo? All that massive, shimmering, feathery, fragile, splintering, weaving, unweaving, revolving world in which we move and live, I began to be aware of it in some overwhelming sense so I could no longer disregard it.27

Cinema, for Brakhage, is uniquely able to return to us an ability to see the world that we have lost and cats are intimately woven into this vision as both subjects and objects. Indeed, it is their complication of the subject/object split that makes them such compelling avatars for cinematic vision: Max evokes both awe at his body’s ability to screen light and colour and affection for his real or imagined thought processes. The most sustained intersection of feline point of view and American experimental film is developed by Carolee Schneemann, the feminist artist who was unwillingly represented wearing an apron in Cat’s Cradle. Schneemann’s work has consistently interrogated the materiality, erotics and political force of the body, breaking down artist/model, subject/object and figure/ground binaries. But folded 50

Cats and the Moving Image

into this feminist deconstruction of patriarchal art practice is a troubling of the human/animal boundary, most controversially in Infinity Kisses (1981–8), her photo series and video of herself kissing her cat Cluny. For Schneemann, these images of ‘intimacy between cat and woman … raise questions of interspecies communication, as well as triggering unexpected cultural taboos’.28 Schneemann’s films, and in particular Fuses (1967), locate the cat in multiple positions across the cinematic field: Kitch is at once an avatar of the artist, subject and object of the look, or even material, where cat hair was stuck to the thickly layered, dyed and collaged film. Schneemann works to figure embodied desire differently and the cat, like the woman’s body, operates as a material, desiring, kinetic field. Kitch is a recurring presence in her films – not a marginal figure but a participant in Schneemann’s avant-gardist breakdown of art and life. Fuses is the first of the films I’ve discussed to credit the cat: Kitch is listed alongside Schneemann and her lover Tenney in the opening title. The film is a complexly layered meditation on female desire that presents Schneemann and Tenney having sex as Kitch looks at them and out of a window. The cat appears early on, as does a shot of a window, curtain flapping, that implies a feline perspective. Cats frequently look out of windows and the film returns repeatedly to shots of trees outside, a subject of at least equal interest to Kitch as the sexual life of her owner. Like Brakhage, Schneemann does not labour to bind the spectator closely to a feline point of view. But whereas Cat’s Cradle produces a tension between human and nonhuman vision, Fuses enfolds Kitch’s perspective with Schneemann’s into a domestic intimacy that overlays erotics, creativity and nonhuman affective bonds. We look with Schneemann and with Kitch, and through Kitch at Schneemann. As M. M. Serra and Kathryn Ramey put it, Kitch is at once herself as well as the representative of the gaze, the eyes of the film-maker/editor, and the presence of the viewer/spectator. Kitch embodies not just the seeing eye, but also the internal eye of the artist.29

Like the mechanical eye of the camera suspended over a chair, Kitch watches the lovers with disinterest. She is an untutored eye, but one explicitly free from oppressive sexual ideologies. Her presence marks their lives together and Fuses merges how she might view the world of bodies and windows and trees and fucking with the dispersed sensorium of female sexuality. Like Private Life, Fuses values the intimacy of the domestic, or the interior worlds that exist within the everyday. The avant-garde discourse on the everyday meets cinematic life in Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–6), an epic double-projection film on the subject of the cat’s death. According to J. Carlos Kase, Schneemann expected the seventeen-year old Kitch to die soon when she began the project of documenting her last weeks. But Kitch lived for another three years, so that the film took on an open-ended quality entirely in keeping with Schneemann’s diaristic practice.30 The film includes 51

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Schneemann and her partner Anthony McCall discussing everyday things, and Schneemann talking about women in art. Kitch’s life encompasses feminism and domesticity but the usual organisation of human/animal relations is reversed so that we focus on Kitch’s experience. And although Kitch dies, feline cinematicity focuses on everyday life not death. The film is an elegy that uses the resurrective power of cinema to bring Kitch back. We watch her playing in the yard and eating fish, intercut with nude scenes between Schneemann and McCall. These are transient moments of a lost past, but moments that can be re-experienced as cinematic life. Schneemann reveals the cat as a very particular type of cinematic creature. She embodies intimacy, affection and nonhuman bonds. She bespeaks a cinematic utopia of vision uncluttered by patriarchal morality yet open to sensation. And she is fragile, a brief life that we must treasure for we experience its finitude.

Feline spectatorship The idea of feline spectatorship is, at first glance, ridiculous. Surely only human viewers are sutured into the apparatus of cinema? But cats do watch moving images, and humans from YouTube audiences to neuroscientists have demonstrated interest in that vision. This twenty-first-century emergence of cat spectatorship discourse asks us to reconsider the relationship of subjectivity to the moving image. A key feature of the feline gaze is its activity. If cats embody cinematic life, they do so from both sides of the screen. When cats enjoy watching screens they also paw at the image, trying to catch the movement, often looking behind the screen for whatever has vanished into off-screen space. True believers in what Kracauer termed the endlessness of the cinematic image, its implication of a world beyond the frame, cats search for diegetic space above, below and behind the screen.31 Forever the apocryphal naïve audience who ran from Lumière’s arriving train, cats believe in images and chase them round the back of the screen. They offer a vision of an all-consuming pleasure in images that is no longer available to us directly. This avid engagement is one of the reasons that human spectators enjoy watching feline spectatorship. We like looking

The author’s cat watching nature programmes on television 52

Cats and the Moving Image

at cats but we also like looking at cats looking at screens. Watching cats watching screens is a relay that is captured by the Infinite Cat Project, a website that creates a potentially infinitely recursive series of images of cats photographed looking toward the computer at the previous image of a cat looking at a computer and so on. But still photography can’t capture the activity of feline spectatorship, so the cat spectatorship subgenre of YouTube video emerged. There are over 11,000 YouTube videos of cats watching television screens. Quand un chat joue aux jeux vidéo (When a Cat Plays Video Games) is exemplary of the form. Here, a young Siamese cat watches the video game Duck Hunt and bats energetically at the screen trying to catch the flying ducks. When the duck flies out of the frame, the cat looks over the top of the television. This activity follows Vivian Sobchack’s description of her own cat’s television viewing, in which she considers ‘the representation of a moving car taken by it, perhaps, to be the presence of a moving insect’. For Sobchack, the cat doesn’t process the images as anything other than motion and the screen therefore ‘does not become for my cat a place of representation’.32 Cats certainly don’t understand the concept of representation, but they can process representational images. My own cat only watches animal shows on television and leaves in boredom if she sees too many shots of human presenters. It’s big cats that excite her and, although she does walk behind the screen to look for those elusive snow leopards, it seems clear that she can read the image for content. Similarly, in many YouTube videos, cats hunt recognisable images like birds and lions. There are many variants: the nonprofit sanctuary Big Cat Rescue has a channel with videos of their cats – one shows a tiger watching other tigers and leopards on a television just outside his enclosure. A video by Taulep zooms out to reveal eight cats keenly eyeing a nature show on television, squashed together on a table to get a better view. These cats stage something about the strangeness of feline spectatorship – a nonhuman eye watching a nonhuman eye – but also its vivacious and intimate pleasures. The iPad has spurred an even more interactive version of this subgenre. Tablets are designed for interactivity and paws work just as well as fingers. Thus several iPad apps aimed at cats have been released, with Game for Cats (2011) the best known. The game is designed with feline players in mind, not so much in the design of the mice and fish that dart across the screen but in the relationship of onscreen and off-screen space and the unpredictable movements of the targets. Some cats undoubtedly enjoy playing the game but the real audience is of course their human owners who enjoy watching feline interactive spectatorship. Popular website Buzzfeed posted a cat iPad challenge, comparing several videos of cats playing Game for Cats and ranking the cats’ performances.33 Cat-food manufacturer Friskies also offers kitty iPad games, including Tasty Treasures Hunt (2011), based on cat food, and You vs. Cat (2011), which bills itself as the first dual-species game for tablets. There is another utopian vision of animal–human bonds here, more commercialised than Schneemann’s, to be sure, but an everyday iteration of technologically intersecting human and feline lives. 53

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Popular and scientific interest in feline vision intersect in the catcam, a feline cinematic eye enabled by the technological development of cheap, tiny cameras. With the catcam, cats move from spectator to film-maker. Beginning with a German DIY project to attach a small camera to a roaming cat’s collar to see where it went, catcam is now sold as a consumer product and has recently been turned into a documentary film called CatCam the Movie (2012). The University of Georgia led a wildlife ecology and management study into outdoor cat movement by attaching catcams to dozens of local cats and viewing their footage. Here, although cats’ films are viewed by Sonia Hernandez and her team purely instrumentally, as evidence of their ‘risk behaviours’, the project’s co-sponsorship by National Geographic and its widespread media coverage illustrates that a popular audience also asks what cats see.34 ‘What do cats see?’ is an appealing question because although they are domestic animals with whom we share intimate life, their private lives are unknown and their vision, we imagine, opens onto alterity. (We might contrast cats to dogs, whose movements we mostly control and whom we suspect see the world in a predictable way, as imagined in Up, 2009.) As well as asking what cats see, recent scholarship has considered how they see. Gudrun U. Moeller et al. have studied how feline vision is different from that of humans.35 Their experimental process involved both feline film-making and feline (and human) film spectatorship. The process involved hooking three cats up to cameras mounted on their heads and letting them roam various outside spaces. Then, both cats and humans watched the resulting films while attached to an eye-movement monitor that could record how they looked at the filmic space. Some cinematic issues arise from this study. First, the centrality of recognisable film-making and film viewing techniques to the experiment is notable. Moeller shows stills from the films made by the cats as well as the cat ‘cinema’ in which they watch the films. It doesn’t quite look like a human cinema since the cats are placed in a box to restrict their movement but still we see a familiar apparatus with a ‘seating’ space in front of a screen on which we see a landscape image. In order to understand feline vision, the researchers must turn cats into first cinematographers and then into spectators. Second, Moeller and her team have an interesting relationship to the discourse of cinema. They call the recordings made by the cats ‘natural movies’. Does the word ‘natural’ aim to remove the connotations of artfulness and intentionality suggested by the word ‘movie’? Probably, but from a film studies perspective we are reminded of histories of naturalism, the quest for total cinema and the many instances of film-makers and anthropologists giving cameras to ‘natural’ subjects in order to access primitive points of view. ‘How does the Other see?’ is a question that has been central to cinema’s intersection with colonial thought and here it is extended to the study of animal life. The symbolic violence of this question is literalised in the study, in which the cats were given a cranial implant that functioned as a mount for the camera and helped fix them to the eye-movement monitor. Although this procedure obviated the need for invasive eye surgery, it gives a whole new life to the coercive qualities of apparatus theory. 54

Cats and the Moving Image

Cats are thus imbricated in cinema’s politics as much as its pleasures. Across the spaces of feline cinematicity, from the whimsical to the experimental, we find a recurrence of cinematic modes of vision as well as a process of reconsidering the relationship of subjectivity to image. What cats see, how cats see and what pleasures they take in the image emerge as questions for new media technologies that can only be answered using the forms and processes of the cinematic. This engagement is exemplified by Pieterjan Grandry’s Analogue Animated Gif Player (2011), an installation that mixes the nineteenth-century technology of the phenakistoscope with the internet phenomenon of the animated GIF. Grandry’s device uses a rotary disk to make an animated kitten nod its head. If the cat can mediate between pre- and post-cinematic technologies, it is because the cat stands in unique relation to cinematic vision. The history of cats in cinema takes us from a simple pleasure in bodily movement to an inquiry into pleasure, affect and subjectivity. Like cinema, cats look in a radically nonhuman way that is, nonetheless, intimately close to our lives. It is this look, I argue, that is promised by the proliferation of cats in online visual culture: Maru, we might say, embodies the feline cinematicity of new media images.36

Notes 1. Quoc V. Le et al., ‘Building High-level Features Using Large Scale Unsupervised Learning’, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning (Edinburgh, 2012) http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/ en//archive/unsupervised_icml2012.pdf. 2. Rathergoodstuff, ‘The Internet Is Made of Cats’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= zi8VTeDHjcM. 3. Keyboard Cat, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J—-aiyznGQ; Cat Alarm Clock, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aTagDSnclk. 4. Jody Berland, ‘Cat and Mouse: Iconographies of Nature and Desire’, Cultural Studies vol. 22 no. 3–4 (2008), p. 432. 5. See for instance Radha O’Meara, ‘Do Cats Know They Rule YouTube? Surveillance and the Pleasures of Cat Videos’, Media Culture Journal vol. 17 no. 2 (2014). 6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. MarieLouise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 7. André Bazin, ‘Death Every Afternoon’, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham, NC Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 27–31. 8. Vicky Lebeau, Childhood and Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), p. 23. 9. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 10. Ninja Cat, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzzjgBAaWZw; Dramatic Cat, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plWnm7UpsXk; Inception Cat, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLDSE7RHvno. 11. For Maru videos, see http://www.youtube.com/user/mugumogu?feature=watch. 55

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

12. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 28. 13. Big Box and Maru, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdhLQCYQ-nQ. 14. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 28. 15. Ibid., p. 41. 16. A Box and Maru 8, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbiedguhyvM. 17. Kracauer, Theory of Film, pp. 60, 71. 18. Mask Maru 2, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofrSio_jZO0. 19. See http://www.walkerart.org/openfield/programs/internet-cat-video-film-festival/ (accessed 31 August 2012). The museum was at pains to point out that the festival wasn’t part of the film and video department. However, the summer series event drew some of the museum’s largest ever crowds. 20. Gregory L. Jantz with Ann McMurray, Hooked: The Pitfalls of Media, Technology and Social Networking (Lake Mary, FL: Charisma House, 2012), p. 53. 21. Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 25; Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 8; Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997). 22. Baker, Picturing the Beast, pp. 28–9. 23. Ethan Zuckerman, ‘The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism’, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2008/03/08/the-cute-cat-theory-talk-at-etech/. 24. Adrian Danks, ‘The Cats in the Hats Come Back; or ‘At Least They’ll See the Cats’: Pussycat Poetics and the Work of Chris Marker’, Senses of Cinema (17 September 2012), http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/the-cats-in-the-hats-come-backor-at-least-theyll-see-the-cats-pussycat-poetics-and-the-work-of-chris-marker/. 25. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 46. 26. Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 27. Pip Chodorov, ‘Stan Brakhage with Pip Chodorov’, Brooklyn Rail, http://www. brooklynrail.org/2008/03/express/stan-brakhage-with-pip-chodorov. 28. Carolee Schneemann, Imaging Her Erotics: Essays, Interviews, Projects (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 264. In 2010, Schneemann used an image from Infinity Kisses as a promotional T-shirt for MIX, the New York Experimental Queer Film Festival, with the caption ‘love the one you’re with’. Schneemann’s interspecies kiss reminds us of the queerness of cinematicity, its ability to engender unexpected seductions and to trigger erotics across identitarian boundaries. 29. M. M. Serra and Kathryn Ramey, ‘Eye/Body: The Cinematic Paintings of Carolee Schneemann’, in Robin Blaetz (ed.), Women’s Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 112. 30. J. Carlos Kase, ‘Kitch’s Last Meal: Art, Life and Quotidiana in the Observational Cinema of Carolee Schneemann’, Millennium Film Journal vol. 54 (Fall 2011), pp. 72–83. 31. Kracauer, Theory of Film, p. 63. 56

Cats and the Moving Image

32. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 53. 33. Josh Fjelstad, ‘Cats Playing iPad Games: Showdown’, http://www.buzzfeed.com/ fjelstud/cats-playing-ipad-challenge. 34. Sonia Hernandez et al., Kitty Cams Project, http://www.kittycams.uga.edu/ research.html. 35. Gudrun U. Moeller et al., ‘Interactions between Eye Movement Systems in Cats and Humans’, Experimental Brain Research vol. 157 (2004), pp. 215–24. 36. I’d like to thank Jennifer Proctor, Andy Medhurst, Margaret Schwartz and Ana Lopez for keeping me updated on cat videos as I researched this project; Alice Bardan and Oona Mekas for help locating films and cats; and Carolee Schneemann for crucial information on Kitch, the most significant cat in experimental cinema.

57

Adam Lowenstein

3 Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion Surrealist and Digital Posthumanisms Something is happening to cinema (or at least the idea of cinema) in our digital, computerised age of ‘new media’ that makes its twenty-first-century existence quite different from what it was previously. That much most film studies scholars can agree on.1 But what is happening, exactly? A host of discourses and phenomena have emerged to account for what cinema is now, or what it is becoming. Globalisation. Convergence. Virtuality. Video games. Digital production. Web video. All of these concepts have attracted well-deserved attention within film studies, but another discourse that has flourished in the digital era has generated comparatively little conversation: posthumanism. According to N. Katherine Hayles’s influential definition, ‘In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.’2 Hayles is rightly suspicious of how posthuman thought tends to valorise disembodied information systems at the expense of human embodiment and all its complex particularities: ‘Embodiment has been systematically downplayed or erased in the cybernetic construction of the posthuman in ways that have not occurred in other critiques of the liberal humanist subject, especially in feminist and postcolonial theories.’3 She admits that her ‘nightmare’ is ‘a culture of posthumans who regard their bodies as fashion accessories rather than the ground of being’, but she also holds out a ‘dream’ of the posthuman ‘that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality’.4 Cinema is nowhere to be found in Hayles’s study, despite the fact that science fiction films have powerfully shaped popular conceptions of the posthuman for more than a century. Indeed, it is doubtful that the most iconic posthuman figure, the cyborg, would have nearly the theoretical and cultural resonance it does today without science fiction cinema’s long line of fantastic life-forms. So where is film in the dream and nightmare mappings of the posthuman? I want to think through cinema’s relation to the posthuman by turning not to the cyborg, but to the animal. My contention is that if posthumanism, as Hayles claims, becomes most problematic when it veers toward disembodiment, then there

Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion

is much to learn about the posthuman from the animal, that most thoroughly embodied ‘prehuman’. It might even be the case that, as Cary Wolfe argues, posthumanism should be regarded first and foremost as a ‘mode of thought’ that engages ‘the problem of anthropocentrism and speciesism and how practices of thinking and reading must change in light of their critique’.5 So if the issue of embodiment – whether embraced or resisted, animalised or mechanised – is at the heart of posthumanism, then cinema’s virtual and material essences, its simultaneous presence and absence, its mechanical technologies so often mobilised to simulate and/or extend human perception, offer rich soil for growing the theoretical implications of the posthuman. Conversely, discourses of the posthuman may also help bring more precision to our understanding of cinematic spectatorship in a digital era. This essay presents two different examples of what I will be referring to as posthuman spectatorship. In other words, I will compare two cases that outline the hypothetical possibilities of interactions between viewers and film-related media at the intersection of cinema and the posthuman. The first example comes from YouTube, a website that launched in 2005 and has since become the most wellknown hub for short videos on the internet.6 In April 2008, a two-minute video entitled Christian the Lion was posted on YouTube and caused such a sensation that it was later broadcast on popular US television talk shows such as The View (1997–) and The Today Show (1952–) and inspired a tie-in book publication. The second example is Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones, 1950), Luis Buñuel’s celebrated return to the main stage of international cinema after nearly two decades of invisibility (but not inactivity) following his surrealist masterworks Un Chien andalou (1929), L’Âge d’Or (The Golden Age, 1930) and Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1933). I will argue that Christian the Lion’s digital posthumanism can be strategically challenged by returning to Los Olvidados’s surrealist posthumanism, resulting in an illumination of the possibilities for posthuman spectatorship.

The animal in posthumanism Historian of science Lorraine Daston argues that current prevailing attitudes toward anthropomorphism (at least among intellectuals) as an impossibility, as something taken seriously only by the childish, is dependent on formulations of perspective as sensory experience, subjectivity and sympathy that arose only in the eighteenth century. In medieval times, angelology posited the study of nonhuman angelic intelligences in ways not dependent on these formulations, where what we now regard as common-sense demarcations between subjectivity and objectivity had not yet taken hold. By contrast, post-Darwinian comparative psychologists of the nineteenth century adopted subjectivity and sensory experience as central terms, thereby placing the emphasis on individuals rather than kinds, on the impossibility of knowing any kind but your own. For Daston, reconsidering anthropomorphism today should not entail dismissing or simplifying real 59

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

otherness, but searching instead for a way to connect across species lines that moves beyond the sentiment, ‘What is it like to be an X?’7 Daston’s concerns fall squarely within the posthuman realm, but she does not use that term. Even Donna J. Haraway, perhaps the leading theorist of the posthuman in both its cyborg8 and animal forms (her work is at the centre of burgeoning multidisciplinary developments in animal studies),9 feels uncomfortable with the ‘posthuman’ label. Despite the fact that her pioneering book When Species Meet (2008) appears in a series called ‘Posthumanities’, Haraway states explicitly her preference for ‘companion species’ over ‘posthuman’ as her foundational concept. Companion species encompasses a biological perspective that posits all creatures as made up of their relationships with other creatures, rather than a series of solitary species identities that do not touch: The shape and temporality of life on earth are more like a liquid-crystal consortium folding on itself again and again than a well-branched tree. Ordinary identities emerge and are rightly cherished, but they remain always a relational web opening to non-Euclidean pasts, presents, and futures.10

For Haraway, companion species resists the dangers surrounding notions of posthumanism that threaten to repeat humanism’s errors. If humanism often tended to drift toward racism and the exclusion of otherness, then posthumanism risks a similar fate in its desire to transcend the human, to leave the problems of defining the human behind. As Haraway puts it, I never wanted to be posthuman, or posthumanist, any more than I wanted to be postfeminist. For one thing, urgent work still needs to be done in reference to those who must inhabit the troubled categories of woman and human, properly pluralized, reformulated, and brought into constitutive intersection with other asymmetrical differences. Fundamentally, however, it is the patterns of relationality … that need rethinking, not getting beyond one troubled category for a worse one even more likely to go postal.11

I agree with Haraway, in the sense that my own investment in the posthuman is more strategic than doctrinaire. Posthumanism, for better and worse, collects around itself the discourses (including those of Daston and Haraway) that I wish to project onto cinematic spectatorship’s digital present and surrealist past. In other words, I am not a posthumanist, but I am committed to understanding the implications of the posthuman in this context. Although visual media exist only on the margins of When Species Meet, it is worth noting that Haraway mentions how the surrealist documentary film-maker Jean Painlevé’s work can guide viewers to ‘the join of touch and vision’ occasionally present in Crittercam, a 2004 National Geographic Channel television series.12 The advertised premise of Crittercam is that special digital cameras attached to the 60

Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion

bodies of wild animals will allow spectators to experience the environment precisely as an animal does. Haraway rightly critiques the absurdity of this premise, where Crittercam’s animals are ‘presented as makers of home movies that report on the actual state of things without human interference or even human presence’.13 But she asserts that Painlevé’s surrealist accounts of underwater organisms help to illuminate what is most promising in Crittercam’s footage, what exceeds the show’s premise: The cuts are fast; the visual fields, littered; the size scales of things and critters in relation to the human body, rapidly switched … never is Crittercam’s audience allowed to imagine visually or haptically the absence of physicality and crowded presences, no matter what the voice-over says.14

For Haraway, the sheer physicality of the Crittercam footage dispels the illusion of the show’s premise – these are not purely movies made by animals, but rather movies that remind spectators of the interdependence of humans and animals for their visual and haptic properties, their materialist (and indirectly surrealist) ‘join of touch and vision’. The camera, contra the premise of Crittercam, does not become some ‘mentalistic, dematerializing black box’.15 Instead, the camera as material site of mediation between animal and human occupies the foreground of the spectator’s embodied experience of the footage. Despite these moments of embodied effectiveness, what frustrates Haraway about Crittercam is not just the naïvete of its advertised premise, but ultimately its inability to provide something implicit in that premise: animal experience and agency on its own terms. Crittercam is still a ‘colonial’ project for Haraway, one that finally subordinates animal experience to human experience despite complicated forms of enmeshment.16 It is possible to detect a similar frustration in Haraway’s accounts of poststructuralist thinkers who have taken up the question of the animal. She admires Jacques Derrida’s willingness to speculate on the philosophical implications of an encounter between himself and the cat that stares back at his naked body, but laments Derrida’s failure to imagine this encounter beyond human shame, his refusal to include an animal acknowledged as ‘mutually responsive’.17 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘becoming-animal’ receives harsher criticism from Haraway – she sees in it ‘little but the two writers’ scorn for all that is mundane and ordinary and the profound absence of curiosity about or respect for and with actual animals’.18 Part of Haraway’s disappointment with Derrida and Deleuze/Guattari surely stems from her deeper investment than theirs in concerns more closely associated with animal rights or animal liberation.19 However, I wish to explore Haraway’s insistence on the ‘mundane and ordinary’, which for her is epitomised by the touch exchanged between herself and her pet dog: ‘My premise is that touch ramifies and shapes accountability. Accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into ethical responsibility are not ethical abstractions; these 61

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

mundane, prosaic things are the result of having truck with each other.’20 In this account, Deleuze/Guattari (and Derrida, to a lesser extent) prefer abstraction to touch, the sublime idea of the animal to the mundane existing animal, the extraordinary to the ordinary. But what does it mean for Haraway to characterise ‘touch’ primarily as a matter of direct physical contact, the kind that occurs between humans and their animal pets? One advantage to this approach is taking seriously an entire realm of relationships that Deleuze/Guattari dismiss when they assert ‘anyone who likes cats or dogs is a fool’.21 For Deleuze/Guattari, human–pet relationships can only prop up the sort of regressive, narcissistic, fixed identities that they believe psychoanalysis depends upon, and which they aim to replace with an alternative notion of being as becoming, of identity as a series of deterritorialising transformations always in flux. I think Haraway is correct to call Deleuze/Guattari on their reductive portrayal of human–pet relations, but her decision to locate her critique in the realm of touch, of actual animals meeting actual humans, minimises those technologically mediated but also affective and embodied aspects of ‘touch’ I will describe here as posthuman spectatorship. Indeed, Deleuze/Guattari’s first example of ‘becoming-animal’ comes from cinema: Willard (1971), a horror film about a young male loner named Willard (Bruce Davison) who befriends a pack of rats, has them carry out his bidding, but then falls victim to their murderous revenge when he betrays their trust. For Deleuze/Guattari, Willard functions as an example of ‘becoming-rat’. His being is not fixed through human or animal identities, but instead circulates as a series of ‘impersonal affects, an alternate current that disrupts signifying projects as well as subjective feelings’.22 Deleuze/Guattari offer impersonal affects involving the human and the animal without resting subjectively in either; they take shape as cinema. Haraway offers personal affects that belong to both human and animal subjectivities; they take shape as the touch between human and animal. But can cinema and/or new media ‘touch’ as well? Can they address and move the spectator in ways that might complicate this duality between the virtual/impersonal and the actual/personal? By juxtaposing surrealist and digital posthumanisms, I hope this essay begins to suggest how we might answer such questions in the affirmative.

Christian the Lion Christian the Lion tells the true story of two men who buy a lion cub named Christian as a pet. Although they love him dearly, they realise they must release him into the wild once he grows too big for them to handle. The video focuses on their reunion in the wild one year later. They are told Christian will not be able to remember them but, when the parties do meet, Christian embraces them with a stunning round of joyful hugs that they return just as enthusiastically.23 The emotional appeal of Christian the Lion is easy to understand, but quite complex in its construction. The video foregrounds its ‘true memory’ status by 62

Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion

Christian the Lion (2008): Christian’s joyful reunion with his human owners

beginning with black-and-white photographs that show Christian the cub at home with his owners, engaging in playful antics like making a mess of dresser drawers and climbing on top of a television set. The transition from still photographs to colour film footage of the reunion does not feel like a departure from the ‘true memory’ tone, since this footage is washed-out and obviously dated, much like a scrapbook would be. Superimposed titles relate the story’s outlines during the photograph segment, but disappear during most of the filmed reunion so that its immediacy stands out. The soundtrack consists of the rock band Aerosmith’s ballad ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing’ (1998), a song that highlights themes of love, loss and the need for physical contact (‘Even when I dream of you/The sweetest dream would never do/I still miss you, babe/And I don’t want to miss a thing’). When the screen goes black, a final title appears: ‘You got this video from someone who loves you. Send it to someone you love.’ Like many other YouTube videos, Christian the Lion is a product assembled from found footage. In fact, the video consists of material posted on YouTube as early as 2006 – it is not the first YouTube version of Christian’s story, but it is the most popular (viewed more than 17 million times by 2012). Many of the video’s photographs can be found in the book A Lion Called Christian, a memoir by the cub’s two owners Anthony ‘Ace’ Bourke and John Rendall first published in 1971 (reprinted in 2009 following the video’s YouTube exposure).24 The filmed reunion is excerpted from the documentary The Lion at World’s End (1971), a chronicle of Christian’s story starring Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, the actors featured in an earlier, Academy-Award-winning film about lions called Born Free (1966). In Born Free, Travers and McKenna play George and Joy Adamson, whose real-life experiences with lions in Africa were the subject of Joy Adamson’s bestselling 1960 book of the same name – the basis for the film. The Aerosmith ballad originally appeared on the soundtrack of Armageddon (1998), a Hollywood disaster/action blockbuster that carries familial connotations since it stars (among others) Liv Tyler, the daughter of Aerosmith’s lead singer Steven Tyler. 63

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

None of the above information on Christian the Lion’s sources appears within the video itself. This is also typical of YouTube’s format. What does appear are a plethora of posted responses from viewers, both in words and in images. These responses include revisions and updates of the original video, so that multiple alternate versions of Christian the Lion coexist alongside it on YouTube. Text responses include discussions of the video’s authenticity (this video must be staged; no, this video is real) and its emotional impact (this video made me cry; you are foolish if this video made you cry). Although it is impossible to provide any comprehensive sense of the text responses to Christian the Lion (as of 2012, there were more than 16,000), it is clear that many users gravitate toward issues of anthropomorphism and cross-species feeling in their reactions to the video. One user writes, ‘Consider my heart touched. I’m crying that changed my perception of what bonds can be held with those who love each other.’ Another writes, ‘After this – who will say that animals have no soul?!!’ At first glance, Christian the Lion appears to support Haraway’s companion species model. Humans and animals connect across species lines, blurring the boundaries between properly ‘human’ and ‘animal’ capacities for memory, love, affection. But if it is the patterns of relationality between organisms that Haraway wishes to recast with the notion of companion species, does Christian the Lion achieve this? Not when it slides into old-fashioned anthropomorphism – Christian acts like humans, or at least mimics the very best interpersonal impulses in humans. Christian gains legitimacy not as an animal on his own terms, but for imitating admirable human behaviour. Yet Christian the Lion also presents a case where Haraway’s web of relationality between species becomes a web of relationality. Perhaps the technological format of YouTube offers possibilities for users to feel the posthuman, in an embodied sense, that exceeds the capacity of Christian the Lion to show the posthuman as anything other than anthropomorphism? Yes, in terms of sheer emotional involvement (including crying), but the direction of this emotional involvement seems geared more toward reinforcing old patterns of anthropomorphic relationality than establishing new ones. The video’s end title underlines the lesson of Christian the Lion as one of human love, not interspecies relationality. In fact, the version of Christian the Lion that aired on The View uses a new end title that makes this stance even clearer: ‘Love knows no limits and true friendships last a lifetime. Get back in touch with someone today. You’ll be glad you did.’25 Of course, it’s one thing for a video to provide a lesson, but quite another for the spectator to swallow it whole. Even if there is evidence at the textual level that Christian the Lion channels its emotional power into shoring up anthropomorphism rather than questioning it, emotion and YouTube are both notoriously unruly entities that may mutate in surprising ways through those experiencing them. Browsing through the videos that YouTube flags as related to Christian the Lion reveals earnest, detailed information about contributing to lion conservation causes, opportunities to learn more background by accessing the films and book 64

Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion

on which the video was based, exposure to current interviews with Bourke and Rendall, as well as all sorts of witty and half-witty parodies that sometimes turn the video’s lesson on its head (Christian mauling his owners, for instance). So there are certainly avenues of interactivity open to spectators of Christian the Lion that do not siphon all feeling into anthropomorphic life lessons, but these avenues appear to be less well travelled. Although Christian the Lion is just one case of the digital posthuman, its status as one of the twenty most popular videos of all time within the sprawling ‘Pets and Animals’ category of YouTube content (the category itself testifies to the centrality of animals on YouTube) gives some outline of its broader significance. In fact, the very first video ever posted on YouTube (on 23 April 2005), ‘Me at the Zoo’, shows a young man (YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim) standing and speaking in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo.26 So from the very beginnings of this posthuman-era technology, the desire for the animal to make it real announces itself. To consider this desire from another vantage point, one where the real encounters its interrogators, we must turn to the surrealist posthuman.

Los Olvidados Buñuel, cinema’s foremost surrealist, started out as an entomologist. Or at least this was his initial ambition when he left his parents’ home in Zaragoza, Spain to study at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid in 1917. Pressed by his father to decide on a sensible course of study, Buñuel chose entomology because ‘all living creatures fascinate me … I’m passionate about insects. You can find all of Shakespeare and de Sade in the lives of insects …’.27 By the time Buñuel left the Residencia de Estudiantes for Paris in 1924, he had traded in entomology for philosophy and literature, but his films reveal a continuing enthralment with animals. Los Olvidados is no exception. A fiction film about the experiences of poor street kids in contemporary Mexico City, Los Olvidados incorporates many of the ethnographic impulses that marked the documentary Las Hurdes. Indeed, Buñuel devoted several months to social research as preparation for shooting the film – he walked the slums of Mexico City, photographed what he saw, interviewed the people he met, consulted with the Department of Social Services, studied hundreds of children’s case files, and tracked down newspaper accounts of the sorts of young lives he wished to chronicle.28 In the film, Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) struggles with his mother Marta (Estela Inda), who resents him because of his conception during a rape by an absent father, and his friend Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), who lures Pedro toward crime and murder. Ojitos (Mario Ramírez), an Indian abandoned by his father, earns the affection of Meche (Alma Delia Fuentes), a young girl who must fend off the sexual advances of Jaibo and Ojitos’s cruel guardian, the blind street musician Don Carmelo (Miguel Inclán). Pedro attempts to better himself, first by getting a job, then by turning over a new leaf at the reformatory where his mother sends him, 65

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

but his association with Jaibo (whom he has witnessed in the act of killing their friend Julián [Javier Amézcua]) spoils these plans. At the film’s end, Jaibo kills Pedro, the police kill Jaibo, Ojitos wanders alone and Meche helps carry Pedro’s hidden corpse past his worried mother (who now, too late, wishes to reconcile with her son) and into a garbage heap where the body is dispatched. The initially negative reception accorded to Los Olvidados in Mexico is less remarkable than the lengths Buñuel went to in order to avoid, or at least soften, that reaction. He filmed an alternate ‘happy’ ending, where Pedro survives and returns to the reformatory, which was not used, as well as an opening prologue, which was included.29 Some critics have assumed that this prologue was forced on Buñuel by his producer, but the director maintains that ‘it was my idea, so that the film could be shown’.30 The prologue appears directly after the opening credits, which include the assertion that ‘This film is based completely upon true facts of life. All the characters are real’ alongside a list of education and social services professionals consulted during production. Images of New York, Paris and London fill the screen while a narrator discusses how all of these ‘great modern cities’ contain unclean, malnourished, uneducated children poised to become future criminals. ‘Mexico, the great modern city, is no exception to this universal rule’, intones the narrator as dissolves between New York, Paris and London give way to views of Mexico City. The narrator warns that this film is ‘not optimistic’, that it ‘leaves the solution up to society’s progressive forces’. One can hardly imagine a more emphatically humanist framing of the social issues informing Los Olvidados. Mexico City is just one modern city among others, all afflicted with the same ‘universal’ problem that can only be addressed by vague ‘progressive forces’ belonging to a ‘society’ that is apparently as universal as the problem itself. The dissolves between the different cities (rather than cuts), along with the preference for images of architectural icons such as the Eiffel Tower and Big Ben (rather than people) buttress the humanist message of equivalence and its detached viewpoint outside and above any cultural specificity. The shock for the viewer as Los Olvidados exits the prologue and enters the film proper is heightened, not tempered, by the humanist introduction. An establishing long shot of a barren city courtyard maintains a comfortable spatial distance from the hollering boys within it, beyond the ramshackle wall that occupies the frame’s foreground. But this illusion of clinical, literally walled-off detachment shatters when the nature of the children’s game becomes clear: this is a bullfight, and we are immediately implicated by watching from a position where spectators at the ring would sit. As Buñuel cuts to closer views of the action, we realise that this bullfight includes no bull – only a child acting as a bull. A close-up of the bullchild emphasises his grotesque appearance, particularly his missing teeth and buckteeth. He clenches his fists and snorts. But just as we cringe with disgust or sigh with pity at this in-your-face image of the bull-child, eager to return to that seat in the ‘stands’ outside the ‘ring’ or perhaps even to the god’s-eye view of the 66

Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion

Los Olvidados (1950): the child as animal

prologue, Buñuel transports us even closer – behind the bull-child’s eyes. In a striking point-of-view shot, the bull-child charges another boy’s jacket and we experience the charge from the bull-child’s perspective. Even when the bullfight disintegrates into drinking, smoking and talking, it is difficult to shake the discomfort generated by Buñuel’s rapid modulation of social, cultural and affective distance for the spectator during the first minutes of Los Olvidados. The humanist promises of the prologue have been broken in so many ways. First of all, the bullfight as point of entry suggests that Mexico City is not just like New York, Paris and London, for bullfighting is as alien to those cities as it is centrally identified with Mexico (via the legacy of Spanish occupation). Indeed, the largest bullring in the world, Plaza Mexico, had opened in Mexico City just four years earlier. Second, the humanist perspective presented in the prologue’s words and images, from outside and above, converts quickly to one from inside and below. We are spectators at the bullfight; then we are face to face with the bull-child; then we are the bull-child. The fact that we see through the eyes of a bull-child (rather than a bull) as part of a sequence of pronounced point-of-view shifts is crucial for understanding Buñuel’s contribution to a surrealist posthumanism in Los Olvidados. Rather than resorting to anthropomorphism’s humanising of the animal, Buñuel chooses to animalise the human with the bull-child. Of course, animalising the human in the context of poor streetkids all too likely to be dismissed as inferior ‘animals’ by a middle-class public runs the high risk of abetting reactionary, even fascistic politics. But Buñuel weighs this risk against the equally dangerous yet less offensive tactic of humanism’s simultaneous ennobling and generalising of the downtrodden, where ‘universal’ problems afflict a pitiable but faceless people. As James F. Lastra has observed, this is just the sort of ethical calculation Buñuel makes in his representation of the poor Hurdanos in Las Hurdes: ‘Given a choice between elevating the Hurdanos in an apotheosis of the ‘truly human’ and a fascist debasement of them as societal waste, Buñuel adopts and rejects both in a gesture that avoids both their appropriation and their demonization.’31 67

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

In comparison to Las Hurdes, Los Olvidados may seem almost restrained in the arc of its swinging pendulum between elevation and demonisation. Yet Buñuel is engaging different genres with different conventions in these two films. Las Hurdes addresses itself to the ethnographic documentary, while Los Olvidados speaks to the social problem fiction film and the disadvantaged child subgenre in particular. This subgenre was very popular at the time in Mexican cinema, but Buñuel certainly had in mind also earlier models from other countries, such as Russia’s The Road to Life (1931) and Italy’s Shoeshine (1946).32 So Buñuel was fully aware of how this subgenre not only tends to elevate its subjects, but how ‘realism’ tends to be deployed as the aesthetic strategy that makes this elevation possible. Instead, he offsets elevation with demonisation and realism with surrealism, all under the umbrella of an animal–human relationality I believe we can refer to as posthuman. The bull-child of Los Olvidados’s opening is far from an isolated figure in the film. His counterparts come in a constantly metamorphosing array of slippages, confrontations and reversals between humans and animals. Chickens will resurface again and again (along with dogs), climaxing in an extraordinary moment at the reformatory where an enraged Pedro bludgeons several chickens to death after hurling an egg directly at the camera. As the lens drips with the broken egg, we can no longer see. Or perhaps, Buñuel seems to intimate, we can no longer see the way we are accustomed to seeing, where our sense of animal–human relationality supports a humanist worldview with which we are familiar. As Buñuel reminds us here in such a flagrantly surrealist manner, the animal is not just in the lens, it’s on the lens – it’s part of our perceptual apparatus as spectators, intrinsic to a way of seeing that Los Olvidados seeks to change. Indeed, Buñuel’s staging of Jaibo’s death near the conclusion of Los Olvidados sets up the spectator for a potentially devastating confrontation with posthuman relationality. Jaibo’s demise occurs shortly after Pedro’s, when the police catch up with him and shoot him in the back. As Jaibo expires, he is granted a brief dream sequence. Although his dream is not nearly as flamboyant as Pedro’s earlier in the film, its echoes of Pedro’s dream and the fact that it comes so near the end of the film give it a sharp impact. Jaibo dreams of a dog coming toward him, just as Pedro’s dream opened with the presence of chickens. The image of the dog is superimposed over Jaibo’s face so that he and the dog must literally share the frame, each dissolving into the other; chicken squawks and falling feathers saturate Pedro’s dream in a similar manner. Disembodied voices speak in Jaibo’s dream, like Pedro and his mother’s voices punctuated his. Among the voices in Jaibo’s dream is Pedro’s, warning him that the ‘mangy dog’ is approaching. But perhaps the most striking visual continuity between the two dreams is Jaibo’s slow-motion turning of his head back and forth, a gesture that mirrors the movement of Julián’s head in Pedro’s dream – blood stains the faces of both Julián and Jaibo in these moments. These multiple points of intersection between the dreams of Pedro and Jaibo suggest one shared subjectivity between them, rather than two different ones. 68

Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion

The centrality of animals to both dreams similarly insists that spectators should not read these dreams solely in terms of individually psychologised interiority, but rather as the merging of subjective ‘humanity’ and objective ‘animality’. In other words, these dreams that transpire during ‘sleep’ for the characters (whether rest or death) invite a sort of posthuman awakening in the spectator. Jaibo’s dream ends in death, a moment Buñuel captures cinematically through a freeze-frame. In the stillness of Jaibo’s face, death’s horror and power come forward for spectators in a moment of absolute presence, frozen in time and space – a vision of posthuman relationality Los Olvidados has insisted upon from the very beginning. The bull-child of the film’s opening meets his partner in Jaibo’s dog-man, images that demand spectators see what Christian the Lion strives to erase: animals and humans as companion species joined not by reassuring anthropomorphism, but by the risk, horror and death tied to truly losing hold on one’s sense of self. Buñuel’s surrealist posthumanism offers important possibilities for reframing the digital posthumanism of Christian the Lion along the axis of spectatorship. Where Christian the Lion’s realism emphasised humanist and anthropomorphic interpretations of animal–human relationality, Los Olvidados animalises the human not to reproduce humanism’s abstraction or realism’s elevation/demonisation of its subject matter, but to embrace surrealism’s challenge to animal–human relationality and its role in ordering social reality. In this sense, Los Olvidados finally comes closer than Christian the Lion to fulfilling Haraway’s vision of companion species, with its insistence on interspecies relationships beyond anthropomorphism as the ground of being. Although the spectator opportunities for posthuman awakening are more apparent in the surrealist cinema of Los Olvidados than the YouTube video of Christian the Lion, this does not necessarily mean that film and digital media have unequal access to the possibilities of posthuman spectatorship. But it does mean that we cannot simply understand posthumanism as something that moves inexorably from human to machine, from body to virtuality, from analogue to digital. It must also move from human to animal and back again, toward that surrealist bestowing of sight where we can see the mutually constitutive animal/human.

Notes 1. For an introduction to these film studies debates, see D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 2. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 3. 3. Ibid., p. 4. 4. Ibid., p. 5. 5. Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. xviii–xix. 69

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

6. For histories and analyses of YouTube, see, for example, Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); and Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (eds), The YouTube Reader (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009). 7. Lorraine Daston, ‘Intelligences: Angelic, Animal, Human’, in Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman (eds), Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 54. 8. See Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81. 9. For an overview of animal studies, see Linda Kalof and Amy Fitzgerald (eds), The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings (Oxford: Berg, 2007). 10. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 31–2. 11.Ibid., p. 17. 12. Ibid., p. 259. For a relevant sample from Crittercam, see Crittercam: Lions, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpAR4OV-9Ds. 13. Ibid., p. 251. 14. Ibid., p. 255. 15. Ibid., p. 257. 16. Ibid., p. 261. 17. Ibid., p. 23. See also Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (2006; New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 18. Ibid., p. 27. 19. See, for example, Peter Singer, ‘Animal Liberation or Animal Rights?’, pp. 14–22; and Tom Regan, ‘The Rights of Humans and Other Animals’, pp. 23–9. Both in Kalof and Fitzgerald, The Animals Reader. 20. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 36. 21. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (1980; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 240. 22. Ibid., p. 233. 23. Christian the Lion, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVNTdWbVBgc. 24. See Anthony Bourke and John Rendall, A Lion Called Christian (New York: Broadway Books, 2009). 25. ‘Christian the Lion – Reunited – From The View’, available at http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=oiGKWoJi5qM. 26. Me at the Zoo, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw. 27. Buñuel, quoted in José de la Colina and Tomás Pérez Turrent, Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel, ed. and trans. Paul Lenti (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1992), p. 6. 28. See Mark Polizzotti, Los Olvidados (London: BFI, 2006), pp. 31–2. 70

Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion

29. See ibid., pp. 75–6. 30. Buñuel, quoted in de la Colina and Turrent, Objects of Desire, p. 59. 31. James F. Lastra, ‘Why Is This Absurd Picture Here?: Ethnology/Heterology/Buñuel’, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 209. 32. See Polizzotti, Los Olvidados, p. 33; and de la Colina and Turrent, Objects of Desire, p. 60.

71

Michael Lawrence

4 Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film Malcolm Le Grice’s Berlin Horse Cinema itself began not just with attempts to bring motion to pictures, but with attempts to use pictures to reveal and study the motions of animals. Derek Bousé1

Muybridge/Muybridgean The publication in 1887 of Eadweard Muybridge’s eleven-volume Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Connective Phases of Animal Movements constituted the culmination of fifteen years’ work during which the photographer conducted experiments developing new visual technologies to produce objective and accurate representations of the movements of human and nonhuman animals, beginning with the stop-action images of racehorses he produced for Leland Stanford in Palo Alto, California in the early 1870s. Animal Locomotion comprised 781 photographic sequences (almost 20,000 individual images) representing in meticulous detail the successive stages in the movement of a wide range of animals: in addition to horses and humans, Muybridge photographed cats, dogs, goats, pigs, antelope, buffalo, lions, tigers, camels, elephants, racoons, baboons and ostriches walking, trotting, cantering, galloping and jumping.2 The sequences submit these diverse subjects to a uniform organisation or rather standardisation of animal being: the photographs (sixteen, twenty, twenty-four) that make up each layout are arranged in a gridlike formation, to be ‘read’ by passing across each row from left to right, starting at the top; the animals themselves are almost always photographed moving from left to right, and are often presented in front of a backdrop divided into regular rows of smaller squares.3 In each sequence the animal (whether human or nonhuman) is presented as a scientific specimen, its movement presented as a measurable phenomenon. While Muybridge’s motion studies had an immediate impact on certain latenineteenth-century painters’ depictions of racehorses (for example, Edgar Degas), they have also had a profound influence on twentieth-century artists working in the post-war period in the West. Marta Braun has suggested that Muybridge’s

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

photographs were of particular significance for the emergence of conceptualism and minimalism in the 1960s and 70s, and states: ‘Animal Locomotion inspired a generation of modernist artists, composers and film-makers engaged with ideas of regularity and repetition.’4 In Avant-garde Film: Motion Studies Scott MacDonald examines a range of American film-makers from the late 1960s for whom ‘reattention to cinema’s beginnings became a particular source of inspiration’.5 As the title of his book suggests, the pre- or proto-cinematic experiments of Muybridge were especially important: many avant-garde films, MacDonald argues, can be described as ‘Muybridgean’ because of the manner in which their images ‘“analyse” continuous activities or motions in a manner analogous to Muybridge’s motion studies’.6 In this chapter, I will consider Berlin Horse (1970), an early work by the British experimental film-maker Malcolm Le Grice, which was produced using resources at the London Film-makers’ Co-operative (established 1966), and which, according to Michael O’Pray, ‘can lay claim to being one of the few classics of the European avant-garde’.7 For A. L. Rees, the films of Le Grice ‘seem to leap over the history of film, and back to the experiments of Demeny, Muybrige and Lumière’.8 Comprising original and early film footage showing horses galloping around yards and out of barns, Berlin Horse arguably demonstrates (but in important respects diverges from) both the Muybridgean mode MacDonald describes as well as the kind of ‘monstration’ André Gaudreault has discerned in Lumière’s films.9 Derek Bousé has suggested that Muybridge’s photographs are important for understanding the ways nonhuman life has been represented on film, even though they ‘have come to be regarded by history almost exclusively as “locomotion studies” rather than as images of animals’.10 The Muybridgean filmmakers discussed by MacDonald are much more interested in structure and sequence than they are in the image of the animal. Le Grice’s film is generally understood in relation to the development of the artist’s ‘materialist’ practice – his method and process – rather than as a representation of a horse. In the 1978 essay ‘Material, Materiality, Materialism’ he wrote: ‘In its simplest sense, the question of materiality is seen in relationship to the: physical substances of the film medium, the film strip itself as material and object.’11 In 1998, Le Grice recalled that the attention given to the materiality of film ‘simultaneously disrupted illusion and established a new basis on which artistic experiment in the medium could be built’: this was the ‘material(ist) approach’ to film-making.12 Thus the ostensible subject of the film is the material properties of (the) film itself, and the appearance of the horse in the film – the horse itself – is (as it were) immaterial. The apparent insignificance of the horse in this film might be understood in relation to what Steve Baker has described as the attempt by artists to remove animals from human regimes of symbolism and anthropomorphism and instead emphasise their ‘obstinate’ and ‘unmeaning thereness’.13 Indeed, materialist film is explicitly opposed to conventional modes of making meaning – it might even be understood as an exploration of the material ‘thereness’ of (the) film as a production or projection ‘event’ – and thus it rejects forms and conventions which encourage 73

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

identification, including narrative, which Le Grice describes as ‘a temporal causality in the field of human (or anthropomorphised) relations’.14 While we might not identify with the horse – particularly in the absence of any narrative – we nevertheless identify (as in establish) that it is a horse. Baker writes: Taken out of human meaning, the animal still holds to form … . The artist’s allowing the animal recognizable form (even if that recognition is sometimes neither easy nor immediate) therefore constitutes a kind of respect for the otherness of the animal, its non-human-ness’.15

In what follows, I explore how Berlin Horse grants the animal ‘recognizable form’, regardless of whether Le Grice was motivated by the attitude Baker describes and even though such recognition would appear in this instance to be neither requisite nor relevant. Critical commentary on Berlin Horse has tended to focus on the film’s form rather than its content. Jonathan Dale, for example, suggests that the use of repetition and superimpositions distance or destroy any narrative/plot concerns: rather, hooked into the circuitous logic of the film, transfixed by both the loop structure and the saturated visual information, the film directs attention toward the materiality of film process itself, bringing film’s intrinsic material qualities to the fore.16

I intend to regard Berlin Horse otherwise, and redirect attention toward the material being of the horse itself. Furthermore, I argue that the presence of the horse in the film suggests that for the photographed animal (and indeed for all animals) an ‘unmeaning thereness’ is impossible: the animal’s material being is always also meaningful being, and inevitably refers (us) to the historical relations between species which have shaped that being. Elaine Walker observes: The desire of humans to shape the world to our use has impacted strongly on the development of the horse … . By controlled breeding, which goes back 4,000 years, humans have been able to produce horses that are more suited to pulling or speed, more agile or athletic, taller or shorter, and to at least aim for certain colours or markings, though nature tends to outwit the most sophisticated plans in this respect.17

By exploring connections between the imaging of animal motion offered by Muybridge’s photographic studies and Berlin Horse I hope to both challenge the marginalisation of the animal in critical discussion of Le Grice’s film and offer an alternative reading, which both attends to the filmed horses’ meaningful has-beenthereness and emphasises the work’s relation to – its evocation and interrogation of – the material and symbolic dimensions of historical relations between horses and humans.18 74

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

An image of an animal – and the methods used to produce it – can affect how that species (and animal life in general) is regarded. John Ott has suggested that [the] Muybridge photos encouraged viewers to imagine the horse, and by extension, all of nature, as merely another kind of machine. Fixed within a cold, monotonous grid of six, twelve, or twenty-four, the serial prints demanded that viewers reconceptualise a sweaty, snorting, quivering mass of horseflesh as a dynamo performing an endlessly repetitive sequence of actions … . It was as if the mechanical means of gathering and reporting data had been transposed somehow onto the subject of study.19

The horse’s corporeal or material integrity – its ‘quivering mass’ – is inevitably destroyed as its lively motion is frozen into a series of instants, and the animal’s meaning is transformed (as if the animal were itself both transfixed and transfigured) by the technological methods deployed to record its motion. It is important to remember, however, that many centuries of developing – of designing – various kinds of horses for the purposes of working, or for racing, for example, means that the horse’s material being is already hybrid: as Ann Norton Greene has argued, ‘[through] the process of domestication, horses became living machines’, with a hybrid status as ‘biotechnology, or organisms altered for human use’.20 Muybridge’s photographs not only reflected this process, but would contribute to the further refinement of the species: Rebecca Solnit writes that while ‘[a] horse in 1877 was … a biological technology that had been much improved with careful breeding and such inventions as stirrups, bits and harness’, for Muybridge and Stanford, ‘understanding the gaits of a horse in a mechanical way enhanced the possibility of tinkering with it, through breeding, training and other forms of management’.21 The photographs of the horses thus had a direct impact on the material being of the species: the technological methods utilised to produce these particular images were thus in important respects continuous with the means deployed to produce the subjects of the images. Muybridge’s experiments photographing animal locomotion are widely understood as continuous with the development of moving image technologies. Amy Lawrence has stated: [motion] is immanent in each layout; each layout points toward a time when the series will be reconstituted as a loop; each loop will document a single visual gesture; and the ‘meaning’ (which is motion) will come not only from the photographs and their order but from the blank spaces in between. These are the elements that make cinema possible.22

In 1879 Muybridge invented an ‘animal action viewer’ – the zoopraxiscope – with which to project silhouettes based on his photographs so as to create the illusion of motion.23 A contemporary account of such a projection event stated: 75

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

While the previous views had shown their positions at different stages of the motion, these placed upon the screen apparently [were] the living, moving horse. Nothing was wanting but the clatter of the hoofs upon the turf and an occasional breath of steam from the nostrils, to make the spectator believe that he had before him genuine flesh-and-blood steeds.24

The zoopraxiscope undoubtedly provided a more exhilarating representation of the horse’s movement, but the animal remains only ‘apparently … living [and] moving’; the images only approximate the motion of ‘genuine flesh-and-blood steeds’; after all, images do not breathe. Braun says of the zoopraxiscope: ‘This magical combination of technology, photography and art constitutes Muybridge’s contribution to the birth of cinema, the most popular and enduring of the entertainments to emerge from the new technologies of representation and spectacle.’25 But many critics – including André Bazin, Thierry De Duve, Noël Burch and Christian Metz – have argued that Muybridge’s photographic studies themselves were just as important a precursor to the cinema.26 More recently, Julian Murphet has stated: Until the mysteries of animal locomotion had been rigorously analysed down to their smallest physical variations … cinema could not even properly be thought as such; for cinema is what follows diligently from this, as the abstract determination to reanimate the inanimate particulars, the stilled data of an exhaustive analysis of the animal.27

For Murphet, the centrality of the animal to the development of modern image technologies and cultures functions to inaugurate a biological-technological synthesis of bodies and signs in which were fused ‘the very destinies of cinema (the moving image) and that of the animal (the moving organism)’.28 The relationship between animal life and the moving image, the synthesis of bodies and signs, anticipated by the experiments of Muybridge, requires careful consideration: attention must be paid to both the material being of real animals as well as the proliferation of animal images in history. As Jonathan Burt has suggested, moving animals and moving images of animals have equal status in the biodynamics of human–animal relations; in other words, the animal image is never external, but is just as structuring and transformative as animals out there in the ‘world’.29

Subsequently, Burt argues, it is important to ‘see the cinematic representation of human–animal relations as a material and integral part of those relations, and not just a detached image of them’.30 Critical responses to Muybridge’s photographs reveal divergent interests privileging either the real animal – the living animal being 76

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

– or the animal figure – the sign or concept of the animal. For certain critics, Muybridge’s animal studies should be considered in relation to the way humans throughout history have used animals in ways that reflect extremely instrumental attitudes toward other living beings. Randy Malamud has argued that the studies ‘profoundly perpetuate the anthropocentric prejudice that other animals exist to serve our own higher purpose’.31 Malamud is interested in how the energy of the animal is appropriated by the technological representation of its movement: Muybridge’s photographs starkly alienate animals from their natural context, exuberantly reframing them in his own amazing new technological discourse of visual culture … . The animals are curiously reduced, caught in the mechanics, the physics, of photography … . Their force and motion no longer seem their own, but Muybridge’s, and ours. Something of their nature has been trapped, isolated, and abrogated by the viewer. Although the human viewers learn much more about the horses, I believe the horses themselves lose something in this transaction.32

Malamud is critical of Muybridge’s studies because each series contributes to a relentless reduction of animal being, and each photograph implies an aggressive extraction of an animal’s energy, and are thus both symptomatic and emblematic of an instrumental attitude toward other living beings. For Malamud, ‘animals caught in the sight lines of technological innovations suffer for the encounter, as people come to devalue the integrity, the inherent and authentic animality, of creatures who get sucked into human culture’.33 Akira Mizuta Lippit, on the other hand, is more interested in the animal that has become sign. Describing ‘the fascination with which animals and animal movement captured the photographic imagination’, Lippit writes: What is remarkable in Muybridge’s work, what immediately seizes the viewer’s attention, is the relentless and obsessive manner in which the themes of animal and motion are brought into contact – as if the figure of the animal had always been destined to serve as a symbol of movement itself.34

In Lippit’s elaboration of John Berger’s influential thesis – which argued that animals are ‘rendered absolutely marginal’ and ‘disappear’ in the modern period – the animal becomes associated with a perpetual vanishing, but the account perpetuates the logic it is describing by focusing on the virtual animal signs that move across image cultures rather than attending to historical and material animal being.35 If, as Lippit suggests, ‘the cinema came to determine a vast mausoleum for animal being’, then the animal image can only ever function in a spectral or a melancholy relation to the actual animal to which it refers or from which it is derived, and it is melancholy signification rather than material being which is of primary interest: ‘animals as filmic organisms were themselves turned into languages, or at least, into semiotic facilities’.36 77

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

How, then, might film (and, we might add, history) attend to the material being of animals in ways that complicate its relationship with the semiotic or rhetorical meanings that man has attributed to them?37 In his consideration of the status of ‘the animal symbol or image’ – and specifically ‘the contemporary philosophization of the concept “animal”’ – Burt refers to a general ‘arena of morbidity’, in which ideas about loss, vanishing, disappearance, death and mourning have become ‘foundational to our sense of “the animal”’.38 Burt is troubled by such a conceptual framework, by ‘[the] loop of the language of morbidity’ in which ‘permutations of language and death form, unform, and reform around the figure of the animal like partners in a waltz’, and is so precisely due to such rhetoric’s distance from ‘the animal’s specific place(s) in the contemporary world’ and from ‘the realities of human–animal relations’, and so he asks: ‘How does the idea of life relate to the animal and animal representation?’39 Burt considers ‘livingness’: a ‘mode of active coexistence’ in which organisms are ‘unavoidably co-constitutive’ (for example, in ‘relations shaped by domestication’).40 Attention to livingness, as an experience, is for Burt ‘fundamentally temporal’, and promises ‘a better sense of human–animal relations as an ongoing emergence’.41 For Burt, moreover, ‘[film] makes livingness apparent to us in some of its most important forms as a temporal, material state that is felt or perceived by the intervals among beings. Indeed, it is a form of livingness in its own right’.42 Stephen Dwoskin has suggested that ‘Le Grice’s film-making aesthetic is based very much on the technology of the film process, though the results seldom have a “technological” or “mechanical” feeling’.43 In what follows, I explore how Berlin Horse represents animal being, how it conveys the ‘livingness’ of the horse as a ‘temporal, material state’ by showing how (the) film is ‘a form of livingness in its own right’, the result of improvisatory manual processes in which the film-maker directly handles and manipulates the filmstrip itself during the film’s production, a physical activity that is then ‘transposed somehow onto the object of study’ – in this case, the horse itself.44 In his 1976 essay ‘“Ontology” and “Materialism” in Film’ Peter Wollen wrote: [We] have passed from an ontology basing itself on the possibility, inherent in the photo-chemical process, of reproducing natural objects and events without human intervention, to the conscious exploration of the full range of properties involved in film-making, in the interest of combating, or at least setting up an alternative to, the cinema of reproduction or representation, mimesis or illusion.45

Materialist film emphasises not only the material basis of film, but also the interventions made by the film-maker during the production of the film. Le Grice explains his working methods thus: For my own filmmaking, the desire to have access to production equipment was driven by two factors: the need to cut the cost of filmmaking – essential then to the emergence of an independent cinema; and to reproduce the direct relationship to the medium I took for granted in painting and music.46 78

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

Such a practice positions Le Grice in opposition to an industrial mode of production, and an organisation of labour that is in certain respects continuous with the photographic experiments to capture animal motion conducted by Muybridge: as Nicole Shukin states, [it] was through the scientific management principles promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor that time-motion ideologies originating in the study of animal bodies developed ergonomic implications for an industrial culture of moving assembly lines requiring workers to perform repetitive motions with increased mechanical efficiency and speed.47

If Muybridge’s photographs encouraged audiences to imagine the horse as a machine, it is not surprising that they have been understood in relation to the maximisation of human workers’ productivity. Mary Ann Doane, for instance, has shown how photographic and cinematic technologies participated in ‘a reconceptualization of time and its representability in capitalist modernity’, and how ‘[much] of the standardization and rationalization of time can be linked to changes in industrial organization and perceptions of an affinity between the body of the worker and the machine’.48 For Doane, scientific management institutionalised ‘a form of mechanization of the human body that would further support the alienation of the worker’.49 If, according to Malamud, the ‘force and motion’ of the horses in Muybridge’s studies ‘no longer seem their own’, then they are both emblematic of and continuous with such scientifically managed workers.50 Le Grice’s film, as I shall show, attempts to interrupt a history in which the energy of human (and also nonhuman) beings is appropriated in this way. For Le Grice, the materialist film-maker’s rejection of mimesis was a profoundly political gesture. Writing in 1972, he suggested that ‘the whole history of the commercial cinema has been dominated by the aim of creating convincing illusory time/space and eliminating all traces of the actual physical state of affairs at any stage of the film’.51 Several years later, he proposed: Examination of film’s reality involves attention to its materiality/actuality as the basis of the film experience. In this respect, apperception of the current reality within the film viewing situation might be considered to serve as a model situation in which materialist consciousness might be initiated … . The only art which deserves the term realist is that which confronts the audience with the material conditions of the work. Work which seeks to portray a ‘reality’ existing in another place at another time is illusionist.52

I am interested, then, in exploring how the materialist film opposes a Muybridgean approach to animal being – and at the same time opposes a capitalist regime of image production organised around alienation and misrecognition – and with how 79

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

the film offers instead a moving documentation of the ‘livingness’ of both human and animal being.

Berlin Horse Berlin Horse demonstrates an attentiveness to animal being that has very little to do with the objective or scientific analysis of animal motion associated with Muybridge, and which results from Le Grice’s rejection of realist and industrial film practice, and from his concern with exposing and exploring the material aspects of film itself. Berlin Horse exemplifies Le Grice’s ideological and artistic opposition to capitalist film culture (specifically, the industrial production of realist narrative cinema, and the division of labour perfected to mass-produce entertainment); the film, moreover, evokes a history (of both the technological and the industrial development of cinema) in which real horses were utilised for the purposes of producing images. If Berlin Horse is explicitly intended to demonstrate an alternative to the capitalist production of film (and organisation of labour), then it also (whatever Le Grice’s intentions) offers a similarly radical recording of living animal being (both human and nonhuman), exposing and interrupting the history of their alienation and their exploitation. Materialist film-makers, according to Peter Gidal, must strive towards what Annette Kuhn called a ‘radical refusal of semioticity’.53 In his 1976 essay, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’ Gidal writes: The structural/materialist film must minimize the content of its over-powering, imagistically seductive sense, in an attempt to get through this miasmic area of ‘experience’ and proceed with film as film. Devices such as loops or seeming loops, as well as a whole series of technical possibilities, can, carefully constructed to operate in the correct manner, serve to veer the point of contact with the film past internal content.’54

Gidal discusses the importance of the ‘nearly empty signifier’ as ‘the dominant factor in the adequate presentation of materialist art practice’: Signifiers approaching emptiness means merely (!) that the image taken does not have a ready associative analogue, is not a given symbol or metaphor or allegory;

that which is signified by the signifier, that which is conjured up by the image given, is something formed by past connections but at a very low key, not a determining or over-determining presence, merely a not highly charged moment of meaning … . And that low-level signifier in momentary interplay with other low-level signifiers foregrounds a possibly materialist play of differences … which don’t lead into heavy associative realms. The actual relations between images, the handling, the appearance, the ‘how it is’, etc., takes precedence over any of the ‘associative’ or ‘internal’ meanings.55 80

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

Animal being, however, presents a particular problem for films which seek to deny ‘semioticity’ in this way: the animal cannot occupy the position of the ‘nearly empty signifier’ for the same reason that it cannot embody an ‘unmeaning thereness’. As Burt has argued: Although the animal on screen can be burdened with multiple metaphorical significances, giving it an ambiguous status that derives from what might best be described as a kind of semantic overload, the animal is also marked as a site where these symbolic associations collapse into each other.56

The animal image, Burt writes, has a ‘rupturing effect’, ‘mainly exemplified by the manner in which our attention is constantly drawn beyond the image and, in that sense, beyond the aesthetic and semiotic framework of the film’.57 I am interested, then, in how animal being challenges the materialist approach to film by drawing our attention beyond the material properties of the film image (rather than, as is usually the case, the fiction of the narrative). Echoing Gidal’s words, Dwoskin associates Le Grice with film-makers who have concentrated on evolving a film which is of its own image by breaking down any inherent symbolism or associative values of the recorded image. The aim is to create a visual language that in no ways refers to anything outside the film itself.58

While such a practice might appear to oppose the ‘semiotic facilities’ of animal signs as part of its rejection of the ‘inherent symbolism or associative values’ of the (conventional narrative) film image, the animal presents a challenge to a ‘film which is of its own image’, because the animal will always refer to the ‘outside [of] the film itself’. Berlin Horse is intended as a two- or four-screen projection, combining both colour and black-and-white versions of the film, but it can also be viewed in a single-screen format. The majority of the nine-minute film consists of 8mm footage shot by Le Grice in Berlin (a village in north Germany) of a horse being trained, trotting and cantering in circles around a male trainer, who holds a long rope to which the horse is tethered. This footage was then subjected to a succession of refilming processes and experimental treatments: in Le Grice’s words: This film began as a Kodachrome 8mm film, where the horse was brown, the grass was green, the sky was blue and the face of the man Kodak flesh tone. I re-filmed this in various ways on black and white 16mm, then produced a positive and a negative printing copy. Using the negative and positive materials in an old Debrie step-contact printer, I manually pulled coloured filters through the printing machine colouring the black and white image in its negative and positive areas with a wide range of pure spectrum colours onto colour film stock. The results of 81

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Berlin Horse (1970)

this were then reworked through various superimpositions and the film structured to retain some trace of this progressing improvisation.59

For the first two-thirds of Berlin Horse, a horse trots clockwise around its trainer, the camera following the horse as it moves from the foreground to the background, and this brief fragment of footage is played and replayed, over and over again. The repetition of this short fragment (showing the horse circling its trainer once) evokes the (much longer) time it takes to train a horse, and the repetition constitutive of such training. As the film loops, the horse rotates in a circular motion, like filmstrip in a camera or a projector, but the footage is also repeatedly sped up, then slowed down and then played backwards at both speeds. For the first few minutes the film is shimmering monochrome, but then the footage is suddenly saturated by colour: abstract and amorphous flashes of turquoise, pink, blue, green, orange, purple and yellow. The film’s approach to colour (and, indeed, animal movement) evokes here the horses painted by the German Expressionist Franz Marc.60 The form of the horse in Le Grice’s film is alternately distinct then indistinct as the image flares and fuzzes, and it disappears and reappears as the frame is suffused with tremulous iridescence, ‘a continually changing “solarization” image, which works in its own time, abstractly from the image’.61 Superimpositions printed through the colour filters present the horse’s negative image chasing after its positive image, its forward motion coinciding with its backward motion. The film’s soundtrack – an original composition by Brian Eno – provides a sonic analogue to the visual track: an intricate (but not dense) texture is produced through hypnotically patterned repetitions of a particular gesture or movement (Eno’s simple melody, the horse’s circular motions).62 The processes which the film privileges – those visual effects which are of more significance than the horse itself – are described by Le Grice in ways that suggest analogies with domestication, whereby the production of the film’s images, organised so as to emphasise the materiality of the film, has parallels with what Solnit described above as the ‘tinkering’ with – and ‘management’ of – the species. In 82

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

Berlin Horse (1970)

other words, the very ‘handling’ of the film itself might be said to provoke particular ‘associative meanings’, rather than forestall them (as Gidal hoped). In 1972 Le Grice suggested that the film reflected his interests in exploring ‘concerns which derive from printing, processing, re-filming and re-copying procedures’, and in experimenting with the ‘transformations possible in selective copying and modification of the material’.63 For Le Grice, such work indicates the way in which each stage in the cinematic process is a reality in its own right, and the way in which the film is, at each stage, ‘raw material’ for new transformation, the transformation becoming an overtly integral part of the meaning and implication of the work.64

The words Le Grice uses evoke the terminology of domestication and breeding: processes of reproduction organised around selection to achieve modification and transformation. Here, the production of the film is a temporal process in which ‘at each stage’ the results are regarded anew as ‘raw material’ to be further developed. However, it is perhaps more productive to think of Berlin Horse as a kind of meeting of the animal’s physical being and the film-maker’s own labour. Michael O’Pray, for instance, describes Berlin Horse as ‘a complex rhythmic weaving of images assisted by the natural rhythms of the subject matter’.65 This notion of assistance resonates with Burt’s notion of livingness as co-constitutive biodynamic relations, and also with Elaine Walker’s claim that ‘[the] horse has enabled many aspects of human development, shaping physical and cultural landscapes in what is usually seen as a supporting role’.66 The moving images presented by the film are both a record of and a complex response to the movements of the animal in the original footage: the horse’s livingness thus contributes to – and is conveyed by – the film. During the film’s final minutes, a different piece of film appears simultaneously with the Berlin footage, and then gradually displaces it. The film is an example of early American cinema, the Edison Manufacturing Company’s The Burning Stable (1896), in which a fireman and assorted stablehands lead clearly panicked horses 83

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

through the door of a stable.67 In Le Grice’s film, the Edison footage is treated in the same ways as the Berlin footage, becoming a kaleidoscopic re-presentation of the original material. The Burning Stable can be considered an early genre or formula film; earlier that year the Biograph company had made the near identical Stable on Fire (William K. L. Dickson), in which both horses and cows were featured.68 The use of the horses to provide dramatic spectacle in The Burning Stable reminds us that animals were for many decades treated by film-makers as props or, to adopt Bousé’s term, ‘disposable subjects’, whose physical, psychological and emotional welfare during and following productions was of little consequence in an industry which regularly and ‘wilfully [subjected] animals to harm or death for the purposes of filming it’.69 The film also reminds us of the presence of working horses in urban spaces at the turn of the century, and thus of the relationship between the horse and industrial capitalism (and, of course, cinema). As Ann Norton Greene reminds us: without understanding the impact of horses on the social and material environment in the nineteenth century, it is impossible to understand the industrial transformation of American society … . Horses, not steam engines, established the material environment and cultural values that have shaped energy use in the twentieth century.70

The physical incorporation of the Edison footage within Berlin Horse is suggestive of how Le Grice’s film might evoke for audiences memories of other films in which horses appear. As the Berlin footage is displaced by the earlier film, the audience is invited to reconsider Le Grice’s horse in relation to a historical archive of equine antecedents – including, of course, the horses photographed by Muybridge. Such associations, inevitably, will be idiosyncratic: watching Berlin Horse I am reminded of other film horses whose appearance and action on the screen refers to a synthesis of the animal’s original being and specific cinematographic effects, such as the carthorse which appears to gallop backwards in Le

Berlin Horse (1970) 84

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse, 1908), the eerily translucent horses from The Phantom Carriage (1921), the galloping white horse so suddenly stilled in Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the champion racehorse ‘Blue Boy’, cantering frantically around and around the grand piano, pursued by, or rather in pursuit of Laurel and Hardy in Wrong Again (1929), and the fantastic Horse of a Different Colour – first mauve, then red and then yellow; grape, cherry and lemon gelatin was applied to separate horses – in whose carriage Dorothy rides into the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz (1939). By presenting a dynamic relationship between the Berlin footage and the Edison film, whereby the latter appears to be summoned forth by the incantatory rhythm produced by looping the former, Berlin Horse enacts and thus encourages such associations. In other words, the images of the horses in this film inevitably refers (us) to what is ‘outside’ of the film. This ‘outside’ – specifically, the history of horse–human relations, of horses being put to work, of their being filmed – is effectively brought into the ‘inside’ of the film. Le Grice writes: At the same time, however much the reality of the image is stressed over the image of reality, however much the material conditions of the production of this image is made evident, the facsimile image of photography attests to a continuum of reality extending beyond the limits of the cinematic recording. That which is specifically recorded, selected, brought within the frame and range of the parameters of recording and transformed within their processing by its specificity of ‘inclusion’ as fragment, asserts, through ‘exclusion’, the fact of a continuum (or series of intersecting continua) of which it is a fragment.71

The ‘continuum of reality’ that extends beyond the limits of both Le Grice’s footage and the Edison film – of which they become mere ‘fragments’ – is the history of horses’ material being, and the manipulation of this material being that has constituted horse–human relations, in which the use of horses in the production of moving images is continuous with the instrumental utilisation of horses in industrial capitalism.

Berlin Horse (1970) 85

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel have argued that the field of animal studies requires ‘a new theoretical formulation that incorporates symbolic approaches with social and material history’ because ‘[our] relationship to animals is … neither wholly symbolic nor wholly material; rather, it is profoundly social’.72 If relations between humans and animals are neither exclusively symbolic nor solely material, then animals themselves, and their histories, combine the semiotic and the material. Indeed, Donna Haraway has proposed the term ‘material-semiotic’ to refer to how ‘bodies and meanings co-shape one another’, to how ‘trope and flesh [is] always cohabiting, always co-constituting’.73 Animals (human and nonhuman) are ‘material-semiotic’ entities, in which the distinctions between materiality (the literal, the concrete, the actual, the real) and the semiotic (the metaphorical, the figurative, the narrative, the imaginary) are necessarily inextricable. In his account of the London Film-makers’ Co-op, Gidal describes the importance of members having access to all the equipment necessary to produce and project their films, and also the impact of this access: ‘The concrete and the abstract became one for the film-makers who handled materials’.74 In other words, the working methods at the Co-op – the physical contact between the film-maker and the ‘materials’ – encouraged the kind of co-shaping and co-constituting between the material and the semiotic that Haraway argues define animal being. Furthermore, the direct intervention of the human in the production of the images enables a transposition of livingness from the film-maker to the image. It is arguably due to the film’s ideological and aesthetic opposition to mainstream commercial cinema that its images of horses interrupt a history of the horse’s utilisation and exploitation: a materialist film practice which resists the denial of film’s material base that characterises the cinema associated with capitalism enables here an evocation of animal livingness which opposes the denial of animals’ material being that characterises an anthropocentric understanding of history – and particularly the history of the moving image. If, then, the image of the horse in Le Grice’s film throbs and palpitates with a quivering livingness, due to the way it is produced, and also derails the materialists’ programmatic denial of semioticity, due to the way the animal inevitably refers to an ‘ouside’, then Berlin Horse can be understood to evoke horses’ material-semiotic livingness, their being (and their having always been) both semiotic bodies and material signs.

Notes 1. Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 41. 2. For a selection of the photographs, see Eadweard Muybridge, Horses and Other Animals in Motion: 45 Classic Photographic Sequences (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1986). 3. Marta Braun discusses Muybridge’s deployment of the backdrop – which began with his study of the ‘mulatto pugilist’ Ben Bailey in the summer of 1885 – and the device’s 86

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

previous deployment by English ethnologists, in Eadweard Muybridge (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), pp. 192–6. 4. Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, p. 8. For Muybridge’s influence on a range of American artists of the 1970s and 80s, see also Tom Gunning, ‘Never Seen This Picture Before: Muybridge in Multiplicity’, in Phillip Prodger (ed.), Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 263–72. Several experimental films explicitly focus on Muybridge, for example, Homage to Muybridge (1972), Eadweard Muybridge: Zoopraxographer (1974) and Muybridge Film (1975). ‘Movement and Time’, the first section of Austrian film-maker Gustav Deutch’s Film Ist. (Film Is., 1998), is particularly ‘Muybridgean’, comprising footage from various scientific films showing the movements of diverse animals, including a cat, a dog, a chimpanzee, a human toddler and an ostrich. 5. Scott MacDonald, Avant-garde Film: Motion Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 8. 6. Ibid., p. 70. 7. Michael O’Pray, Avant-garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003), p. 102. 8. A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (London: BFI, 1999), p. 81. 9. See André Gaudreault, From Plato to Lumière: Monstration and Narration in Literature and Cinema, trans. Timothy Barnard (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999). A comparable interest in animal movement is demonstrated by Le Grice’s first film, Little Dog for Roger (1967), which is based on fragments of 9.5mm home-movie footage shot by Malcolm’s father. Danni Zuvela, for example, has referred to its ‘interrogation of movement’ and discerned in the film a ‘Muybridgean fixation on the energetic bounding motions of a small dog’. See ‘Avant-home Cinema’, Real Time no. 81 (October–November 2007), p. 21, available online at www.realtimearts.net/article/ 81/8703. 10. Bousé, Wildlife Films, p. 42. 11. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Material, Materiality, Materialism’, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age (London: BFI, 2001), p. 165, originally published in 1978. 12. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Art in the Land of Hydra-Media’, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 301, originally published in 1998. 13. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000), p. 96, emphasis in the original. 14. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Towards Temporal Economy’, Screen vol. 20 nos 3–4 (Winter 1979/80), p. 71. 15. Baker’s reflections here develop from his consideration of Horses, an Arte Povera installation at the Galleria L’Attico, Rome in 1969, in which the artist Jannis Kounellis exhibited twelve live horses tethered to the walls of an empty gallery (Baker, The Postmodern Animal, p. 79). 16. Jonathan Dale, ‘Brian Eno: Discreet Vision’, in Graeme Harper (ed.), Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media: An Overview (New York and London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 482–3. 87

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

17. Elaine Walker, Horse (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), p. 64. 18. Roland Barthes describes the essence or ‘noeme’ of photography as the ça a été (that has been): ‘In photography I can never deny that the thing has been there.’ In Camera Lucida; Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 76. 19. John Ott, ‘Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye’, Oxford Art Journal vol. 28 no. 3 (2005), p. 414. 20. Ann Norton Greene, Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 4. 21. Rebecca Solnit, Motion Studies: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), pp. 182–3. 22. Amy Lawrence, ‘Counterfeit Motion: The Animated Films of Eadweard Muybridge’, Film Quarterly vol. 57 no. 2 (Winter 2003–4), p. 15. 23. The device was also sometimes called the zoographoscope or zoogyroscope. 24. Article from the San Francisco Call (4 May 1880), cited in Solnit, Motion Studies, p. 203. 25. Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, p. 159. 26. See André Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’ (1946), in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 17–22; Thierry De Duve, ‘Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox’, October vol. 5 (1978), pp. 113–17; Noël Burch, ‘Charles Baudelaire versus Doctor Frankenstein’, Afterimage vols 8–9 (Spring 1981), pp. 4–21, reprinted in Life to Those Shadows (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 6–22; Christian Metz, ‘Photography and Fetish’, October vol. 34 (1985), pp. 81–90. See also Gordon Hendricks’s biography Eadweard Muybridge: The Father of the Motion Picture (New York: Secker and Warburg, 1975). 27. Julian Murphet, ‘Pitiable or Political Animals?’, SubStance vol. 37 no. 3 (2008), p. 102. 28. Ibid., p. 102. 29. Jonathan Burt, ‘Morbidity and Vitalism: Derrida, Bergson, Deleuze, and Animal Film Imagery’, Configurations vol. 14 nos 1–2 (2006), p. 167. 30. Ibid., p. 170. 31. Randy Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 62. 32. Ibid., p. 66. By removing the horses from their ‘natural environment’ in this way, Muybridge’s photographs evoke British painter George Stubbs’s Whistlejacket (c. 1762), which famously depicts an Arabian racehorse against a blank background. 33. Ibid., p. 68. Malamud suggests that ‘Muybridge’s complicity in his era’s … industrial fantasies means that his photography was ultimately destructive to the animals he so keenly observed.’ Furthermore, he argues that ‘nineteenth-century factory farming bears an ideological affinity to the dissections of Muybridge’s motion studies’, p. 69). 34. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 185. 35. John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, in Why Look at Animals? (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 35–6, originally published in 1980. 88

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

36. Lippit, Electric Animal, pp. 187, 196. 37. For a discussion of the animal’s challenge to historiography, see Erica Fudge, ‘A Lefthanded Blow: Writing the History of Animals’, in Nigel Rothfels (ed.), Representing Animals (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 3–18. 38. Burt, ‘Morbidity and Vitalism’, pp. 157, 158. 39. Ibid., pp. 166, 158, 167. 40. Ibid., p. 169. 41. Ibid., p. 178. 42. Ibid., p. 179. 43. Stephen Dwoskin, Film Is …: The International Free Cinema (London: Peter Owen, 1975), p. 177. 44. This phrase is from Ott, ‘Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye’ p. 414. 45. Peter Wollen, ‘“Ontology” and “Materialism” in Film’, Screen vol. 17 no. 1 (Spring 1976), p. 11, emphasis added. 46. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Improvising Time and Image’, Filmwaves no. 14 (2001), p. 16. 47. Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 72–3, emphasis added. See also Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’ pp. 23–4. 48. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 3–4, 5. 49. Ibid., p. 5. The classic account of early cinema, capitalism and labour remains Janet Staiger, ‘The Hollywood Mode of Production: Its Conditions of Existence’, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London and New York: Routledge, 1985), pp. 87–95. For a discussion of Taylor (as well as Pavlov and Eisenstein) in relation to cinema, capitalism, labour and animality, see Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon, NH and London: University Press of New England, 2006), pp. 101–37. 50. It is important to remember that nonhuman animals – working animals and livestock – were integral for the emergence of capitalism, beginning in the seventeenth century. Mary Murray has suggested that ‘the development of capitalism in England was founded on the back of hooves, paws and claws’, or, in other words, ‘in and through particular forms of speciesist social relationships’. See ‘The Underdog in History: Serfdom, Slavery and Species in the Creation and Development of Capitalism’, in Nik Taylor and Tania Signal (eds), Theorizing Animals: Re-thinking Humanimal Relations (Leiden: Brill, 2011), p. 88. For an account of ‘the role which animals have played in the development of the agricultural and industrial revolution’, ‘how this process in turn impacted the lives of these creatures – both qualitatively and quantitatively’, and ‘how animals have contested their expropriation and exploitation’, see Jason Hribal, ‘“Animals Are Part of the Working Class”: A Challenge to Labor History’, Labor History vol. 44 no. 4 (2003), pp. 435–53 (436). 89

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

51. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Real TIME/SPACE’, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 155, originally published in 1972. 52. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Material, Materiality, Materialism’, p. 170. 53. Annette Kuhn, ‘Notes for a Perspective on Avant Garde Film’ (London: Hayward Gallery, 1977), cited in Peter Gidal, Materialist Film (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 45–6. 54. Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’, in Michael O’Pray (ed.), The British Avant-garde Film 1926 to 1995: An Anthology of Writings (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1996), p. 146. Originally published in Peter Gidal (ed.), Structural Film Anthology (London: BFI, 1976). 55. Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural/Materialist Film’, pp. 152–3. 56. Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 11. 57. Ibid., p. 12. 58. Dwoskin, Film Is …, pp. 167, 168 (citing P. Adams Sitney). 59. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Colour Abstraction – Painting – Film – Video – Digital Media’, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, pp. 264–5, originally published in 1995. 60. See, among others, his 1911 painting ‘Die grossen blauen Pferde’ (The Large Blue Horses). 61. Malcolm Le Grice, DVD liner notes, Malcolm Le Grice: Volume One (LUX, 2009). 62. For an analysis of the score, see Dale, ‘Brian Eno’, pp. 481–6. 63. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Thoughts on Recent “Underground” Film’, Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age, p. 15 64. Ibid. 65. O’Pray, Avant-garde Film, p. 102, emphasis added. 66. Walker, Horse, p. 89. 67. It is often incorrectly claimed that Berlin Horse incorporates refilmed footage from the British film The Burning Barn (1900). See, for example, Paul Willemen, ‘Malcolm Le Grice’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), Directors in British and Irish Cinema: A Reference Companion (London: BFI, 2003), p. 371. 68. The Edison company produced many films featuring horses, reflecting the diverse ways horses were put to work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and also suggesting the particular attraction of the horse for early film audiences: such films include Bucking Broncho (1894), Mounted Police Charge (1896), Cavalry Passing in Review (1897), Boxing Horses, Luna Park, Coney Island (1904), Hippodrome Races, Dreamland, Coney Island (1905) and Life of an American Fireman (1906). 69. Bousé, Wildlife Films, p. 42. As Bousé notes, ‘[the] practice of setting up an actual killing for the cameras started as early as 1884 when Muybridge arranged at the Philadelphia zoo for a tiger to be set loose on an old buffalo’ (ibid). See also Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture, p. 68. For an account of cruelty to animals in the motion picture industry, and the measures adopted to protect animals, see Rebecca Hall, Voiceless Victims, foreword by Brigitte Bardot (Hounslow: Wildwood House Ltd, 1984), pp. 117–25. Hall notes that the most common form of 90

Muybridgean Motion/Materialist Film

abuse has involved horses, specifically the use of devices such as tripwires to produce ‘fall effects’, p. 118). It was partly due to the public outcry over the death of a horse during the production of Jesse James (1939) that the American Humane Association was given permission to inspect the treatment of animals on film sets. 70. Greene, Horses at Work, pp. 8, 9. Greene suggests that the number of horses in cities (in the US) peaked at the turn of the century (p. 171). 71. Malcolm Le Grice, ‘Towards Temporal Economy’, p. 71, emphasis added. 72. Susan J. Pearson and Mary Weismantel, ‘Does “The Animal” Exist? Toward a Theory of Social Life with Animals’, in Dorothee Brantz (ed.), Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. 17, 22. Similarly, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost have recently argued: ‘For critical materialists, society is simultaneously materially real and socially constructed: our material lives are always culturally mediated, but they are not only cultural.’ In ‘Introducing the New Materialisms’, in Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (eds), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 27. 73. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), pp. 4, 383n11. 74. Peter Gidal, ‘Technology and Ideology in/through/and Avant-garde Film: An Instance’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds), The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1980), p. 154.

91

Paul Wells

5 ‘You Can See What Species I Belong to, but Don’t Treat Me Lightly’ Rhetorics of Representation in Animated Animal Narratives Animating animals In recent years, when watching animated films from all eras, nations and cultures, I have asked myself two fundamental questions: in all animation featuring animals, how far can they be understood as animals, and how much as humans in disguise, and further, what does depicting a character as an animal enable an animator to say or do that using a human character cannot? I first addressed these questions in a book-length study, The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons and Culture (2009), using a ‘bestial ambivalence’ paradigm, which I will reintroduce and refine here, but my main preoccupation will be to look at the notion of ‘animality’ in animated films, through the specific address of liminal and compound states of construction in creature design and behaviour.1 This analysis, will, therefore, reveal the rhetorical strategies by which the distinctive language of animation is deployed to engage with a range of animal discourses from the mytho-poetic to the quasi-political. Torben Grodal has noted: Fantasy films like Fantasia …delight in the metamorphosis of form – for example, speeding up the slow processes of animal and plant growth and transferring them to other features of the world. These accelerated transformations make the world less stable; objects may suddenly morph into something quite different. Fantasy films may also create synthetic associations between sight and sound: for example, deep tones may be linked with the motion of large animals such as rhinos, high tones with small animals … it is also possible to create a completely fantastic world, in which fundamental features and laws are altered so that, for example, thoughts impact directly on the physical world … the distinction between life and death is annihilated, or body and soul exist independently of one another … .2

Curiously, Grodal fails to acknowledge that these are not merely the characteristics of ‘fantasy films’, but the fundamental conditions of animation as a form. Metamorphosis, the manipulation of time and space, the rejection of the physics of the material world, the narrative and symbolic signification of sound, and the dislocation between animate and inanimate, the static and the animatic, are all

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

aspects of the distinctive vocabulary of expression available in animation.3 This inevitably creates instability not merely in the illusionist worlds created in animation, but also considerable tension, ambiguity and slippage in representational forms, too. This is also the case even in narratives that deploy more photo-realistic animation seeking to reinforce more naturalistic, plausibly real worlds; the surreality of figures like Hulk (Eric Bana) (Hulk, 2003), Davy Jones (Bill Nighy) (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, 2006), Caesar (Andy Serkis) (Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 2011) and Jin (Takeshi Kaneshiro) (House of the Flying Daggers, 2004) is seamlessly absorbed into the often fantastical logics and parameters of their seemingly ‘realistic’ story world. These core elements of animation as a form inherently problematise all the representational aspects of the image when they are measured against a nominal yardstick of the camera’s quasi-documentary recording of indexical reality. In contemporary cinema, using ‘film’ is but one aspect of acquisition in the construction of the image, and as film becomes inexorably closer to the condition of animation, the terms and conditions by which any one aspect of the image may be perceived have changed. This may be immediately understood as a formal tension between the physical presence and materiality of a person, object or environment, and the ways in which they have been reimagined or reinvented through the new repertoire of digital applications. Animation – analogue or digital – has always, anyway, sought to exploit this tension as the key element of its specificity as a model of creative expression, constantly pointing up the space between ‘the real world’ and its own constructed artifice. Such self-consciousness in the act of imagemaking and the choreographic principles employed, defines animation as an intrinsically rhetorical form, both literally illustrating, and implicitly, metaphorically commenting upon its image construction. Animation thus has a core condition of analogy that prompts the need to consistently interrogate how the form deals with its chosen topics and themes, since all aspects of its construction signify a tension between received reality and its representational outcome. When addressing the representation of animals in animation in The Animated Bestiary, it became clear that animated film raised some very particular and critical issues because animals had almost constituted its lingua franca since the form’s inception and development. There was some irony in the fact, though, that the literature investigating this phenomenon was scant, and a mere piecemeal or marginal aspect of a number of disciplinary studies. Further, it was important to take into consideration the perspectives of both scholars and practitioners; the latter, especially, because animators adopt a highly self-conscious and specific approach to the technique of animating animals, from the hyperrealistic to the abstract.4 Consequently, as a purely representational form, using prefilmic and profilmic artificially constructed material, and not live action footage of real animals, animation readily engages with the public discourses of animals and ‘animality’ in many complex ways. In attempting to understand this complexity, I constructed a critical paradigm – ‘bestial ambivalence’ – that I will seek to explain and develop here. 96

Rhetorics of Representaion in Animated Animal Narratives

Bestial ambivalence revisited Essentially, this model of analysis sought to suggest that animation always places any representational form ‘in flux’, and that at any time there can be fluid and rapid shifts between what it might represent, for example, in relation to the body, identity, gender, race and ethnicity, etc. This is made more complex in the case of animal representation because there are clearly different aspects to the understanding of animal life and its categories, classifications and context. Consequently, I posited an approach in which an animated animal or animated animal narrative was moving between positions and discourses – namely the pure animal (our knowledge of animals in themselves outside human discourses), the critical human and the aspirational human (when the animal is anthropomorphised to reveal positive and negative aspects of human conduct and experience) and the hybrid ‘humanimal’ (which refers to the meanings of animals in established myths, metaphors and analogous narratives). These shifting modes might occur within singular movements or sequences or across a whole story. One immediate example to illustrate this might be Disney’s feature, Bolt (2008). When viewed as an animal story its pure animal credentials are evidenced in many self-conscious scenes addressing the difference between the ‘natural’ motion and behaviour of an animal and the consciously performed. Bolt, the dog, is encultured to accept the story world of his television show – ‘if the dog believes it, WE believe it’ stresses the director – but finds himself increasingly alienated and challenged by the real world he escapes into, but has no consciousness of. A particularly playful sequence uses the birds’ ways of communicating in jerky head and feet movements to comic effect as they try to free Bolt’s head when it gets stuck in railings. This issue is most directly expressed though when Bolt leaves the safety of the artificial set and is no longer bound by the ‘trained’ aspects of his performance for the show. In the real world, he bleeds, and hurts himself and possesses no superpowers. The critical and aspirational aspects of measuring human conduct are played out through the symbolic functions of Bolt’s two main companions – Mittens, the cat, and Rhino, the hamster. Mittens is a stray because she has been the victim of human abuse and abandoned, while Rhino is almost a case of an overcared-for pet, his domestic status representing a sheltered context from which he is inevitably naïve about the outside world. Both, however, are instrumental in enabling Bolt to understand the reality of the world he inhabits – Mittens grounding him in a ‘known’ animal pragmatism of being a ‘regular dog’ (chasing thrown sticks, burying bones, letting his tongue slobber when hanging his head from a car window, etc. and even, in her eyes, the inevitability of human cruelty), while Rhino offers a less streetwise perspective, informed by optimism, selfbelief and the importance of friendship. The hybrid ‘humanimal’ is at the heart of the film’s core theme, in that the narrative works as a post-9/11 engagement with the myth of the hero; Bolt is essentially an address of the Hollywood animal icon, and the sharp differential between the assumed powers of the celebrity/the superhero and the reality of actual capabilities and the capacity for survival, in a seemingly corrupt and exploitative human world. Bolt and indeed, the other animals 97

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

exist caught between the fact and fiction of prescribed animal cultures. The ‘bestial ambivalence’ paradigm reads ‘the animal’ then as a flux of discourses. The paradigm was further contextualised within the broad parameters of definitions of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as opposed poles that, on the one hand, viewed animals as intrinsically different and outside representation, or on the other, viewed them as assimilated to the extent that human- and animal kind must be reconciled as part of an inherently related spectrum of being. This, in itself, is often cited in playful animated narratives. Aardman Animation’s The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (2012) tells the story of a Pirate Captain’s encounter with Charles Darwin. In a drunken exchange, the Captain asks the almost identical Darwin, and his ‘monkey man-servant’, Mr Bobo, ‘Are you related in some way?’ Throughout the film, Mr Bobo is half-animal, half-humanised, exemplified in the comic conceit of denying him verbal expression in favour of silent-film-style title cards. Aardman’s best example of the mute but sentient animal is, of course, Gromit the dog, from Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit narratives – the raise of an eyebrow the signal of a clear and responsive mind. This idea of the ‘mute’ animal serves in more serious contexts to represent the fundamental difference/distance between animal and humankind, while still allowing for the possibility that animals possess their own sentience and forms of communication. The Tannery (2011), for example, clearly delineates that it is concerned with a critical human discourse, while allowing for a hybrid ‘humanimal’ narrative, which posits the suggestion that animal experience might be self-conscious and regulated. A hunter shoots a fox for its skin, which he takes back to his tannery to remove. The ‘spirit’ of the fox survives, fleeing back into the forest, meeting the spirits of other dead animals. He is befriended by a spirit rabbit, who he originally seeks to devour, but it is in this act that he realises both his status as a supernatural form, and also, his own condition as a spirit that seems in some way different from the rabbit’s. The fox and the rabbit also have the facility to see the material world, and observe animals being caught and eaten by other animals, and their spirits being subsequently released. As the spirits float heavenward, these acts seem to be accepted by the fox and rabbit as their intrinsic fate. It is as if they possess knowledge of their own place in the animal food chain and this enables them to reconcile their place in a natural order. The fox, however, becomes aware that he cannot achieve this reconciliation and redemption, because his spirit, like those of many other animals, is arrested in the purgatory of the tannery – in remaining somehow part of the human world by virtue of being killed, and further exploited by humankind in leather goods, and so forth, the animal cannot find release. This film makes the case for an alternative pure animal world that humans are unaware of, and which may be understood only by animals. Such laws and conditions still speak of course, to human paradigms, but suggest at least that humankind’s brutality and exploitation does impinge on an animal order, and that the mistreatment of animals does not merely reflect badly on humanity, but irrevocably disrupts animal cultures and practices, whatever they may be, observable, known or otherwise. 98

Rhetorics of Representaion in Animated Animal Narratives

The Tannery (2011): animal spirits as the defining principle of alternative animal cultures disrupted and destroyed by human intervention

The idea of the pure animal culture also finds purchase in other ideologically charged contexts. Felidae (1994), based on the 1989 novel by Turkish-German Akif Pirincci, who co-wrote the screenplay, features a black-and-grey European shorthair cat called Francis, who addresses the viewer, imploring ‘You can see what species I belong to, but don’t treat me lightly.’ In the distinctly un-Tom and Jerrylike scenarios that follow, it would be hard to do so, since a gamut of animal narratives emerges, from the brutalities of animal testing to the sexual proclivities of mixed breeds, in a thinly veiled metaphor about Nazi ideology and the lasting legacies of National Socialist thought. The narrative is essentially a detective story in which Francis seeks to find out who is responsible for the murders of a number of cats, who appear to have been killed in a state of sexual arousal. This fact alone marks out the film as distinctly adult fare, but more importantly from the perspective of this discussion, it signals how the film wants to present the pure animal discourse, focusing on the ways in which the animal is defined through the orientations of the senses and primal actions. Francis constantly notes what he smells – particularly in relation to the chemicals in the laboratory hidden in the old house his owner moves into, and in regard to coital emissions – and also, what he hears – the death cries of other cats – and what he desires – food and mating. This engagement with the physical and sensual also chimes with the critical and aspirational human themes in the film, as animal testing is viewed as both a wellintentioned model of research to service humankind but equally as a vehicle of animal mistreatment and mutation. It is this principle of mutation that speaks to the metamorphoses and analogous aspects of animation as a language of expression. The nightmare Francis endures, played out to Mahler’s Resurrection symphony, is a gothic grotesque showing scientist, Gregor Mendel – ‘the father of 99

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Felidae (1994): the Anti-Aristocats plays out ‘pure animal’ discourses of cat behaviour in the midst of a quasiparable about Nazi ideology and animal welfare

modern genetics’ – resurrecting dead and brutalised cats like a mad puppeteer, in a sequence animated by Hayo Freitag. There is surely an echo of Josef Mengele, the German SS officer, known as the ‘Angel of Death’, who supervised the fate of Auschwitz detainees. This is reinforced by the idea that the eventual murderer, the overly anthropomorphised Pascal, a computer-literate Havana Brown cat, is actually Claudandus, the original cat mutated by Mendel’s tissue-bonding glue. He has assumed mythic power and status, and is now killing cats as a mode of selection and cleansing in the development of his new and superior feline breed. This hybrid ‘humanimal’ agenda most obviously speaks to both the anti-Semitic Aryan motivations of Hitler’s Reich, and more recently, the racist mistreatment of Turkish immigrants in Germany. This idea of ‘species engineering’ explored in the film, explicitly refers to complex ideas about evolution and natural selection and the interventions of scientific practice. As Francis pertinently remarks of his observation of animal testing, performed as mythic ritual, ‘What I was watching wasn’t exactly a scene out of The Aristocats’.

Animal evacuation Such a self-conscious distinction between the anthropomorphic orthodoxies of classical character animation in the Disney style, and the visual imagery in Felidae not only foregrounds the film’s status as an adult animated feature, but also points up the ways in which family-orientated narratives largely domesticise the animal to contain, repress and deny the ‘animality’ that may compromise the presumed moral, social and archetypal certainties at the heart of such narratives. The further anxiety that often accompanies such a view is that the very illusionism of using the animated form per se, effectively evacuates ‘the animal’ from animal characters altogether. Such a fear is articulated brilliantly in James Lever’s spoof memoir, Me Cheeta: The Autobiography (2008), in which Cheeta the monkey, from the 1930s Tarzan movies featuring Johnny Weissmuller, supposedly writes about his experiences in Hollywood.5 In the midst of scurrilous recollections of the excesses of the stars, and his often startling descriptions of animal mistreatment – all made extremely funny or challenging by his own position as an untrustworthy narrator – he makes comment about the place of a chimpanzee both in ‘the wild’ and in captivity. 100

Rhetorics of Representaion in Animated Animal Narratives

Cheeta stresses, ‘Sooner or later, every creature that lives in a forest has to learn that there’s only the hierarchy and alphadom and the constant dance of death … Everything that lived murdered.’6 He is even grateful that ‘Irving Thalberg, Prince of Hollywood’, in assembling MGM’s roster of wild animals in different shelters for packing and export, and ‘rehabilitation’, had changed this: ‘It was as if you’d taken the jungle and poured the death out of it.’7 Even though Cheeta begins to realise that the treatment he and the other animals receive is not fundamentally caring and sometimes cruel, he remains grateful for human intervention as it prevents his inevitable death at the hands of other predators. Interestingly, thereafter, he becomes part of an alternative value system, which sees cruelty to animals made manifest in their seemingly ‘unnatural’ participation in human entertainment; Dr Jane Goodall championing a ‘No Reel Apes’ campaign, to ensure no animals are used in films, and suggesting that they might be replaced by computer-generated ones. Cheeta readily dismisses human simian actors, and is equally vexed by the notion of CGI: ‘a collection of pixels, each distinct hair waving lightly in the digital wind, will never start coming to terms with its mother’s death on camera. And that’s what CGI is … it’s back to the men in monkey suits.’8 While he acknowledges ‘the wisecracking eyeball, the smart-aleck donkey’ (Mike Wazowski in Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. [2001] and Donkey in Dreamworks’ Shrek [2001]), he rails ‘they’re not fucking there, are they? … That’s the real magic of movies: their flesh and blood. Does Buzz Lightyear suffer for his art? No, and that’s why he’s no good.’9 Lever’s playful engagement with the Cheeta story, for all its ironies, draws attention to the animal point of view, the physical presence of the real animal – through pain and pleasure, insight and ignorance, pure creature and quasi-human – to resist the notion of the artificial, the illusional, the animated.

Embedded animality Ultimately, though, even as it may be possible to read the flux of meaning in animated animal narratives, and debate the position and identity of the animal when it is depicted in animation, this merely points up the bigger question of what exactly ‘animality’ is, and how it is embodied (or not) in an animated animal film. I first addressed this question when writing about Charlie Chaplin as a proto-animator in his relationship to objects and environments, and his fundamental influence on the animated characters of the pre- and early Disney eras.10 I argue that Chaplin’s performances preserve an essential ‘animality’ in the ‘gag’, which is a resistance to the dehumanising aspects of modernity in the machine age. Further, I suggest, such animality – the physical existence and action of the animal – is aligned with the plasmatic agency of animation, and that this constitutes a common instrumental essence. A brief survey of some further animated animal texts is offered in support of this view. Geoff Dunbar’s animated adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (1979) looks at the seemingly natural processes of uninhibited ‘animality’ through the crazed 101

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

persona of Ubu, whose aspirations to power and control are not the strategic manipulations of an authoritarian politician but the playing out of embedded appetites and desires in literally physically driven actions. The ‘natural’ order here is one that seems unchecked and inchoate. This is best signified in the soundtrack in which the real cries of animals are used to suggest the immediacy of direct and instinctive responses. In a key sequence following a brutally violent battle, Ubu literally tears a huge bear apart and consumes his bloodied flesh. There is no differentiation here between the primal order of animal survival and human agency played out through Ubu. Such an alignment of human and animal normally serves to critique humankind. Usually, this ‘descent’ into animality serves to reveal ‘inhumanity’, only apparent when supposedly civilised behaviour is reduced to a purely animal state of physical self-preservation. Such a perspective misrepresents animality, though, as its instrumental essence is revealed through Ubu’s actions, the animation functioning to present a natural state in and of itself. This is a pure act motivated not by the loss of rationality and conscious control but by somatic drives. This is related to the perspective posited in a film like Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), which speaks to the real similarity and continuum between human and ape, situating the differences as minimal; merely the evolutionary space between the capacity for sentience and the means to express it. This ‘difference’ is brokered through the external agency of science and technology, and is fundamentally concerned with the containment of the impactful powers of ‘animality’ so freely expressed in Ubu Roi. It is pertinent to draw attention here to Cheeta’s concern about the evacuation of the animal in CGI, but the very hyperrealism of Rise of the Planet of the Apes serves to support both the implied and explicit lineage, but in this case seeks to secure the recognition of the animal by its adoption/adaption of the rationalising tendencies of language. Ironically, it is only Caesar’s intellect and ultimately his resistant use of language, which seeks to secure the maintenance of respect for primal knowledge outside the oppressive and misrepresentative systems of the supposedly civilising process. The use of animation is highly significant in both cases – Apes’ persuasiveness is wholly predicated on the plausibility of humans and apes communicating on rational terms, those literally of a heightened naturalism secured by animated motion capture and computergenerated forms; Ubu Roi’s suggestiveness in regard to the physical alignment and elision of animality in human and bear is wholly achieved by brutalist two-dimensional drawn forms, an illusionism moving beyond the literal to embrace the metaphoric. The animal and the animation share instrumental essence, which in turn defines ‘animality’. Nathalie Djurberg’s Putting down the Prey (2008) is a 3D stop-motion puppet animation that once more privileges a particular approach to the form to secure this defining principle of animality. Djurberg enlists the Icelandic/Celtic myth of the shape-shifting seal, the ‘silkie’, which becomes human by shedding its skin, but inverts its theme to show a female hunter, killing and flaying a walrus, only to 102

Rhetorics of Representaion in Animated Animal Narratives

embody its skin and swim away in the Arctic waters. Like Apes and Ubu Roi, the film uses animation to subvert the expectation of human/animal bonds; here the apparent, if seemingly pragmatic brutality of the hunter, is both feminised and revised by virtue of the act of embodiment played out by the girl. She is both human and animal, hunter and hunted, literal and transcendent; a figure implicitly demanding a fresh understanding of the natural order and its effects by effecting ‘animality’ as the very currency of existence. These three examples are hugely suggestive in demonstrating three key ways in which animation as a representative form may be understood as both evidence for, and a consequence of, the instrumental essence that characterises animality. It remains the case, though, that these are essentially embedded examples of human/animal dynamics, and ultimately, the three key approaches here, which might be termed complementary, continuity and communion, are best revealed through animation’s capacity to create bi-creatures in a curio-natural order – and will be addressed in the final part of my discussion.

Bi-creatures and the curio-natural In both the ‘bestial ambivalence’ paradigms, and the three models of ‘animality’ mentioned above, I have sought to suggest that animation has particular qualities that enable a more specific understanding of the relationship between human- and animal kind. This is based on the view that the intrinsic language of expression available in animation offers the potential of a rhetorical commentary on the issues of representing animals, and in best revealing the primal knowledge that properly aligns humans and animals. In my original address of animal representation I situated the discourse of human/animal as part of a dialectic between nature and culture, and implicitly, the impactful nature of technologies. It is clear that the ‘animal’ in animation can therefore always be viewed as a bi-creature oscillating between the traits and tropes of representational orthodoxies in the construction of fictional animals and humankind. I wish to define the bi-creature here a little more precisely, though, as a creature that is neither human nor animal but in some ways embodies both. Indeed, it is the function of the animation itself to reveal the ways in which this model of embodiment is created and to suggest ways in which meaning and affect are therefore subverted. Such subversion, however, is a method by which to reveal more subtle truths about an essential animality and humanity, which, as director Paul Schrader has suggested, ‘recall some greater primal knowledge that is less available to us in the modern urban world’.11 This bi-creature then participates in what I am arguing is a model of the curionatural, at once a ‘curatorial’ view of the assembled repertoire and received meanings of the ‘natural world’, and an approach which remains ‘curious’ in its reinvention or quasi-preservation of a natural or pastoral idyll. The animated works I am concluding this analysis with use bi-creatures in a curio-natural environment, situating the status of the bi-creature as a discourse by which to investigate, define and evaluate the coming together of human and animal discourses: 103

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

first, Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo (2008), second, the much vaunted box-office champion, Avatar (2009) and third, the more left-field, low-rent genre piece, Trollhunter (2010). Ponyo features the eponymous ‘little girl’ who emerges from an undersea mythical kingdom in the midst of an imbalance in the natural order. She is thrown on land stuck in a glass jar as part of the waste and debris pulled from the sea by a trawler, immediately suggesting the difference between the marine idyll and the polluted public world. She is found by a human boy, Soskei, and initially in her early stage of growth is reminiscent of many of the molluscs and starfish in the sea, with no visible arms or legs, and almost the appearance of a glove puppet. Soskei’s mother is convinced she is a fish, and certainly, remains unpersuaded she is human but, as Soskei counters, ‘she’s not just a goldfish, she’s Ponyo’, her name apparently delineating someone or something specific to its own species, or to the boy’s own categories of understanding living creatures. Throughout the narrative, Ponyo’s father tries to reclaim her back to the sea, but she merely becomes part of the increasing natural ferment of deteriorating weather and incipient floods. Ponyo’s fundamental relationship to an alternative order is confirmed, though, when one of the old ladies at the care home that Soskei’s mother attends, views Ponyo in a toy bucket and says ‘fish with faces coming out of the sea cause tsunamis’. Her very age projects this view back in time; previous experience registering contact with the natural disasters endemic to Japanese culture, and seemingly intrinsically related to powers beyond human experience. With each incarnation of Ponyo, her broader relationship to the curio-natural order is made clear, since animation’s inherent deployment of metamorphosis shows her change from ‘fish’ to ‘bird’ to ‘mammal’ to ‘human’. She essentially reveals that she has a continuity with the primal realm and oscillates between human and animal to evidence its inherent relatedness and harmony. Though Soskei’s mother argues ‘you can’t be human and magic at the same time’, Ponyo is exactly that; a symbolic figure that exhibits both the mystery of nature and the qualities that help humanand animal kind restore balance in the natural environment. In James Cameron’s Avatar, the mineral-rich world of Pandora is home to the na’vi, a race of humanoid blue creatures; such extraterrestrials the symbolic projection of humankind totemically embedded within a natural realm. Drawing upon a collective mythology explored in such other literary texts as Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s The World of Noon (1965 onwards), Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest (1976) and Poul Anderson’s Call Me Joe (1957), and films such as The Emerald Forest (1985), Laputa (1986) and Dances with Wolves (1990), Cameron creates a curio-natural order in which the na’vi bi-creatures constantly demonstrate their deep relatedness to the elemental lifeblood of the organic world, and the spirit imbued within it. This is perhaps best exemplified in the act of tsaheylu – the bond – in which the na’vi become physically connected to their flying horse-styled creatures, and other animals and environments in their world. This seemingly ‘bestial’ alignment is once more revealed by the way in which animation 104

Rhetorics of Representaion in Animated Animal Narratives

The documentary imperatives in Trollhunter (2010) authenticate the animality of the troll as a reflection of humanity as a ‘species’

uses penetration to visualise the interior state of the neural connections as they entwine to secure quasi-‘oneness’, both a physical and spiritual joining. It is this that fully empowers former paraplegic marine, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in his exploration of the Pandoran culture, but crucially, it is the key aspect in which the hybridity of the human/animal communion is expressed, and which in turn validates the persuasiveness of the animated avatar itself. Humanity, in and of itself, is proven to be alienated from its essential being, distanciated even from its monotheistic assurances and in need of reawakening through animistic principles – those inherently facilitated by the life-giving properties of animation. In essence, then, Avatar, both as a text, and in regard to the very use of an avatar, promotes animation as the most animistic of forms, in the alignment of human and animal in an eco-centred parable. It is Trollhunter, though, that in using the bi-creature – the troll – as a vehicle to resist the idea of intrinsic continuity or communion between animal and human, but to point up their complementary and parallel place, which most explicitly defines ‘animality’. Several Volda College students embark on making a verité-style documentary about a hunter who appears to be killing bears, but this is merely a cover-up by the authorities, as the hunter’s real mission is to expose and kill the variety of species of troll. As director Andre Ovredal remarks, ‘I was trying to make an animal kingdom out of the trolls … they’re basically beastly humans. I wanted it to be the other way round. I wanted them to be more like animals with a human touch.’12 This shift enables Ovredal to create rhymetossers, ringlefinches and mountain kings, different types of troll, all of which prompt engagement with ‘species’, and how these might be defined and understood. Though the hunter says, ‘They are animals. They eat, shit and mate. Eat anything they can’, the key aspect of the film, once more, is the way in which animation plausibly fabricates the creatures, making 105

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

them believable less in the mythic sense of Ponyo, or the science fictional sense of Avatar, but in the quasi-documentary sense of employing ‘real-world’ strategies which define difference in the animal breed. Consequently, the hunter does not become overwhelmed by, or imbued with, the ‘animality’ of the natural world, but seeks to intellectually embrace it, in order to act upon his brief to regrettably eliminate them. This is based, then, on his perception of the trolls’ distinctive anatomy and biology; their specific sounds and means of communication; their relationship to other animals (‘cows, sheep, German tourists’); their scent and habitat; and the behavioural evidence that reveals their defence and attack strategies, and their means to secure their own well-being and safety. The hunter effectively defines the hunted on terms by which he understands himself, and as such reveals the shared degrees of ‘animality’ that link him to these symbolic creatures that essentially invade the consciousness of humankind, as reminders of its own fears and anxieties about its place within wider schemes of existence past and present. By animating ‘the troll’, the film has reanimated the realisation that ‘fairytales don’t match reality’, and humankind must take more responsibility for itself, and its relationship to animal and environmental cultures.

Conclusion: ‘Donald Duck never wore pants’ In the globally successful TV sitcom, Friends (1994–2004), Chandler (Matthew Perry) remarks, ‘Donald Duck never wore pants, but when he comes out of the shower, he puts a towel around his waist. I mean, what’s that about?’ One might immediately answer that it is concerned with the simultaneity of remembering the ‘nakedness’ implied in taking a shower as a human, but forgetting both Donald’s status as a duck and as an animated character. These oscillations between animal/human discourses are fundamental in the construction of animated animals and suggest a range of perspectives about both the standing of ‘the animal’ in the real world, and the tension between the promotion and evacuation of its meaning in the representational order. I have tried to demonstrate here, though, that both in the use of the ‘bestial ambivalence’ paradigm, and the three models of ‘animality’ – continuity, communion and complementariness – that both the animal and the human are best revealed through rupture, and in essence, this becomes an important agency of radical incoherence or redirection in the animated text per se. The animal and the human seem to find their most effective representation in the liminal states that are often the staple of animated forms and figures. In what is probably the seminal question in this field of enquiry, Steve Baker asks, ‘Why is it that our ideas of the animal – perhaps more than any other set of ideas – are the ones which enable us to frame and express ideas about human identity?’13 In the case of animation, I would argue that its intrinsic vocabulary of expression liberates humans to find a fundamental essence of themselves in animal identity, and that it is a shared ‘animality’ that enables the richest reading of the condition of embodied life itself. 106

Rhetorics of Representaion in Animated Animal Narratives

Notes 1. Paul Wells, The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons and Culture (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2009). 2. Torben Grodal, Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture and Film (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 99–100. 3. See Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991); Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007); Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); Paul Wells, Scriptwriting (Lausanne and Worthing: AVA Academia, 2007); James Telotte, Animating Space from Mickey to WALL-E (Lexington: Kentucky Scholarship Online, 2010); Ulo Pikkov, Animosophy: Theoretical Writings on the Animated Film (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts, 2011). 4. See Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck (London: Simon & Schuster, 1990); Osamu Tezuka, Tezuka School of Animation: Vol 2: Animals in Motion (Carson, CA: Digital Manga Publishing, 2003). 5. James Lever, Me Cheeta: The Autobiography (London: Fourth Estate, 2008). 6. Ibid., p. 23. 7. Ibid., p. 30. 8. Ibid., p. 100. 9. Ibid., p. 86. 10. See Paul Wells, ‘The Chaplin Effect: Ghosts in the Machine and Animated Gags’, in Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil (eds), Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio Era Hollywood (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 15–28. 11. Personal interview with the author, June 1987. 12. Damon Wise, ‘Troll Deep Crew’, Guardian, 3 September 2011, Guide, pp. 14–16. 13. Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 6.

107

Georgina Evans

6 A Cut or a Dissolve? Insects and Identification in Microcosmos There can be little doubt that human spectators commonly conceive of forms of likeness connecting them to the animal subjects they witness in nature documentary film. Laura Mulvey’s classic 1975 essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, sets out the ways in which fiction film offers a dissolution and reimagining of the spectator’s self as they sit in the dark, permitted to ‘misrecognise’ themselves in the enlarged figures before them in such a way that they enjoy ‘temporary loss of ego while simultaneously reinforcing the ego’.1 The resemblance between spectator and subject is predicated upon a superficial similarity, residing specifically in their shared human form. As Mulvey writes: Scale, space, stories are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.2

Mulvey’s ensuing argument about the sexual politics of visual pleasure has, of course, been much revisited, but the question of how we recognise ourselves in fiction film, in which human actors play out our innermost desires and fears, has never lost its fascination. It is striking, however, that models of identification are far less frequently addressed in discussion of documentary film, still less where they concern nonhuman subjects. As Bill Nichols has noted, ‘issues of objectivity, ethics and ideology have become the hallmark of documentary debate as issues of subjectivity, identification and gender have of narrative fiction. But this divide is a matter of aesthetic convention and historical circumstance.’3 The nature film offers a particularly interesting place in which to extend a consideration of identification, and the broader theme of likeness construed by the viewer. Some animal subjects can partially fulfil the criteria of human form proposed by Mulvey, but the extent to which they do so is largely a function of the choices made by film-makers. In Scott MacDonald’s invaluable exploration of the subject of wildlife film, he observes that these films have very little presence within academic film criticism, and furthermore, even those works which have recently addressed this gap tend to

A Cut or a Dissolve?

focus on the American tradition, and to exclude ‘films that focus on insects and sea organisms’.4 In the marginalising of these creatures, we might already detect the difficulty of establishing a relation between human viewer and the least readily anthropomorphised citizens of the animal kingdom. Indeed, in the film which will form the focus of this chapter, Marie Pérennou and Claude Nuridsany’s Microcosmos (1996), the challenges of encouraging an audience to engage emotionally with insects as beings rather than objects were part of the project’s attraction for the film-makers. As Nuridsany remarks, there is nothing harder to relate to than an insect ‘which has no face, no facial expressions, which you cannot stroke or engage with in an affective exchange like a cat, or a dog, or a sheep’.5 He explicitly states that they wished their film to provoke audience sympathy with insects, and to transform the repugnance so often expressed in the face of their alien anatomy into childlike wonderment at an enchanted world inhabited by mythological ‘princes’ equipped with fantastic armaments.6 As I will demonstrate, there are many ways in which this might be deemed a variation on an all too conventional anthropomorphism. However, it is also true that the film complicates its appeals to sympathy by recognising that likeness is in the eye of the beholder, and not all eyes are human eyes. In writing on wildlife documentary by film scholars, notably in the dedicated volumes by Gregg Mitman, Derek Bousé and Cynthia Chris, some clear orthodoxies emerge, which govern the majority of encounters between human spectator and on-screen animal.7 Chris summarises the three key forms of animal–human relation promoted by wildlife film as follows: the genre shifted from a framework in which the animal appears as object of human action (and in which the animal is targeted as game), to an anthropomorphic framework, in which human characteristics are mapped onto animal subjects, to a zoomorphic framework, in which knowledge about animals is used to explain the human. Thus, representations of animals articulate and reinforce new understandings of not only animal life but also human behavior. We look not only at animals to learn about them, but we also look through animals for ourselves.8

The first of these forms is most clearly identified in early films made as a form of ‘hunting with the camera’, as Mitman describes it, although the underlying attitude remains very visible in recent work.9 This is especially true in ‘making of ’ features, in which lamentation over threat to an endangered natural world implies a concomitant triumph in bringing back footage. This particular form of objectification is also tied up with the idea that animal film should be science film, a record of data gathering rather than a creative production. The persistence of this popular feeling is manifest in the furore over a mother polar bear shown in the BBC’s 2011 Frozen Planet series. British tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror uncovered the fact that the images of the bear and her newborn cubs were captured in a Dutch zoo rather than the arctic terrain ostensibly presented to the viewers, and 109

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

lambasted the makers for having ‘fooled the audience into believing the footage was gathered by intrepid cameramen in the brutal sub-zero wilderness’.10 Attenborough’s defence, ‘Come on, we’re making movies’, failed to convince, instead being deemed ‘surprising’ in ‘comparing BBC nature documentaries to movies’.11 This apparent zeal for a distinction between fictional ‘movies’ and nature documentary does not necessarily extend into enthusiasm for fidelity to the rhythm of animal life. Bousé explores the ‘pervasive media image of nature as a site of action and excitement’, considering the fact that a truthfully ‘proportional’ representation of an African lion’s average day would result in around forty-two minutes of relative inactivity in a fifty-two-minute documentary, which would clearly be unpalatable to the general market for wildlife documentary.12 Bousé suggests that television should be held responsible for the scenario observed by John Berger, in which children at zoos with artificial expectations of animals are heard wondering, ‘Where is he? Why doesn’t he move? Is he dead?’13 Nuridsany notes with exasperation that didactic explanation of reproduction and predation have come to be overstressed to the extent of becoming stereotypical of animal film.14 The anthropomorphism and zoomorphism identified by Chris as the two later developments in animal film are borne out throughout criticism on the subject, and the substantial moral and political weight brought to bear on animal subjects, largely imposed through voiceover, has received detailed scrutiny by MacDonald, Bousé, and Mitman as well as Chris. Using animal film to narcissistically reflect a zoomorphising gaze back on our human selves might be seen as a natural development in a Darwinian age. Chris cites the example of Bridget Jones, despairing at a wildlife documentary voiceover describing lion mating as ‘brief and perfunctory’, to illustrate how readily we assume that animal film is understood as an essentially anthropocentric, pedagogical enterprise.15 The fact that a corpus of films has given rise to these general truths is not, as both Attenborough and Bousé indicate, reprehensible in itself, but should be acknowledged as having set parameters which leave room for different kinds of truthful encounter with the same subject matter. In this chapter, I want to look closely at Microcosmos as one example of a film which manages to create a different perspective, and to open this into a consideration of forms of identification which are not entirely anthropomorphising, zoomorphising or pedagogically motivated. The film presents us with a study in astonishing forms of likeness, but one in which the hierarchy governing the separate elements of that likeness is not clearly defined. We are left asking what, exactly, resembles what, through what lens and with what significance. The discussion will call upon the writings of avant-garde film-maker and critic Stan Brakhage, and French thinker Roger Caillois. Caillois is most often recognised for his writing on games and his associations with the Surrealists. However, his relevance here lies in fascination with the ways in which resemblance reveals intersections between science, myth and a human desire to become lost in a broader natural landscape. It was atomic physics which confronted Caillois with the most emphatic statement of the world’s inherent strangeness, but animal life which provided him with the clearest focus for his 110

A Cut or a Dissolve?

writing on the subject. He fell out with Surrealist leader André Breton over the question of whether scientific scrutiny necessarily robbed nature of its enchantment. The flashpoint in this dispute was Breton’s refusal to slice open a Mexican jumping bean, ‘because you did not want to find an insect or worm inside (that would have destroyed the mystery, you said)’, an attitude which for Caillois indicated Breton’s refusal to confront ‘a form of the Marvellous that does not fear knowledge but, on the contrary, thrives on it’.16 Caillois has much in common with Nuridsany and Pérennou, sharing a wish to articulate the coincidence of science and enchantment, and all three at times articulate this encounter in terms of myth. In Caillois’s writing of the 1930s, he postulates that the repeating forms of myth across cultures indicate its biological origin.17 References to myth pepper interviews with Nuridsany and Pérennou, for whom the idea seems to represent a determination that observable truths of insect life need not be held apart from the pleasures of imagination. Indeed, Nuridsany and Pérennou are nervous of the term ‘documentary’ precisely because of its disenchanted connotations, preferring the tag ‘poetic drama’.18 Microcosmos depicts the teeming life of insects, caterpillars and molluscs which proliferates within a meadow in Aveyron in the south of France. The directors are biologists-turned-photographers-turned-film-makers, who describe their own metamorphosis as that from caterpillars to butterflies.19 The extraordinary macrophotography in the film is the result of years of technical development, a direct development from their first book, Photographier la Nature, which itself sits in a long tradition encompassing Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey and, further back, Robert Hooke’s 1665 work of microscopically informed illustration, Micrographia.20 Like these predecessors, Nuridsany and Pérennou celebrate in their book not only their animal subjects, but the revelatory optical technology that facilitates the study. However, Microcosmos is not conceived of by its makers in quite the same scientific terms as is their book. Whereas the book is devoted to parallel explanation of macrophotographic technique and the behaviour of the creatures at which the lens is directed, the film strives ‘to project the spectator onto an unknown planet, Planet Earth’, in a way which feels more transparent.21 The makers’ technical development work was thus directed towards enabling the use of a familiar cinematographic language, through ‘the same tools that are used to film actors and actresses in fiction films: traveling shots, cranes, et cetera, so as to give the insects that stature of real characters’, all of which had hitherto been impossible on such a small scale.22 This was followed by the building of special sets, devised to screen the creatures from the intense lights between takes. In interviews, the two directors further develop this sense that the insects are entities rather than objects, continually referring to the animals in the film as ‘acteurs’, and giving each an individual listing in the final credits. Rather than seeing all this as a slide into an even deeper anthropomorphism than that already prevailing in the nature film, Nuridsany and Pérennou consider their whole approach to Microcosmos to be an explicit refutation of the worn-out tropes of wildlife documentary: 111

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

There was always the voice-over commentary, almost interchangeable from film to film, that dictated to the spectators what they should understand from the images that were presented to them. The music was often overbearing, and the editing was there to invent an artificial story line, to create events that never actually happened in real life.23

Nuridsany and Pérennou also assert their rejection of the ultraviolence and improbable levels of action criticised by Bousé, preferring to document the ‘quotidian’ life of their insect subjects. Although the film does resist turbulent dramatic arcs, the structure it uses to reveal the everyday has been compared by MacDonald to the city symphonies of the 1920s, which aimed to present a social portrait of the typical life of a human conurbation.24 Early in Microcosmos we see a montage of various creatures washing themselves, implying that this is the morning ritual preceding the day’s work, akin to what we see early on in Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929). MacDonald’s reading certainly fits with the film’s original French subtitle, Le Peuple de l’herbe (People of the Grass). The quest to present a truth about insect life does not necessarily imply a rejection of its resemblance to the human. In interviews on the film, its makers speak with high emotion, declaring that their primary aim was to communicate the enchantment with animals which they felt as children, and which would later lead them into science. The wonder they feel in the face of nature is one they conceive of as part of the natural response of a child confronted by insect life, imagining what it would be like to actually be an insect.25 In the film, this sympathetic relation with the animal subjects is demanded of the spectator, to use one example among many, in a sequence depicting a bee, described in the credits as being ‘amoureuse’ of a bee orchid. This description refers to a sequence in which the film presents the bee’s fascination with the flower. The film cuts from a close-up shot of a bee viewed from the side to a shot in which the camera moves slowly up the stem of the orchid, finally pausing when one of the flowers is squarely presented to the camera. This prompts a rapid shot/reverseshot sequence, showing first the bee head on, its eyes newly conspicuous, then the flower in a much closer shot than the previous one, and then the bee taking off to investigate more closely. The sound of the bee’s buzzing flows continuously over shots of the flower, not only stressing its proximity, but enhancing the spectator’s sense of the flower’s masquerade. This suturing of bee’s vision to human spectator’s vision gives way to a fairly conventional suggestion of pathos, as the camera now watches the bee stroke the deceitful flower with one tiny limb, in an apparent attempt to fathom what is going wrong. While thus far the soundtrack has offered only silence and buzzing, it now swells with wistful strings in wordless human commentary on this tragedy of misrecognition. A series of shots dwell on the bee’s frantic exploration of the orchid’s mysterious body, with close-ups indicating that the bee becomes laden with pollen before finally moving on. Even though there are so many mute appeals to our sympathy, the lack of an explicatory commentary, here 112

A Cut or a Dissolve?

Microcosmos: Le Peuple de l’herbe (1996)

and throughout the film, is a bold and unusual move in nature documentary. Nuridsany and Pérennou initially recorded one, but chose to discard it. In doing so, they were aware that they risked losing the insights that such sequences are generally intended to illustrate, but speak of the decision in terms of more important ambitions: they found that the commentary disabled the direct address to the imagination that they wanted to prioritise, remarking that the presence of commentary tends to overwhelm films about the natural world; to us it’s as unbearable as commentaries by tour guides during organized guided tours of exhibitions: they limit your imagination and your sensibility, alienate your liberty and, as far as we’re concerned, spoil your pleasure.26

The orchid does achieve its presumed biological function, in leaving a parcel of pollen on the bee, but Nuridsany and Pérennou’s willingness to risk this going unnoticed softens the driving narrative of purpose generally associated with such scenes. More interesting than the appeal to emotion perhaps is the anthropomorphism of the gaze suggested by this sequence, which moves the practice of filming insects as if they were people a stage further. The implied shared point of view of humans and animals is a concern for MacDonald in the context of Walt Disney’s True-Life Adventures (c. 1948–60), which not only ‘lure children, mothers and fathers into emotional identification’ with ‘animal characters’, but use classic point-of view shot sequences ‘fabricated to suggest that the animals, like the spectators in the theater, are interested observers of what is occurring on-screen’, thus suturing the viewer into a false parallel.27 This mistrust of anthropocentric visual models echoes 113

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Caillois’ writing on insects in his 1935 essay, ‘Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire’ (Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia), in which he discounts claims of meaningful resemblance between some creatures, deemed to play some essential part in nature’s systems, as only the product of a human gaze. Caillois contemplates, among other examples, the Smerinthus occellata moth and the Caligo butterfly, both of which were described in turn-of-the-century scientific texts as resembling the heads of birds of prey when adopting certain attitudes. Caillois concludes that ‘it is all too clear that anthropomorphism plays a decisive role ... the resemblance exists solely in the eye of the beholder’.28 Even if it were possible to escape the inescapably human parameters of any such assertion of visual resemblance, it is not straightforwardly defensible to presume the primacy of any form of vision in an animal subject. As Caillois goes on to indicate, much animal hunting is conducted via the sense of smell, and Nuridsany and Pérennou acknowledge in discussion of their film that smell is part of the bee orchid’s masquerade.29 While it is certainly the case that vision appears to play a role in this encounter, the nature of that vision is opaque to us, though film can offer us little choice but to elide it into our own model. The notion that the camera eye should be equated to a human eye (even when used to produce a macrophotographic image) is explicitly suggested in Nuridsany and Pérennou’s earlier book on close-up photography, in which the lenses used are described as ‘perfecting the human eye’.30 This presumed correlation between the eye of the camera and a rigidly conceived model of human vision is one which is probed by Brakhage in his book Metaphors on Vision (1963).31 Brakhage laments the ways in which the film image in its supposed veracity is determined by human models of the eye, concretised through the grinding of lenses to reproduce a narrowly conceived visual realism. Brakhage invites us to imagine alternative conceptions of the eye, models which surely must be equally available to a film technology which has only been driven to emulate the human through force of narcissistic and conservative habit. Brakhage considers instead the possibility of ‘an eye unruled by manmade laws of perspective, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception’.32 In the bee orchid sequence from Microcosmos, the human viewer’s sympathies are aroused not least by the fact that the orchid is clearly not another bee, but merely a flower which resembles a bee, an awareness through which we might feel comforted that our powers of perception surpass those of the insect. Brakhage asks us to desist from thinking of animal eyes as impoverished, in terms only of what they cannot see, and exhorts film-makers to attempt to incorporate into their work those aspects of animal vision which exceed the limits of the human: Don’t think of creatures of uncolored vision as restricted, but wonder, rather, and marvel at the known internal mirrors of the cat which catch each spark of light in the darkness and reflect it to an intensification. Speculate as to insect vision, such 114

A Cut or a Dissolve?

as the bee’s sense of scent thru ultraviolet perceptibility. To search for human visual realities, man must, as in all other homo motivation, transcend the original physical restrictions and inherit worlds of eyes.33

Brakhage imagines a future for film-making in which, among other things, film technology can help to lend us forms of vision imaginable to human beings, but not generally realisable by the human eye. In cinema he sees ‘virtually untapped talents, viewpoints ... more readily recognizable as visually non-human yet within the realm of the humanly imaginable’, and specifically he expresses the hope that computer technology and technical advances will be engaged to render in motion such things as infrared and the ‘transformation of ultra-violets to human cognizance’.34 Here he echoes some of early twentieth-century science film-maker Jean Painlevé’s enthusiasm for the cinematic possibilities of technologies such as endoscopy and radiography, and Painlevé’s belief in science film as research rather than simply a means through which research might be communicated.35 In Nuridsany and Pérennou’s work, there is indubitably much which implies their investment in the human visual models Brakhage so mistrusts. However, in one short sequence, they pay homage to the alternatives, and through digital images they realise some of Brakhage’s ambitions. We see what is straightforwardly set up as a point-of-view shot, situated as the perspective of a bee flying over a lush green field carpeted with brilliant red poppies. However, the film dissolves into an alternative rendering of the scene, which offers us only a pattern of coloured hexagons, apparently continuing the movement already described over the field of flowers, but presenting them to the spectator in a radically unfamiliar

Microcosmos: Le Peuple de l’herbe (1996) 115

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

visual form which we can only assume mimics the compound eye, made up of thousands of separate units or ommatidia, each detecting different colours. This sequence was described as ‘incongruous’ by a reviewer in Nature,36 and certainly it sits strangely with Nuridsany and Pérennou’s professions of transparency, which include a claim to have used no special effects in Microcosmos.37 However, if it is seen as ‘incongruous’, this can only be because it disrupts the illusion through which we conceive of the camera eye to be naturalistic, endow insects with human vision and suppose that merely by borrowing their small scale we become like them. In this digital sequence, the absence of commentary again feels highly significant. Microcosmos presents the transformation between these two shots without comment, and refrains from delivering a conventional lecture on the marvels of the compound eye. Thus there is no distinction asserted between the deliberately familiar film language so meticulously employed in the rest of the film and this utterly unfamiliar image, which only achieves any legibility through its context. The film spectator’s gaze is zoomorphised as far as possible (for we can never see the ultraviolet which other sources tell us must be informing the bee).38 The next manoeuvre in the presumed narrative of mating, feeding and pollination is far harder for us to second guess here than it is in the bee orchid sequence. These few seconds of hexagonal imagery are crucial to the film’s success in evading some of the most common pitfalls supposed to beset the nature documentary. It comes early in the film, preceding the incident depicting the bee orchid, and arguably it awakens in the viewer a self-consciousness about the human perspective through which everything else will be seen. It tells us that whatever we see hereafter is effectively a translation, and any sense of identification must always be qualified. Nevertheless, it is telling that the boundary between human and insect vision is marked not by a cut but by a dissolve; the continuity in the motion does allow us to suppose some continuity between these two perceptual worlds. The compound eye sequence offers the viewer a mimicry of the insect which, if only for a moment, collapses the distance between them at the same time as it stresses it. The question of resemblance, and through what kind of eye resemblance is judged to exist, is central to Nuridsany and Pérennou’s work. They ascribe a mythological resonance to their subject, observing that the scenes depicted in Microcosmos are such that they are immediately transfigured by the human viewer into a ‘wild mythology’.39 As Nuridsany indicates, many of the film’s images are deliberately allusive, provoking in the spectator a sense that they have been seen before, such as the example of ants circled around a tiny pool of water, which recalls the African waterhole scenes with which wildlife film has familiarised us.40 The spectacle of a mosquito rising from the water takes on a heroic aspect in the film-makers’ vision, as a ‘golden deity’,41 a figure bearing meaning in a world in which ‘the sciences fulfil the role of mythology’.42 Nuridsany stresses that almost every image in the film can be viewed in this light, with the spectator not being told 116

A Cut or a Dissolve?

Microcosmos: Le Peuple de l’herbe (1996)

what the image actually is, but rather being left the space to ask ‘What does that look like?’.43 Nuridsany and Pérennou’s sense that nature’s internal echoes are closely entwined with the patterns and uses of myth chimes with Caillois, for whom the human fascination with insects, and the repetitious aspects of the expression of this fascination, are testament to the biological origins of myth, as he argues through an account of the diverse traditions surrounding the praying mantis.44 The sequence of the bee and the bee orchid clearly reflects this concern with resemblance, imitation and mimicry, which we can trace through Nuridsany and Pérennou’s earlier work, including one book explicitly on this theme entitled Masques et Simulacres: Le Mimétisme dans la nature (Masks and Simulcra: Mimicry in Nature, 1990),45 and in their 2004 film Genesis. Genesis makes copious use of graphic matches in its editing to insist upon organic similarities as part of its spinning of a science-based creation myth: a mushroom cloud of white smoke folding back on itself echoes the ethereal form of a jellyfish in dark water, and a cut flips a stream of bubbles into a mass of microscopic round organisms. The story of the earth’s evolution is minimally narrated in voiceover by an African griot, but insisted upon far more schematically through the moves the film makes from one image to the next. The example of the orchid that looks like a bee in Microcosmos is something of an exception among a greater number of animals that mimic plants. A series of shots of waving grasses, with whiskery heads, bookend one of a stick insect perched atop a dry flower head, fauna distinguishable from flora only because it is choosing to move in a fashion that is too deliberate. A shot of a branch bearing leaves offers a similar revelation, as one leaf strolls along the stem, not a leaf but 117

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Microcosmos: Le Peuple de l’herbe (1996)

a caterpillar. In its characteristic wordlessness, the film gives no specific indication of the usefulness of this camouflage, and instead allows it to simply provoke wonder at the moment the vegetable unveils itself as animal. Here again, Nuridsany and Pérennou resonate with Caillois. Caillois proposes that the common arguments about mimicry in animals, which suggest that it must have either a defensive or offensive purpose, are not sustainable in the face of numerous examples where this result is not achieved, the most notable example being that of the ‘wretched’ Phyllidae insects, which so closely resemble the foliage that is both their habitat and foodstuff that they ‘graze on each other, literally mistaking other Phyllidae for real leaves’. 46 Thus, says Caillois, we are compelled to look to an anti-Darwinian interpretation and conclude that, far from being useful, mimetic behaviour is a form of ‘luxury’ that is symptomatic of less utilitarian motivations at the heart of both human and animal nature. For Caillois, non-useful mimicry indicates a drive to become assimilated into the environment, to dissolve the figure of the self into the ground of one’s surroundings and to let go of the singular location at which one’s consciousness coincides with an identifiable location in space. In humans, the expression of this as ‘psychasthenia’ is considered to be disordered, but a similar experience of dislocation is generated in confrontation with twentieth-century physics, which presents us with spatial models which leave no clear place in which to situate the human self and instantly undermine the security of the individual subject.47 Microcosmos’s efforts to indicate and generate uninterrogated resemblance, and to disrupt the laws of scale that usually govern a human viewer’s encounter with the screen, perform something similar. Its (admittedly very gentle) assault on the self-assurance of cinema spectators is compounded by its fleeting incorporation of an entirely unfamiliar correlation between the visual and 118

A Cut or a Dissolve?

the spatial, in the compound eye sequence. In Brakhage’s terms, it examines human visual realities by indicating others. Certainly I would hesitate to suggest that Nuridsany and Pérennou’s resemblances propose that, even as cinema viewers sitting in the dark, we become subsumed in a world on screen. But there is something in their refusal of the utilitarian account of animal life, and in the commonality implied by their reverberating visual echoes, which releases us from binaries of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism. The line between animal subject and human spectator can be marked by a dissolve.

Notes 1. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975), in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 18. 2. Ibid., p. 17. 3. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 156. 4. Scott MacDonald, ‘Up Close and Political: Three Short Ruminations on Nature Film’, in Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration, Essays/Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 158. 5. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos: Entretien avec les réalisateurs’, in Microcosmos: Le Peuple de l’herbe, DVD (Arcades Video, 2003). 6. Ibid. 7. Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 8. Chris, Watching Wildlife, p. x. 9. Mitman, Reel Nature, p. 5. 10. Euan Stretch, ‘Frozen Planet Fakery Row: Polar Bear Filmed in Zoo’, Daily Mirror, 12 December 2011, available at http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/12/12 frozen-planet-fakery-row-polar-bear-filmed-in-zoo-115875-23628713/. 11. ‘Frozen Planet Scandal: Sir David Attenborough Defends Fake Polar Bear Footage’, Daily Mirror, 13 December 2011, available at http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tvnews/frozen-planet-scandal-sir-david-96593. 12. Bousé, Wildlife Films, p. 6. 13. John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, in About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 21. 14. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos’. 15. Chris, Watching Wildlife, p. 123. 16. Roger Caillois, ‘Letter to André Breton’, in Claudine Frank (ed.), The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, trans. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 85. 119

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

17. This essay focuses upon Caillois’s writing of the 1930s. He would amend and expand upon his thinking about mimicry later in his career, in Méduse et cie (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), but would maintain the central belief with which I am concerned here, namely that the insistence on interpreting all animal behaviour in terms of utility is a form of anthropomorphism. 18. Press release for Cannes Film Festival 1996, available at http://www.filmfestivals.com/ cannes96/cfilc2.htm. 19. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos’. 20. Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, Photographier la Nature: De la Loupe au microscope (Paris: Hachette, 1979). 21. Scott MacDonald, ‘Interview with Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’, in Adventures of Perception, p. 190. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 189. 24. Ibid., p. 192. 25. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos’. 26. MacDonald, ‘Interview with Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’, p. 190. 27. MacDonald, ‘Up Close and Political’, p. 163. 28. Roger Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, in Frank, The Edge of Surrealism, p. 93. 29. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos.’ 30. Nuridsany and Pérennou, Photographier la Nature. 31. Stan Brakhage, Metaphors on Vision (New York: Film Culture Inc., 1963). 32. Brakhage, ‘Metaphors on Vision’, in Bruce R. McPherson (ed.), Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking (New York: Documentext, 2001), p. 12. 33. Stan Brakhage, ‘The Camera Eye’, in McPherson, Essential Brakhage, p. 19. 34. Ibid., p. 23. 35. Jean Painlevé, ‘Le Cinéma scientifique’, La Technique cinématographique (1955). 36. Helen Phillips, ‘Sex, Flies and Videotape’, Nature, vol. 387 (1997), p. 363. 37. Press release for Cannes Film Festival 1996. 38. See, for example, Adrian G. Dyer, Angelique C. Paulk and David H. Reser, ‘Colour Processing in Complex Environments: Insights from the Visual System of Bees’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 278 (2011), pp. 952–9. 39. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos’. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. MacDonald, ‘Interview with Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’, p. 193. 43. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos’. 44. Roger Caillois, ‘The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis’, in Frank, The Edge of Surrealism, pp. 69–81. 45. Claude Nuridsany and Maria Pérennou, Masques et simulacres: Le Mimétisme dans la nature (Paris: Du May, 1990). 46. Caillois, ‘Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia’, p. 97. 47. Ibid., p. 100. 120

Cynthia Chris

7 Subjunctive Desires Becoming Animal in Green Porno and Seduce Me How much my life has changed, and yet how unchanged it has remained at bottom! Franz Kafka, ‘Investigations of a Dog’

Male whitetail deer compete for opportunities to mate with multiple females, and males losing these battles mount each other.1 (They get to have same-sex sex.) A limpet, an aquatic snail, ‘born sexless’, attaches to a rock, and becomes female. Other limpets cluster around her, each becoming male and mating with her. When she dies, the closest limpet to her becomes female: the species is sequentially hermaphroditic. A male bedbug stabs a female, ejaculating in her abdomen, in an act known as traumatic insemination. A snake, a seahorse and a squid, in turn, engage in sexual behaviour, coupling or cloning, singly or with another or with many others. In the series of short films known as Green Porno and Seduce Me, these creatures – the deer as well as the duck, the dolphin and more – are not themselves. Each of these animals is familiar to humans from urban parks and zoos, picture books, biology classes and wildlife films. But in these films, the animal is both present and absent. The creator of these films, Isabella Rossellini, occupies the very space in which we find the cuttlefish, the barnacle or the whale. (She has always been an adventurer.2) Not only writer, producer and director or co-director, Rossellini also stars in each film. She undertakes these acts – performances, transformations or becomings, we are yet to be sure – in a series of eighteen very short films shot on highdefinition video. Most follow a standard format: three minutes or less, simple props on nearly bare sets, focused on the sexual behaviours of nonhuman animals. According to Sarah E. S. Sinwell, the project began as Sundance Channel’s experimental debut on so-called third and fourth screens (computers and mobile devices, respectively).3 The films have been screened at ‘first-screen’ film festivals and as part of the New York-based IFC Center’s Short Attention Span Cinema programme – essentially, as shorts before a feature; on television (the ‘second screen’) via Sundance Channel and the Independent Film Channel; and on YouTube and on Sundance’s own website.4

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Green Porno’s first season (2008) featured mostly insects. The second season concentrated on marine life.5 The third includes three films with a ‘Bon Appetit’ theme, taking on the impact of commercial fishing on oceanic populations, as do photo essays on shrimp, anchovies and squid in a book version of Green Porno.6 A sequel, Seduce Me, comprises two sets of five films, with somewhat more eclectic animal subjects, and more elaborate sets and costumes than Green Porno. Occasionally, other actors appear, but none as recognisably, or as centrally, as Rossellini herself. For example, a man’s bulging bicep represents masculine allure in ‘Cuttlefish’. In ‘Deer’, Rossellini is one of four females hoping to be selected for mating by the herd’s dominant male, who she refers to as ‘champ’. All the does wear Rossellini masks, which, rather than low-tech props, are video images composited using chroma key techniques. Rossellini becomes the firefly and the salmon, among other animal others, in a world of construction paper and puppet strings, wearing fabric wings and wiry antennae, swollen with thorax or bursting with fins. What would it be like to live underground or underwater, to spin a web or to light one’s own way, bioluminescently? Can our human selves ever really know? Sinwell situates Rossellini’s presence in these films, using the work of Judith Butler and Michael Warner as frameworks, as performative, parodistic and political.7 However, there may be other layers of meaning to be discerned within these films through other lenses. I might argue that, to answer these questions, Rossellini becomes animal. Fleetingly, knowingly, but animal nonetheless. Or – considering the terms set by Deleuze and Guattari’s delirious sections on ‘becoming-animal’ in A Thousand Plateaus (1989) – does she? Amid passages on ‘the fine film Willard’, vampires, the Wolf-Man and Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1951), Deleuze and Guattari offer: A becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, or imitation, or, at the limit, an identification … To become is not to progress or regress along a series. Above all, becoming does not occur in the imagination, even when the imagination reaches the highest cosmic or dynamic level … . Becomings-animal are neither dreams nor phantasies. They are perfectly real. But which reality is at issue here? For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal … [b]ecoming produces nothing other than itself.8

Within this setting, Rossellini’s Green Porno and Seduce Me performances might be dismissed as resemblance, imitation, identification that fail to qualify as becoming. Or, taking another tack through the notion of becoming, we might find that Rossellini indeed becomes, animal or otherwise. To do so, I would argue, involves less transmogrification than transitivity: a matter of establishing a relationship between the transitive verb to become and its object (proverbially, here, animal). Becoming, then, may be fundamentally grammatical: the syntactical arrangement of components of a system (animals and humans being inextricably part of the same system, after all). This chapter explores Rossellini’s short films, in which she 122

Subjunctive Desires

performs the roles of various animals, against and through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal. In Green Porno, becoming begins with a wish, expressed in a tense as object-hungry as the transitive verb form, the future subjunctive: ‘If I were …’. But not all becomings are knowingly desired, even if desire proves key to all becoming.

Becoming insect To see what becoming may be, it might pay to consider a becoming-animal undergone elsewhere. In Franz Kafka’s wonderful tragedy The Metamorphosis (1915), the travelling salesmen Gregor Samsa wakes up to find that he is not quite himself. The young man, accustomed to throwing two legs over the side of his bed, taking his case of fabric samples in hand and rushing to the early morning train, finds that his body has become crusty with shell and gawky with unexpected, sticky appendages. He misses his breakfast but has a newfound taste for rot. He croaks (‘chirping’, Kafka writes) in a voice that is, to his own ears, ‘unmistakably his own voice’, and, to others, ‘the voice of an animal’.9 Gregor Samsa goes to bed man, and wakes up animal – insect, that is; cockroach or beetle, Kafka does not say, and Gregor does not seem to know himself – gnawing on the doorknob and clinging to walls. Kafka spares us the actual metamorphosis, so it is hard to say exactly what happened in the night. The story begins in the morning, when Gregor finds himself irrevocably late for work and already changed. But we do know that as a man, Gregor is only an object of others – his voraciously dependent family; his demanding, deafened boss; his far-flung clients, to whom he migrates, shuttling about in trains and scratching out nights in hotels. Gregor scuttles from sale to sales prospect, returning occasionally to a home that he experiences only as the site of debts to be paid and mouths to be fed. One might say that his species-being is unfulfilled, in the terms Karl Marx used to describe the alienated worker in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: ‘in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal’.10 That is, Gregor becomes insect because that is the abject hull that remains when his circumstances – as exploited labourer and as his family’s meal ticket – dessicate his humanity. But Kafka provides ‘something more than an entomological fantasy’, as Vladimir Nabokov argued in a lecture at Cornell University in the late 1940s.11 (Nabokov was not only a novelist and poet but also something of an insect expert – specifically, a lepidopterist.12) While he spends some of the lecture trying to identify Gregor’s species from Kafka’s clues, Nabokov largely refuses the symbolic and summarises the story’s other themes in formal terms, beginning with the threesomes that echo throughout the tripartite story: ‘There are three doors to Gregor’s room. His family consists of three people. Three servants appear in the course of the story. Three lodgers have three beards. Three Samsas write three letters.’ If one is tempted to find Holy Trinity in this theme, Nabokov finds only ‘aesthetic and 123

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

logical’ structure.13 Second, he identifies the theme of opening and closing doors, an action which allows information (as well as persons and objects) to flow within the story, literalising the notion of narrative space. Third and finally, he finds Kafka preoccupied in The Metamorphosis with the economic ‘ups and downs’ of Gregor’s family, its cyclical ‘flourishing’ and despair.14 It may be this tendency toward cyclicity that prompts Nabokov to declare, ‘I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs’, in a section of the lecture that acrimoniously rejects a Freudian analysis of the story as Oedipal allegory.15 Nabokov insists, and rightly so, that there is more to The Metamorphosis than the obvious fact that the son is, literally, squashed by the father. Still, it is hard to keep the paternal figure that looms over Gregor entirely out of the picture, given that the family’s periods of economic hardship and relative comfort – which Nabokov identified as a worthy theme – alternate as the role of breadwinner shifts from father to son and back again. (And given Kafka’s own well-known conflicted filiality.16) In a 1934 essay, Walter Benjamin notes the story’s fundamental reversal: it is the father who is parasitic, even if it is the son who turns animal.17 It may just be that, from Nabokov’s perspective, too much attention to the father–son dyad distracts from the elegantly triangulated structure he identifies throughout the story. Yet another dyad central to the story is at least as unavoidable: it is a woman who brings desire squarely into view. And it is desire that holds the key to becoming. If it seems at times that in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari most deftly articulate what becominganimal is not, in their earlier volume Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986), they explicate the concept with uncharacteristic clarity. Thanks may be due to the rich animal territory provided by their subject. After all, the insect that Gregor Samsa becomes in The Metamorphosis is only one member of the menagerie that populates Kafka’s work, making music and making conversation, and often, narrating these very stories. Consider the half-lamb/half-kitten of ‘A Crossbreed’ (1917), Red Peter the ape in ‘A Report to an Academy’ (1917), the unnamed creature (a mole?) of ‘The Burrow’ (1923), ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’ (1924) and the canine characters of ‘Temptation in the Village’ (1914), ‘The Jackals and the Arabs’ (1917) and ‘The Investigations of a Dog’ (1922).18 To Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal is an affronting displacement of power and a refusal of repression – ‘where one believed there was the law, there is in fact desire and desire alone’ – that alters the subject himself.19 ‘To the inhumanness of the “diabolical powers”,’ they write there is the answer of a becoming-animal: to become a beetle, to become a dog, to become an ape … rather than lowering one’s head and remaining a bureaucrat, inspector, judge, or judged … To become animal is to participate in movement, to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold … .20

Becoming animal is ‘the way out’, and it is driven by desire.21 124

Subjunctive Desires

That is, desire is the route between Gregor’s human and animal selves. While Marx cordoned off procreating, like eating and drinking, as an ‘animal function’, Gregor yearns for a connection with another human that transcends reproductive imperatives.22 Yet love proves as elusive as his labours are estranged. The object of Gregor’s desire appears in a photograph torn from a magazine, preserved in a frame carved by his own hand and hung on the wall of his bedroom. The woman in the photograph is his very own Venus in Furs, unobtainable and already wrapped in animal.23 From Gregor’s aching perspective, she is so remote, so unfamiliar, that she may as well be another species, ‘untouchable, unkissable, forbidden’.24 He is so close to her, yet she is so far from his reach, that he cannot bear his desire, not for one more night. And so he rises, devoid of the heart and groin and mouth and hands he once sported, to find himself in a body as foreign to him as the body of the beloved but unknown woman, and as foreign to him as the body of vermin that he would have previously dismissed as beneath knowing. He becomes, but does not recognise, the animal he is and will be. His task after becoming is not to assign himself to one category or another, to fret over species as he had fretted over the corners of the picture frame, but only to learn to operate new apparatus, the sticky feet and flailing legs and steel-trap jaw with which he finds himself newly equipped. Later, when his family clears the furniture from his room, Gregor uses his new body to cling to the picture, as if the remnants, the memory, of his humanity depended on it.25 I am quite sure that it did.

Becoming subjunctive In The Metamorphosis, Gregor’s becoming-insect is no mere imitation, nor is it allegory in which the bug is simply a symbolic pointer to the man’s fragmented and repugnant self.26 What of Rossellini’s animal acts? Is that all it is – just an act – or does she become animal? It might pay to consider both the boundaries of mimicry and the beginnings of becomings. According to Deleuze and Guattari, becoming is a matter of composition. They are instructive: Do not imitate a dog, but make your organism enter into composition with something else in such a way that the particle emitted from the aggregate thus composed will be canine as a function of the relation of movement and rest, or of molecular proximity, into which they enter … . The actor Robert De Niro walks ‘like’ a crab in a certain film sequence; but, he says, it is not a question of his imitating a crab; it is a question of making something that has to do with the crab enter into composition with the image.27

Again, Deleuze and Guattari hint that becoming is a kind of embodied grammar – perhaps, a taxonomic grammar that disrespects the artificial categories wrought by humans. Thus when De Niro crabwalks, or Rossellini worm-wriggles, each actor makes a step toward becoming-animal. That step is largely syntactical, not 125

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

mimicry, but a reordering of that which is human and that which is animal. It is realised when imitation (can I be like the crab?) is jettisoned and anything becomes possible (if I were …). Just as it is sex, or want of it and its connective externalities, that turns Gregor Samsa animal, it is sex, or want of knowledge about it, that turns Isabella Rossellini toward the animal. When she becomes animal – if indeed that is what she does – she dresses the part. She mimics and swoons. She feigns ecstasy, fear and appetite. (Is she feigning?) Her position vis-à-vis the animal is aspirational, slinking and prancing in the manner of this beast or that, yet always quite obviously herself, peeping out from a mask or sporting antlers. Unlike Gregor Samsa, Rossellini never has to ask, ‘What’s happened here?’28 Gregor, after his transformation, cannot imagine himself, ever uncertain about his size, his shape, his strength and to what use he might put all those legs, but Rossellini is devoted to categorisation, to cataloguing difference species by species. She explains the animal and herself, narrating each short scene as if to persuade the viewer that she is, despite her recognisable face and voice, bird, fish, marine mammal, reptile, insect. She is Adam, naming the animals; Noah, collecting them; and animal herself. Sinwell argues that Rossellini’s animal performances are distinctively ‘scandalous and queer’.29 To be sure, Green Porno and Seduce Me defy traditional binaries, singular subjectivities and stable identities. Rossellini’s presence is frequently multiple; in ‘Bee’, she plays ‘the roles of the queen bee, daughter bees, and drones’.30 She is, in these films, ‘both male and female, heterosexual and homosexual, asexual and pansexual, animal and human’.31 She challenges conventional wisdom and giggles when normative boundaries collapse under scrutiny. It may not make Green Porno and Seduce Me – or, for that matter, Rossellini herself – precisely queer so much as encyclopedically non-discriminatory. But they do celebrate – normalise, even – non-normative sexualities. That the sexual behaviours explored are primarily practised by nonhuman species is both the point and beside it. Difference, in sexual and species terms, proves pervasive. ‘Snail’, from Green Porno’s first season, begins, as most of the films do, with a medium shot of Rossellini, standing against a plain green backdrop and looking directly into the camera. She begins, ‘If I were a snail …’. (In Seduce Me, the opening narration goes Sherlock Holmes, deducing the identity of the animal subject from behavioural cues: ‘Are they trying to seduce me? What am I?’) Cutting to a long shot, her entire body, sheathed in a tan unitard, becomes visible, and she continues: ‘… I would have one big slimy foot.’ She raises that huge foot, and streamers play the role of the sticky mucus that gastropods secrete as they move. Then she twists and curls the costume around her, so that ‘my foot would end up at the bottom, allowing me to crawl. My anus would end up on the top of my head. Unfortunately.’ As green goop slides onto her cheek, she grimaces. Sound effects – watery slurps – emerge from a subtly minimalist score by Andy Byers (who is also the production designer) to mark those moments when the snail exudes slime or excrement. In the next scene, Rossellini lies on the floor with her lower half 126

Subjunctive Desires

Seduce Me: Snail (2010)

encased by a shell; tufts of green grass, which appear to be cut from cardboard, spurt around her. She disappears, explaining matter-of-factly, ‘I can withdraw my entire body into my shell’, then peeks out again, adding, ‘where I can hide my vagina and my penis. I have both.’ Her inflection shifts to coy. In the second minute of the film, she demonstrates how snails strike at one another with calcium darts before mating, interacting with a faceless snail costume that may be occupied by an unseen human (elsewhere, puppets are used), diverting from strict attention to what the snail does, to how the snail might feel (‘I love to be hurt’). Her swoon, upon impalement, may hold an intertextual wink to fans, recalling her performance in the role of the abused and masochistic nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986). To close ‘Snail’, she intones, ‘Sadomasochism excites me’, before the picture cuts to black and credits roll.32 Seduce Me season one’s ‘Duck’ begins with a half-dozen male hands patting and pawing Rossellini’s head and grasping her neck. A smile turns to a distressed expression, as she cries, ‘Are they seducing me? What am I, a duck?’ Using only her head and shoulders, caped with a duck costume while the rest of her body is invisibly ‘underwater’, she interacts with two-dimensional duck puppets, and explains that a female subject to forced copulation can avoid impregnation by an unwanted male because of the evolution of ‘vaginal complexity’.33 As a corkscrewshaped duck penis enters a red and pink fabric labyrinth, Rossellini giggles and shrieks with pleasure, ‘My vaginal structure is a twisted tunnel … I can block the phallus. I can discombobulate the phallus. I can trick the phallus!’ Then, glancing flirtatiously at a paper male duck, she murmurs, ‘I want you to be my husband’, and allows him to mount, guiding his penis directly to her eggs. Starting Green Porno videos in the future subjunctive mood, Rossellini muses, ‘If I were a fly…’, ‘If I were a barnacle …’, ‘If I were a whale …’. Searching for anatomical corollaries, she imagines her own body in the shape of the animal, and settles for flirtatious mismatches: ‘If I were a firefly, I would light up my ass at night’ is Green Porno’s vivid if vague distillation of the luciferin-luciferase reaction that produces bioluminescence in the lantern section of the firefly’s ventral abdomen. Occupying a long, segmented pink sheath from which only her face emerges, she begins, ‘If I were an earthworm …’, going on to explain how her earthworm body would eat, breathe, excrete, mate (‘in the 69 position’, of course) 127

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Seduce Me: Earthworm (2010)

and reproduce. ‘I would be both male and female’, Rossellini declares, peeping out from her wormy pink tube (earthworms are simultaneous hermaphrodites). She is not quite the worm, and not quite not the worm, always contingent, bound to human subjectivity by that pesky ‘if’ that marks species-difference as too great for the desire that seeks to become the animal Other. It is that ‘if’ that, if Deleuze and Guattari get to make the rules, keeps Rossellini from quite becoming. Their notion of becoming-animal thwarts the purposive performance of animal as impressionistic copying, a kind of species-plagiarism that can only be acting without knowing. Deleuze and Guattari may argue that becoming is ‘a verb with a consistency all its own; it does not reduce to, or lead back to, “appearing”, “being”, “equaling”, or “producing”.’ 34 Such a definition risks chasing its own tail, until, paradoxically, it leaves room for little but fictive becomings. But it is also, by their own admission, wildly rhizomatic. Can the rhizome of becoming reach Green Porno and Seduce Me’s animal performances? If becoming doesn’t involve actual metamorphosis, as in the case of Gregor Samsa, then it may operate in an economy of ‘movement and rest … making something that has to do with [the animal] enter into composition with the image’.35 Rossellini brings something of the animal – its shell, its posture, its glow – into the picture. She becomes animal, and the animal becomes her.

Becoming-subject (or, a conclusion) In this pas de deux between animal and human, Rossellini’s performances as anglerfish, elephant seal or praying mantis, begin to look a little more like becoming. So, becoming-animal is not a matter of no longer being human. Becoming animal is an opportunity arising from recognising the animal – the animal function, anyway – alongside and within. From this perspective, Rossellini’s animal performances are, as much as they are acts of becoming, acts of recognition. In contrast, Kafka’s animals suffer from failures of recognition. Gregor is still Gregor when he climbs the walls, but he no longer knows himself. Indeed, Benjamin observed, ‘the most forgotten alien land is one’s own body’.36 Gregor dies morosely behind a locked door, no longer recognised by others as son or brother or salesman, and never as lover. Isabella is still Isabella when she lurks in webs and 128

Subjunctive Desires

glows in the dark, cloaks herself in the animal’s colours, reshapes herself according to its parameters, aligns herself in its movements. To what end? (Or, as Deleuze and Guatarri once asked, ‘Which reality is at stake here?’37) In ‘making of’ videos on the Green Porno and Seduce Me website, and in numerous interviews, Rossellini has said that she intends for the series to be both funny and informative – and that it is really about animals, once telling a Vanity Fair reporter that after a screening, she was asked, ‘“What do you learn about men?” and I just said, “How do I learn about men? It was the worm I was talking about.”’38 But it is almost impossible to keep allegory out of the equation, whenever the animal is in question. The human condition may be narcissism, after all. It may simply be part of what I referred to earlier as the veritably grammatical entanglement between the human animal and the nonhuman animal, an interdependence which, recalling Deleuze and Guattari, is multivalently systemic and semiotic. Accordingly, at times, Rossellini asks a question that fails, with apparent purpose, to exclude the human, as in ‘Why Vagina’, from season two of Green Porno. Dressed simply in a black, long-sleeved, turtleneck top and black pants, a black headband holding shoulder-length hair away from her remarkable face, Rossellini declaims directly to the camera, gesturing with her hands for emphasis: Eggs are precious. Sperm are cheap … . If I were a female, any female, I would want to protect my precious eggs. I would want to hide them in a hole and I would want for that hole to be in a place hard to reach.

She meanders through a garden of paper shafts, as round as tree trunks and towering overhead, while she speaks, then pauses, bows her head and puts one hand on her pubic region. The film cuts to a headshot, and she raises her head, once again eyeing the viewer, smiling seductively and finishing the sentence – ‘Unless I want you to reach me’ – in irresistibly breathy, honeyed tones. She identifies the structures surrounding her as penises. Why are they so different from one another? Because vaginas also differ. I would have a tunnel, and it would be a labyrinth, it would be intricate, it would be unique, it would be species-specific, so that I would not be screwed by a bear … a cozy fit, like a hand in a glove. That’s why I want my vagina.

The bear is the only animal mentioned, but it is not the subject of this particular film. It is only a marker of difference and the boundaries of desire. (Who would want to be screwed by a bear? Another bear, of course.) The human animal is the subject of this particular film, even if it is not named, and even if it is found only amid the sex of other species. But then, to Deleuze and Guattari, becoming-animal has never meant becoming nonhuman. Becoming takes place by means of ‘contagion’, proximity, exchange.39 Necessarily, then, ‘A becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, 129

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity.’40 Recall Rossellini’s appearance as queen and daughter and drone in ‘Bee’, and her becoming herd in ‘Deer’ as a quartet of does, all angling for a buck’s attention. Thus, when Rossellini questions, explicitly, common knowledge about the animal kingdom (such as the presumption that all species reproduce heterosexually), an echo that returns the human subject is not far behind. In fact, becoming is nothing if not the articulation of a relationship between the human and the animal, a relationship that we have only begun to understand; about which we have only begun to ask the right questions. A glimpse at one final film in the series may be warranted in this regard. In ‘Noah’s Ark’, she asks, ‘How did Noah do it? How did he manage to organize all animals into couples?’ While she revisits the story of the great flood, a Bible opens, revealing itself as a pop-up book containing an ark. Animals, each a wonder of detailed paperwork (perhaps more akin to kirigami than more familiar origami), are carried on a plank into the ship: elephants, giraffes, lions, monkeys, eagles, pandas, each paired two by two. When a single earthworm is about to enter, thunder and lightning crack and a masculine arm points aggressively while Rossellini, her voice exaggeratedly deepened, demands of the worm, ‘You! Why are you alone?’ In the costume that also appears in ‘Earthworm’, Rossellini explains that she is ‘a hermaphrodite, both male and female. To reproduce, I can mate with another hermaphrodite, or I can segment my body and clone myself.’ So much for heterosexual privilege. The couple recedes while Rossellini catalogues others. Parthenogenic aphids and whiptail lizards, all female, are asked to account for the absence of a male. Rossellini coos, ‘We simulate sex, among us girls, to start off our hormones, and then we have daughters. No sons, only daughters.’ Rossellini concludes by asserting the fact of diversity, despite the biblical insistence on pairing. ‘How did Noah do it?’ she asks. ‘Hermaphrodite, transvestites, transgender, transsexuals. Polygamy, monogamy. Homosexual, bisexual. How could [they? we?] all be heterosexual?’ The operative pronoun in the final sentence is appropriately unintelligible. I recall Walter Benjamin’s words on Kafka’s ability ‘to pick up the forgotten from animals’. Rossellini, too, picks up the forgotten from animals. In doing so, she may become-animal, or come close. Or perhaps she becomes more human because of animals. ‘They [animals] are not the goal, to be sure, but one cannot do without them.’ 41

Notes 1. A preliminary version of this chapter appeared as ‘Gregor and Isabella’ in Suzie Silver, Jasdeep Khaira and Christopher Kardambikis (eds), Strange Attractors: Investigations in Non-humanoid Extraterrestrial Sexuality (Pittsburgh, PA: Encyclopedia Destructica and the Institute of Extraterrestrial Sexuality, 2012). Thanks to Jeanine Oleson and especially Arlene Stein, and to Kathy High and Jim Supanick, who invited me to speak in the Flaherty film series Lives of Animals on Green Porno and other animal films. 130

Subjunctive Desires

2. Isabella Rossellini is the daughter of Italian neorealist film-maker Roberto Rossellini and actress Ingrid Bergman. A model and actress, she wrote the script (her first) for My Dad Is 100 Years Old (2005, directed by Guy Maddin), a playful tribute to her father. Recent projects include a semi-autobiographical hour-long special called Animals Distract Me (2011, for Discovery’s Green Planet channel). Rossellini has also raised and trained service dogs for the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind, Inc. 3. Sinwell also explores the entanglement of the celebrity body with ‘green’ marketing and ‘greenwashing’. See Sarah E. S. Sinwell, ‘Sex, Bugs, and Isabella Rossellini: The Making and Marketing of Green Porno’, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly vol. 38 nos 3 and 4 (Fall/Winter 2010), pp. 118–37. 4. Sundance Channel, Green Porno, www.sundancechannel.com/greenporno. The Sundance Channel (which was founded by Robert Redford and Showtime Networks), the Independent Film Channel and the IFC Center are all properties of AMC Networks (formerly Rainbow Media). 5. Rick Gilbert and Jody Shapiro co-produced Green Porno and Seduce Me; Shapiro codirected. Biologist Claudio Campagna of the Wildlife Conservation Society serves as consultant on conservationist matters. He rarely appears on screen, but in the eightminute ‘Harem on the Beach’ (from Green Porno, season three), Campagna and Rossellini appear in documentary footage shot in Argentine Patagonia, among elephant seals. As Sinwell suggests, this particular film comes closer than usual to conventional wildlife film-making (‘Sex, Bugs, and Isabella Rossellini’, p. 27), with its penchant for presenter-hosts who are on location with animals in their own habitats. 6. Isabella Rossellini, Green Porno: A Book and Short Films (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). 7. Sinwell, ‘Sex, Bugs, and Isabella Rossellini’, p. 130. 8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 237–8. 9. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis, trans., ed. Stanley Corngold (New York: Bantam Classic Reissue, 2004), p. 5. 10. Karl Marx, ‘Estranged Labour’, in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Mulligan (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1959). Reprinted at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm. 11. Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Franz Kafka: “The Metamorphosis”’, in Fredson Bowers (ed.), Lectures on Literature (San Diego, CA: Harvest/HBJ, 1982), pp. 250–84. Reprinted at the Kafka Project, http://www.kafka.org/index.php?id=191,209,0,0,1,0. I draw on Nabokov’s lecture as an influential analysis that comes, not coincidentally, from the pen of an insect-hunter. Deferring to a few classics, I acknowledge that there are volumes of criticism on The Metamorphosis that are beyond the scope of this chapter. See, for example, Marc Lucht and Donna Yarris (eds), Kafka’s Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010). 12. See Kurt Johnson and Steven L. Coates, Nabokov’s Blues: The Scientific Odyssey of a Literary Genius (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2000); Matthew L. Forister et al., 131

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

‘After 60 Years, An Answer to the Question: What Is the Karner Blue Butterfly’, Biology Letters (22 December 2010), doi: 10.1098/rsbi.2010.1077; and Roger Vila et al., ‘Phylogeny and Palaeoecology of Polyommatus Blue Butterflies Show That Beringia Was a Climate-regulated Gateway to the New World’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (26 January 2011), doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2213. See also Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Butterflies’, New Yorker (12 June 1948), pp. 25–8. 13. Nabokov, ‘Franz Kafka’, p. 283. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., p. 256. 16. Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father: Bilingual Edition, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken, 1966). 17. Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 114. See also his ‘Reflections on Kafka’, in the same volume, pp. 141–6. 18. Red Peter may be Kafka’s second most famous animal, having been featured in the lecture given by the character Elizabeth Costello in the novella The Lives of Animals by J. M. Coetzee (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). All of these stories are collected in Franz Kafka, The Basic Kafka, introduction by Erich Heller (New York: Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1979). 19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 49 (emphasis original). Thinking of Gregor and the role of the woman in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, I choose the gendered pronoun purposefully. 20. Ibid., pp. 12–13. 21. Ibid., p. 35; also, see Red Peter’s discussion of ‘the way out’ in ‘A Report to an Academy’, in Kafka, The Basic Kafka, p. 253, which affirms that becoming is movement, ‘right or left, or in any direction … Only not to stay motionless …’. 22. Marx, ‘Estranged Labour’. 23. I allude here to the novella Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1870), another tale in which a man desires a seemingly unattainable woman, and, having gotten his chance to be alone with her, lives to regret it. 24. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, p. 4. 25. Kafka, The Metamorphosis, p. 34. Deleuze and Guattari make the case that Gregor’s devotion to the portrait provokes jealousy in his sister, a turning point at which her empathy pales, and her abandonment facilitates his messy death; see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, pp. 4, 15, 64. 26. Adaptations of The Metamorphosis tend to avoid committing to Gregor’s becominginsect. For example, in Norith Soth’s Metamorphosis: Beyond the Screen Door (1996), Gregor Samsa becomes Tom Gregor, a man who becomes ill, but not obviously insect. Like Deleuze and Guattari, I take Gregor’s transformation literally. 27. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 274. 28. Kafka, The Metamorphosis, p. 3. 29. Sinwell, ‘Sex, Bugs, and Isabella Rossellini’, p. 130. 132

Subjunctive Desires

30. Ibid., p. 120. 31. Ibid., p. 129. 32. Rossellini is, in this case, more anthropomorphically playful than scientifically current. It is not precisely the pain inflicted by the dart that produces receptivity to mating. Rather, a substance in the mucus delivered by the dart may influence the female reproductive system to respond more favourably to sperm than if the sperm were received without dart-carried mucus, giving a reproductive advantage to snails that successfully dart potential mates. See Ronald Chase and Katrina C. Blanchard, ‘The Snail’s Love-dart Delivers Mucus to Increase Paternity’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B (22 June 2006), pp. 1471–5; also, published online 14 March 2006, doi: 10.1098/rspb.2006.3474. 33. Maybe this is what Republican Congressional Representative Todd Akin of Missouri was thinking of when, explaining his position that abortion should be criminalised without exceptions for rape or incest, he told an interviewer that rape rarely if ever results in pregnancy because ‘the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down’. In regard to humans, he was very wrong. See Charles Jaco, The Jaco Report, Fox News 2/WTVI, St Louis (19 August 2012), http://fox2now.com/2012/08/19/thejaco-report-august-19-2012/. 34. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 239. 35. Ibid., p. 274. 36. Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, p. 132. 37. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 238. 38. Julian Sancton, ‘Isabella Rossellini: ‘Let’s Talk About (Barnacle) Sex, Baby’, Vanity Fair Daily (25 March 2009), http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2009/03/isabellarossellini-lets-talk-about-barnacle-sex-baby. Also, Ian Sample, ‘Isabella Rossellini’s Guide to the Sex Life of the Anchovy (and the Duck, the Snail, the Dolphin …)’, Guardian, 5 February 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/feb/06/isabellarossellini-green-porno-film. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 247. 40. Ibid., p. 239. 41. Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka’, p. 132.

133

Lynn Turner

8 Animal Melancholia On the Scent of Dean Spanley What, then, is true mourning? What can we make of it? Can we make it, as we say in French that we ‘make’ our mourning? I repeat: can we? … are we capable of doing it, do we have the power to do it? But also, do we have the right? Jacques Derrida1

This chapter will explore the prescription of what I call an ‘animal cure’ in the beguiling film adaptation of Lord Dunsany’s 1936 novella, Dean Spanley (2008), directed by Toa Fraser.2 Dean Spanley does not self-consciously extend itself to support an ethics that would include animals, indeed it comes close to the problems we readily associate with fables or allegory (in which animals habitually figure only as ciphers for human beings). However, as I hope to show, close reading allows for some productive leeway in the relations it proposes and questions it provokes. The animal cure in this film is not for a sick animal, or animals in general if there were such a thing. Rather Dean Spanley enacts a cure for melancholia as manifested in a cantankerous elderly man, Fisk (Peter O’Toole). Fisk’s extremely formal relationship with his surviving son, Henslowe (Jeremy Northam), is stymied by the unmourned deaths of his wife and other son, Harrington (Xavier Horan). Meanwhile Henslowe becomes fascinated with the oddly convincing stories produced by the local clergyman, the eponymous Dean (Sam Neill), of his life as a dog when enjoying the scent of the rare Hungarian liquor, Tokay. Realising that the dog, in whose name the Dean speaks, uncannily recalls the lost pet of his father’s childhood, Henslowe effects his animal cure through the means of a dinner party. From the moment that this pet, Wag, is ‘returned’ through the medium of the Dean’s apparent recollections, Fisk can begin to cry and thus to admit grief. Yet from this moment too, the intoxication with Dean Spanley fades: the resolution of the last scene proposes a happy Fisk accompanied by a new pet dog. Dean Spanley makes a series of doubles between humans and dogs: son and dog (Harrington and Wag), dog and Father (in the Dean and also in Fisk), and also of dog friends and human friends (Wag’s doggy friend and Wrather the ‘conveyancer’ [Bryan Brown], Henslowe’s fellow conspirator in the supply of Tokay).3

Animal Melancholia

It is able to do this with the key scenes of the film too – humans assembled around a dining table/dogs running through fields. In convening the entwined narratives through a ritual meal, metonymised by Tokay, Dean Spanley invites reflection on the primal feast and the legend of consanguinity between human clan and totem animal as invoked in Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agrement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913).4 Ostensibly telling a tale of reincarnation and one that is persuasively evoked through the cinematic convention of flashback, this film enables discussion regarding mourning among humans and animals, specifically the dog as man’s best friend. This chapter will explore these interwoven themes in light of Jacques Derrida’s investigations into the work of mourning as related to an ethics of what he names ‘eating well’.

Totem and Tokay The body must bear no trace of its debt to nature: it must be clean and proper in order to be fully symbolic. Julia Kristeva5

Most of the proliferating commentaries on The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008) concentrate on Derrida’s encounter with the animal in or as his deconstruction of the persistent philosophical support for human exceptionalism.6 Yet observant readers will have noticed that, in reference to his own ‘zootobiography’ Derrida remarks that his writings have ‘welcomed’ animal differences on the ‘threshold’ of sexual differences.7 The word ‘welcome’ draws attention to an ethics of hospitality to the other, rather than a manifesto of rights: Derrida’s transfigured autobiographical texts welcome sexual and animal others.8 While this kind of welcome includes the complication of being hostage and not simply host to unknown others, Derrida nevertheless offers a scene of hospitality that moves away from canonical autobiographical and philosophical negation or abjection of those others in the name of the subject that calls itself man.9 The scenes of hospitality that structure Dean Spanley, however, echo these problematic processes of negation or abjection, not least in regard to the primal feast that Freud deduces must have occurred at the origin of culture.10 For Freud, this feast is a ritualised exceptional event that permits the clans of ‘primitive’ cultures to kill and to eat their totem, a specific animal with whom they assume a consanguinous relation (the ‘truth’ of sexual reproduction being unknown). Without this ritual such a meal would have been strictly taboo, both murderous and cannibalistic. As codified and momentous event, the ritual both breaks the law and founds it. Interleaving numerous anthropological sources, Freud works in the present of his clinical observation of animal phobias. His phobics exhibit ambivalence – that is both love and hate, towards the feared animal, and Freud finds continuity between primitive and modern cultures in support of the theory of psychoanalysis: ‘It was 135

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

the same in every case: where the children examined were boys, their fear related at bottom to their father, and had merely been displaced on to the animal.’11 Regardless of any doubt raised by the absent question of girls, the primal meal requires greater finesse and Freud further entrenches the father at the origin of culture by supplying a revised wish for which the primal feast is already a dilution. Consanguinity is of no consequence: our animal ancestry is a displacement of patriarchy (literally the father is the origin). Freely borrowing from Charles Darwin, Freud imagines the overcoming of this primal father by the ‘company of brothers’ who murder and eat him.12 Such is the enormity of their guilt that the father is resurrected in name and in/as law, without even having to die since the wish to so dispatch him would have been force enough for psychic reality. As feminist scholars such as Kelly Oliver and Elissa Marder have remarked, Totem and Taboo glosses over both modes of kinship that predate the nuclear family as well as the scattered incoherent references to feminine fancies and maternal deities in the rush to render the father original, necessary and human.13 Retaining the notion that affective response to criminal events found culture as law, Julia Kristeva invokes not only the murder and cannibalism of the father, but also incest with the mother.14 Most of the literature following Derrida on the question of the animal has remained within his philosophical terrain, targeting the Cartesian legacy of such thinkers as Heidegger, Levinas and Lacan, yet Oliver has shown that female thinkers such as Kristeva also demand to be rethought in light of the human exceptionalism that they too legislate. Thus I introduce her with caution. In Kristeva’s case, alongside the human and masculine route to language – the abject haunting of any borders recalls not only the body of the mother – through ‘our personal archaeology’– but also, on a wider scale, animality, expelled as ‘representative[s] of sex and murder’, or lawlessness.15 Indeed animal and sexual differences traverse the same horizon. Kristeva might address Freud’s notorious blind spot regarding femininity, but she does not offer a feminist counter model (as she herself acknowledges). The uncertainties of Kristeva’s mother offer no ‘solace’ to the subject. Moreover, Kristeva endorses the requirement that the social rest upon the exchange of women between men, indexing the symbolic exchange of signs, for fear of the untutored lawlessness of the mother.16 While the figure of the mother is not immediately in evidence in the homosociality of Dean Spanley, the liminal nature of abjection means that her direct representation is not the issue.17 Given the encoding of the scene of the meal as both paternal and fraternal in Freud and Dean Spanley, Kristeva provides a useful supplement through her attention to the abject power of particular substances. Signally, in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980), food as ‘the natural’ opposes the sociality of man; food as ‘oral object’ recalls the archaic relations between human and m/other.18 Food can always ‘defile’.19 Having set the table with the spectres of cannibalism and incest, I want to turn to Dean Spanley. Thursdays tablet a dry ritual between Fisk and Young Fisk (as 136

Animal Melancholia

Henslowe is schematically addressed by his father). ‘Young Fisk’ arrives at his father’s house and they address matters of fact, untouched by affective involvement. Henslowe himself ironically refers to their scheduled meetings as rituals, and ones that he wishes ‘dismantled’. An altogether more fascinating ritual transpires for Henslowe with Dean Spanley. Underlining the displacement of father for Father, Henslowe arranges his meetings with the Dean on Thursdays. Not unaware of this substitution, Fisk makes his own: when they do manage to get together for a (Thurs)day out, Fisk pointedly trips up a young boy (i.e. in lieu of Henslowe). At first, procuring the Dean’s favourite liquor is simply to facilitate their meeting and to allow for the Dean to expound upon the unlikely topic of reincarnation (one Fisk characteristically dismisses as ‘poppycock’). Almost immediately the Dean is implicated in that very topic as his unusual degree of pleasure inhaling Tokay – the script positions him as ‘entirely focused in his nose’ – leads him to wish for the ‘olfactory powers of the canine’.20 More disconcertingly, as he continues with increasingly outré remarks, his first person becomes uncannily canine. He does not mimetically sound canine, rather his sudden marked interest in cats, smells and the love of a master evokes the point of view of a pet dog. At this early stage in Henslowe’s intoxication with the Dean, no images flesh out his narration as flashback in the manner cinema habitually treats evidentially as memory. We have to take his word for it: certainly Henslowe is fascinated. The clue to the change in perspective comes through an unusual comparison. The Dean opines that ‘to pull a dog away from a lamppost is akin to seizing a scholar in the British Museum by the scruff of his neck and dragging him away from his studies’. Making kin of the inhalation of urine and the study of books threatens the clean and proper body (inhalation of urine is not named as such but the comparison follows swiftly on from the Dean’s appreciation of the Tokay consolidating their metonymic connection). Dog and (human) scholar are made of the same stuff, and up to the same activity. Traces of urine are read by a dog like writing is read by a scholar.21 By implication, to urinate is to write (to leave a trace, one vulnerable to erasure), to smell is to read. Metaphor assumes that the meaning of the term of comparison anchors that to which it is compared. Here, however, the scholar is already doglike, seized by the ‘scruff of his neck’. Later, in the climactic sequence, it is Fisk who makes a similar comparison in which his wife calls him away from reading Balzac, ‘rather like dragging a dog away from a lamppost’. In both cases there is no mention of the word ‘urination’, which is tidily metonymised by the lamppost. Even as metonymy – a relation of comparison based on proximity, the abject contact between urine and study is finessed. In the latter scene the Dean describes the pleasures of eating a whole rabbit, fur, bones, guts and all, waxing lyrical about the smell of fear. Although by then we are regularly treated to visual flashbacks of Dean Spanley in the guise of Wag the spaniel learning about the world from his roguish mongrel friend (clearly meant to be Wrather), this visceral desire is overheard by Mrs Brimley, the housekeeper (Judy Parfitt). Literally peripheral to the proceedings, her mortification is presented as comic. She hears something that 137

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

she should not and cannot understand, unaware that she is listening to the Dean as a dog. Dean Spanley is at pains to make sure that our guts are never turned (as we, audience, metonymically join with the enraptured homosocial circle of Henslowe, Fisk and Wrather). While Mrs Brimley has prepared the food (and insisted on preparing something more special than the ‘hotpot’ to which Fisk habitually constrains her), this is not the meal at stake for the assembled men. That they eschew the tradition of leaving the table in order to enjoy port in separation from any ladies that might ordinarily be present to remain at the table confirms which meal is in focus. They partake of the story of downing an entire rabbit mediated by the aroma of Tokay in order to share in the memories voiced by the Dean. Unable to be seen, smell is elusive. It lends itself to the uncanny tale of Dean Spanley, posing the unfathomable question of whether the Father was once a dog, while the domestication of that dog points back to Fisk (again containing the impure legend of consanguinity).22 The film supplements smell’s invisibility with the Dean’s rhetorically exaggerated appreciation of the Tokay. This rhetorical exaggeration is given clearest visual expression in the climactic dinner sequence. There, in close-up, the Dean raises his glass to his nose, reminiscing about the delicious smell of fear, the classical soundtrack swells and the film cuts to the comedically rapid appearance of sheep being chased over a hill by dogs delirious with olfaction. Becoming virtually airborne in their haste, the white clouds of leaping sheep evoke their own scent. In his discussion of smell and Freud, Akira Lippit refers to its paucity of visible trace as an immateriality that bars smell from forming a ‘semiotic system’.23 In this view a scent could never form a sentence. In view of current work on ‘new materialisms’ however, we might not be so quick to assume that a) smell is immaterial, or that b) materiality guarantees signification.24 Tokay is elusive. Wrather, the ‘conveyancer’, sniffs it out, squirrelled away in the wine cellars of the wealthy, though he soon dispenses with a finder’s fee for the sake of a place at the table with the Dean. It is not disgusting. Even if Tokay is rather syrupy, it is not presented as abject. One does not even have to bother the mouth by drinking it. Tokay is taken by nose. Intoxication with Tokay is not coarse inebriation. This rarefied liquor is claimed as ostentatiously cultural. Rather than confirm human desire over animal need, the Dean imagines that a dog might appreciate its aroma all the more. Perhaps the ritualised, exceptional consumption,

Dean Spanley (2008) 138

Animal Melancholia

the elevated palate required to appreciate Tokay protests too much and defends against the possibility that pollution inheres in food. For Henslowe and Wrather this liquor is instrumentally the vehicle for the Dean’s transport. Fisk blunts the allure of the Tokay not by emphasising disgust but dismissing it as nothing more than ‘fermented grapes’. Outright disgust would too easily register the psychoanalytic mode of repression. Freud famously narrates – albeit in a brief footnote itself banished to the bottom of the page – the vertical elevation of man as coterminous with the predominance of the sense of sight, with both verticality and visuality set against the horizontal and olfactory order of the animal.25 Closer to the earth, closer to the sexual and excretory organs of other four-legged animals, this plane is one foregrounding the sense of smell. Defending against a disgusting smell then bespeaks the desire for the sexuality it indexes.26 The Dean’s elevation of Tokay might be read in this context, especially given the homosociality the dinners also convene, as eliminating women and cultivating men – and male dogs. Yet for Fisk, Tokay occupies no extreme, it is neither disgusting nor wondrous. In common with his reduction of Mrs Brimley’s culinary repertoire to the economically descriptive ‘hot pot’ and his curt reduction of things that have ‘gone to the trouble of happening’ including the deaths of his wife and son, as ‘inevitable’, Fisk dampens social engagement until he recognises his dog in the Dean.

Scents and sentences For everything that happens at the edge of the orifices (of orality, but also of the ear, the eye and all the ‘senses’ in general) the metonymy of ‘eating well’ [bien manger] would always be the rule. Jacques Derrida27

In the material already introduced there is a mounting sense of the sociality at stake in the consumption of food in excess of a supposedly simple nutritional need. While Freud has laid out the primal feast as a scene in which animality is exchanged for (human) paternity, and Kristeva has indicated the feminine as well as animal territory mapped by the mouth also haunting this feast, it is Derrida that names an ethical imperative to eat well.28 Eating well does not equate to fine dining. Rather the ‘good’ (underlined by his translator’s emphasis on the original ‘bien manger’) speaks to an ethics that for Derrida cannot be resolved into a calculable formula. Sara Guyer notes that ‘un homme de bien’ is not merely a ‘good’ man, but a man of property and that ‘bien’ is connected to the Greek ‘oikos’ drawing together ‘the home … the “proper” … the private … the love and affection of one’s kin’.29 Not only are we always in a relation of ‘eating the other’ and being eaten by them, but the ingestion the verb indicates is limited neither to food nor to intake by mouth. In the ‘Eating Well’ interview Derrida himself exclaims, ‘What is eating?’, having so expanded this ostensibly self-evident category, now re-posed as 139

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

the ‘metonymy of introjection’.30 Contiguous with eating, introjection names the psychic process of identification and itself metonymises the work of the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok on whom Derrida implicitly draws, albeit in a modified fashion.31 For Freud, Abraham, Torok and Derrida we must ‘eat the other’ if we are to form our own ego, that is to say, our earliest identifications with others occur as a form of ingestion that we are obliged to swallow. For Derrida, the ‘must’ here refers to an ethics of infinite hospitality – one takes in the other but does not decide which other. At the same time there is a ‘cannot’ in that we cannot measure or decide how much of that other to take in: the critical interface of literal and figural ensure that we cannot totally appropriate the other through this ingestion. That the ostensibly physical practice of eating and ostensibly psychical process of introjection may be said to share a border not only points to the difficulty of forming a clear succession or separation between literal and figural, but also between need and desire and thus, for Derrida, if not for Abraham and Torok, between humans and other animals.32 Departing from the metaphysical conceptual path that orders and interlinks these terms leads Derrida to pose the ethics of the ‘One must eat well’ as offering an ‘infinite hospitality’.33 This infinite hospitality strikes at the ‘carno-phallogocentric’ heart of metaphysics in calling into question the structure of sacrifice that it conserves.34 This mouthful of a term brings Derrida’s existing critique of the conceit unifying the presence of the word with that of the phallus (phallogocentrism) into contact with a carnivorous appetite. Even ethical thinkers with whom Derrida shares ground such as Emmanuel Levinas fall foul of the configuration of sacrifice. While a ‘Thou shalt not kill’ may be invoked, even as a first principle, Derrida draws attention to the way in which killing is managed such that a ‘non-criminal putting to death’ symbolically and legally distinct from murder is reserved for some beings.35 This Levinasian ethical law implicitly addresses a human community, for whom the killing of nonhumans does not count. Explicitly affecting animals, the sacrificial loophole for legal killing can and has been turned on humans, frequently figured animalistically as ‘vermin’, for example. As Freud describes, so Derrida critiques this community, which, moreover, privileges brotherhood: the virility associated with the carno-phallogocentric subject is indeed that of the ‘adult male, the father, husband, or brother’ demanding a sacrifice.36 Rather than legislate anew, invoking a new law on which we could always rely, the Derridean ethics of infinite hospitality keeps the question of what it is to eat well open. Refusing to sequester symbolic anthropophagy as a human practice distinct from literal cannibalism committed by the untutored, animals, those who lack the law, Derrida implies that vegetarians also ‘eat meat’ in the place where eating and introjection touch.37 Harking back to my remarks on early identification as a form of ‘eating the other’, there is a metaphoric carnivory at stake that is not definitively refused by the practice of a vegetarian diet. This metaphoric ingestion is not necessarily organised linguistically (i.e. it is not clear that for Derrida metaphoric carnivory as part of a practice of identification is not performed by nonhuman 140

Animal Melancholia

species).38 The contiguity between eating and introjection provokes another conceptually challenging question: ‘In what respect’, Derrida asks, ‘does the formulation of these questions in language give us still more food for thought? In what respect is the question … still carnivorous?’39 The carnivory of the question is given with the caveat ‘formulation … in language’. This question recalls the Freudian understanding of language acquisition as the substitution of breast for word: in the crossover between the metaphysics of presence and psychoanalysis a suite of metonymies, milk, breast and mother, each bound to the psychoanalytic fantasy of satisfaction, gives way to the substitution of language. The question further opens toward a limitrophic subject – one whose borders ‘grow’ – for whom no orifice is immune to the ingestion of the other.40 Where Levinas poses the face as that which says ‘Thou shalt not kill’, Derrida displaces the humanism that the face proposes with all the orifices, thus weakening the association with literally speaking subjects.41 In Abraham and Torok’s work on mourning, framed in binary combat as ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, they distinguish these processes in ways that lend themselves to thinking about Fisk’s abrupt dismissal of pain.42 In Derrida’s ‘Foreword’, called ‘Fors’ for their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (1986), he warns against the ‘limitations’ of a ‘linguisticistic’ reading of their work, one easy to make since it stems from the very ‘base of the[ir] enterprise’.43 This reading overdetermines the mouth as the privileged oral locus of ‘verbal language’, one whose presence fills the gap left by the breast.44 Speech comes first, and speech is presence (the metaphysical problem inherited by psychoanalysis). Derrida underlines the inadvertent fracture in this logic: the substitution is ‘partial’, presence is a ‘figure of presence’.45 Psychic life is in mourning from the start. Abraham and Torok differentiate mourning and melancholia through two different relations to the literal and the metaphoric. Rather than introject the lost other as a metaphor, the melancholic incorporates that lost other as an object that thus refuses metaphoricity.46 Melancholic incorporation involves the fantasy that one eats this object precisely ‘not to introject it, in order to vomit it, in a way, into the inside into the pocket of a cyst’.47 This ‘cyst’ is the secret ‘crypt’ in Abraham and Torok’s terms, into which the one for whom the melancholic fails to mourn is squirrelled away. Secret, Abraham and Torok oppose the withheld path of incorporation to the sociality of introjection. For them ‘Introjecting a desire, a pain, a situation, means channelling them through language into a communion of empty mouths’ (empty by virtue of the process of weaning).48 As Derrida writes ‘Introjection speaks … . Incorporation keeps still, speaks only to silence or to ward off intruders from its secret place.’49 This crypt of language depends, for Derrida, on the logic of a primary substitution for the maternal breast configured as presence. Language, cryptic or otherwise, is here caught in the logic of re-presentation. Of course Derrida gives emphasis to the supplemental nature of the substitution of breast by word: supplemented, the breast loses the sense of an originary completion 141

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

(without thereby falling into a logic of lack). Rather than the full presence of the breast, metonym of the mother’s body, metonym of nature, Derrida posits an original writing: general ‘hieroglyphia’ precedes possibility for thinking the crypt.50 This does not push the supposed ground of ‘nature’ further ‘back’ but rewrites it as writing already.51 Thus the general writing of nature also disperses the singular path to language as the human response to lack. Ingestion that does not necessarily pass by way of the mouth immediately evokes the nose for Dean Spanley, as well as the ears for his audience, while the crisis in language summons Fisk.

Pet seminary Fisk is blunt. He neither ‘wastes’ words by indulging their figural capacities, nor worries about offending others. The congregated guests around the dinner table in the climactic sequence are at first beholden to his stories, ones they have not come to hear. We hear how his late wife dragged him from Balzac to aid their two sons, out on a rowboat on a stormy Lake Windermere.52 Mocking her fears, the cantankerous Fisk addressed the storm intoning ‘Give Up Your Dead!’, as if they were already deceased. Fisk’s disregard for emotional responses evidently predates the death of Harrington (fighting in the Boer War, his body was never recovered). At dinner, once the Dean has again become the focus of attention, we learn the incorporative extent to which Wag and Harrington share the same fate, both marked by a ‘non-criminal putting to death’. It is the Dean’s desire to remain at the table that again prompts the olfactory metaphor spurring his uncanny reflections. Leaving the table would be equivalent to having a bath ‘when one ha[d] just gotten comfortable in one’s smell’.53 Bodily, animal, smell is thus brought into proximity with the bouquet of Tokay as a form of clothing, troubling its primary horizontality in Freudian legend. Bathing, cleanliness, lead to the embarrassment of nudity.54 The séance-like scene in the dark environment of the book-lined room housing the dinner resumes. Or, in Derrida’s neologism the ‘animalséance’ resumes: Leonard Lawlor unpacks this term as both ‘animated impropriety’ and as a ‘session of the animal’ (session having both a psychoanalytic and an occult implication).55 Fisk is astonished. Before he can issue an insult, the Dean resumes his otherworldly discourse. Speaking from the twinned crypt of Harrington and Wag, he makes casual reference to being called Wag by the Master. Fisk is transfixed. The Dean’s ensuing stories entrance Fisk even more than Henslowe, and in transferential style he soon responds as the Master in question, even recognising himself as one who administered an occasional beating (to the raised eyebrows of Henslowe). The tales to which Fisk is party bring the whole group together. Here we gain a clearer picture of urination as a writing practice, of the enticing smell of fear and of friendship between dogs (the ‘unmastered’, unnamed stranger, and Wag, domesticated, his species loyalty divided by a love of the Master). This picture is fleshed 142

Animal Melancholia

Dean Spanley (2008)

out by luscious flashbacks cinematically coded as first-person memory in that they are attached through successive sequencing to the Dean but shot from a low angle, from a dog’s eye view. The latter gives credence to the Dean’s story and draws those who see these sequences – the cinematic audience – into the film through that canine viewpoint, making dogs of us all; exuberant dogs often taking up the whole frame, dogs in the prime of life, sometimes with a slightly self-consciously comedic feel produced through a slow-motion close-up of wind in their coats, all suggesting yes, those times were fantastic. Fisk is particularly taken with the Dean’s assurance that, to find home, after running unfettered through farmland with his pal, he had only need turn towards it.56 This confidence mystifies Fisk since Wag had disappeared, like Harrington, and no body had been recovered. Yet the dogs do not arrive home, since, as the film shows while the Dean cannot tell, a farmer shoots them dead. Fisk is rapt. As he stares at the Dean, the scene cuts back to that same field in the same light, but this time with his son Harrington riding a horse across it. With the sound of gunshot, the scene cuts and we see Harrington lying dead in the field as the Dean narrates Wag’s last thoughts of ‘home in [his] heart and the master waiting. No, no pain.’ The Dean’s audience are visibly affected (indeed it would be hard to remain unmoved). Fisk, weeping gently, touches the Dean’s hand affectionately. With new consideration for the feelings of others, Fisk retires, saying that he is ‘put in memory of Harrington’, the son whose name he uses for the first time in this film. Finding him crying in the hallway, the surprised Mrs Brimley asks Fisk if he is all right. ‘He was shot’, he replies, showing his pain and opening the crypt. The personal pronoun is ambivalent as to which death it refers, Harrington or Wag. Both shot: the dog as an animal trespassing on a farmer’s land and as an animal that can be killed without criminal offence, indeed without truly ‘dying’, merely perishing according to Heidegger; the son as a soldier, engaged in the lawful practice of killing those designated ‘enemy’, is himself so killed, a casualty of war.57 The Dean’s apparent recollection gives a representation to the traumatic absence of any such for Fisk, and one that affirms ‘no pain’. In contrast to the formerly inexplicable disappearances of Harrington and Wag, Mrs Fisk died of grief for her son, in emotional pain ‘enough for both of us’, in Fisk’s encrypted opinion. Yet the film shows no engagement with Fisk’s grief for his wife – who remains nameless, only his belated double mourning for son and dog. 143

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

‘Eating’ Wag as metaphor (by taking in the Dean’s narration) allows the name of Harrington and sociality to resurface.58 Talking now with uncharacteristic familiarity, Fisk hugs Henslowe, calls him by name too and volunteers to see him next on any day of the week. ‘One moment you are running along, the next you are no more’, a tearful Fisk utters, with the pronoun again lending ambivalence to its reference. Substitutable, the second person could indicate Henslowe, Harrington, Wag, Fisk himself or any other. With the animal cure pronounced and Fisk returned to sociality and/as paternity, fascination with Dean Spanley fades: this Father too has been figuratively consumed. Henslowe next finds his father – not ensconced in the parlour but outside playing with a spaniel.59 A dog has replaced the Dean. A dog comes home and ‘home’ is returned to itself. Watching Henslowe watching his father, the film frames Mrs Brimley next to the painted portrait of Mrs Fisk. Mrs Fisk, nominally the maternal figure in the film, is never mentioned in Fisk’s restored sense of feeling, but is nevertheless symbolically assembled through this representation with the group approving Fisk’s joy in his new pet.60 In the spirit of doubles dogging this film, Mrs Brimley metonymises the maternal – but a maternal already in service to the father/law. Employed as the housekeeper, she literally maintains clean borders rather than threaten their collapse in Kristevan abjection.61 Later in the film, talking to her late husband in the form of the chair in which he used to sit, Mrs Brimley refutes the idea that she would ever cook anything so disgusting as a whole rabbit.62 Is the new spaniel a substitute for Wag or Harrington? Maintaining totemic ambivalence over whether humans and animals are distinct or consanguinous, Henslowe’s closing voiceover suggests that reincarnation might be something to greet with anticipation, and that, should he be reborn as a dog, he hopes to belong to a ‘master as kind as [his] father’. Given that Fisk had affirmed that he beat Wag (only) when it was necessary, and the Dean had spouted the colonialist view requiring the colonised to love their colonising masters – characteristically confusing servant with dog – this wish too remains thoroughly ambivalent. What is clear, however, is that not any animal could induce this cure for Fisk. I have indicated that the animal in the Dean is domesticated rather than wild, indexing Fisk rather than unleashed animal others. The film also deliberately repudiates felinity. The Dean reviles cats, berating their lack of understanding of the sport of the chase, and Swami Prash (Art Malik) specifically expels them from proximity to man (the generic is categorically specific) early in the film. Speaking of reincarnation at the event that first brings the protagonists together, the Swami vehemently rejects enquiries after a feline soul made by women in the audience. In spite of its scenes of hospitality, Dean Spanley does not welcome animality, rather its feminine taint and concomitant disrespect for (the law of) the master is held at bay while the film maintains a domesticated totemism commanding masculine descent. Derrida asks what would happen to fraternity should an animal – or a sister – enter the scene.63 Dean Spanley splits between negative and affirmative 144

Animal Melancholia

readings: the symptomatic containment of the animal precisely as man’s best friend, absorbing the dog within the discourse of friendship and ingenious pointers to deconstructing the conceptual hierarchy of man and animal. Laurence Rickels has recently ascribed to the pet the role of inoculation against death.64 A loyal Freudian, he means specifically paternal death (the primal feast is lived every day).65 Prescribing carno-phallogocentrism anew, Rickels posits the eating of meat as that which develops resistance to the pain of loss.66 Eating meat is indeed an ‘animal cure’ (as food preservation). If the pet’s death is unmournable for Rickels, this is because this classical traffic in substitution is one-way (pets rehearse human death but no-one does so for them). Rhetorically maximising his own ambivalence regarding pet death, Rickels refers to ‘cut[ting] their losses with the paternal economies of sacrifice, substitution, and successful mourning’.67 Whether this means breaking from or mixing in with such economies, the prospect of successful mourning brings me back to Derrida and to Dean Spanley.

Just desserts I began this chapter with an epigraph from Derrida asking whether ‘we’ are ‘capable’ of true mourning. This phrasing resonates with his deconstruction of the habitual framing of human response versus animal reaction.68 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, rather than simply extend the ability to respond to animals, Derrida questions the way in which ability is construed as the proper of the human (the ability to speak, respond, reason, etc.) and proposes a ‘weak ability’ in the common question ‘can they suffer?’ (i.e. are they able to suffer?).69 Here he asks do we have the ability to mourn?70 His implication troubles the binary confidently asserted as ‘Mourning or Melancholia’ by Abraham and Torok, a division that circulates the one for whom we ‘successfully’ mourn and encrypts the one for whom we fail to do so. Getting to the leeway in Dean Spanley to go beyond a beguiling human narrative in which dogs feature decoratively has demanded a critical engagement with the crime that founds culture in Freudian legend, the primal feast. The sexism of that feast required the addition of Julia Kristeva. The human exceptionalism of psychoanalysis as linked to the metaphysics of presence brought Derrida into the scene. At numerous junctures I have drawn on Derrida’s deconstruction of the classical methods of distinguishing man from animal to affirm ways in which Dean Spanley departs from these methods: writing is habitually thought as the communicative medium of the human, this film invites us to think of dogs as beings who also write; for the Dean, scent is a form of clothing with which animals – like humans – also hide themselves. The film also modifies the cinematic convention of the point-of-view shot to sympathetically and plausibly draw us into a canine environment. However, Dean Spanley also employs a masculinist ruse that risks fettering its departures from the discourse on ‘the animal’: when dogs are pulled back from writing – with urine – this is at the hands of a female figure whose action is 145

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

tantamount to toilet-training; elements that might usually impart abject revulsion – sniffing urine, eating entire rabbits – and thus bespeak the defilement of the Kristevan mother, are elevated to ritual events. In so doing, the film risks maintaining a virility in which man’s best friend is indeed like man, rather than following through on Derrida’s insight that the general condition of writing affects the ‘living in general’ and cannot secure impermeable borders.71 Ending on the son’s desire for a good father who will treat him, even discipline him, like a pet dog endorses classically satisfying narrative closure. Our inability to decide how and when we eat the other nurtures resistance to such ends.72

Notes 1. Jacques Derrida, ‘Mnemosyne’, trans. Cecile Lindsay, in Memoires for Paul de Man, rev. edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p. 31. 2. Dean Spanley is now published as one volume containing both Lord Dunsany’s novella My Talks with Dean Spanley and Alan Sharp’s screenplay Dean Spanley, ed. Matthew Metcalfe with Chris Smith (London: HarperCollins, 2008). 3. Hunting for more Tokay, Wrather takes Fisk to the Nawab, who coincidently refers to the Dean as Old Wag Spanley, referring to the name he was known by at Oxford by virtue of his initials (Walther Arthur Graham Spanley). 4. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics [1913], trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1950). 5. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 102. 6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills, ed. MarieLouise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Among the best commentaries are Matthew Calarco, Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) and Leonard Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality and Human Nature in Derrida (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 7. Ibid., p. 36. 8. Derrida references numerous examples in The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 37–8, e.g. ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoff Bennington, with drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 21–92. 9. See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005). 10. Freud, Totem and Taboo, p. 136. 11. Ibid., pp. 127–8. 12. Ibid., p. 142.

146

Animal Melancholia

13. See Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 248–57; and Elissa Marder, ‘The Sex of Death and the Maternal Crypt’, in parallax vol. 15 no. 1 (2009), pp. 5–20. 14. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, especially Chapter 3, ‘From Filth to Defilement’, pp. 56–89. 15. Kristeva, Powers, pp. 12–13. The widespread uptake of an overgeneralised notion of abjection as border disturbance in 1990s visual culture frequently neglected Kristeva’s specificity regarding the maternal and animal borders of the subject. 16. Ibid., pp. 63, 61. I deconstructed the assumed stability of this structuralist conception of exchange in Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Lacanian-inspired feminist film theory of Elizabeth Cowie in ‘The Course of a General Displacement/The Course of the Choreographer’, in Martin McQuillan and Ika Willis (eds), The Origins of Deconstruction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 50–66. The same critique applies to Kristeva. 17. The film’s narrative of reincarnation might itself be understood as a topic invested in minimising maternity. 18. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 75. 19. Ibid., p. 75. 20. Sharp, Dean Spanley, pp. 193–4. 21. The Dean says as much later in the film, during one of the ‘animalseances’. 22. With so many doubles structuring this film, together with the uncertainty regarding the veracity of the Dean’s memories and the status of reincarnation, Freud’s ‘uncanny’ is strongly evoked. See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Art and Literature, vol. 14 of the Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1985), pp. 336–76. 23. See Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000), p. 123. It is ambiguous as to whether Lippit agrees with this view. 24. See, for example, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (eds), Material Feminisms (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008). 25. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’ [1929], in the Penguin Freud Library, vol. 12, Civilization, Society and Religion, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 288n1. 26. See Lippit, Electric Animal, pp. 125–7. 27. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well” or the Calculation of the Subject’, in Elizabeth Weber (ed.), Points … Interviews 1974–1994 (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 282. Originally published in Topoi vol. 7 no. 2 (1988), pp. 113–21; Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 28. Ibid. 29. Sara Guyer, ‘Albeit Eating: Towards an Ethics of Cannibalism’, Angelaki vol. 2 no.1 (1997), p. 64. 30. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282.

147

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

31. Prior to ‘Eating Well’, Derrida had already published ‘Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonomy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986), pp. xi–xlviii. 32. In an essay contiguous with the concerns of the present one, I further discuss this problem of succession; see ‘Hors d’Oeuvres: some footnotes on the Spurs of Dorothy Cross’, parallax vol. 19 no. 1 (2013), pp. 3–11. 33. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 34. Ibid., p. 280. 35. Ibid. Levinas’s inability to think the ‘face’ as anything other than human has now been the topic of extensive debate, e.g. John Llewelyn, ‘Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal)’, in Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (eds), Re-Reading Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 234–45; or Simon Glendinning, ‘Le Plaisir de la lecture: Reading the Other Animal’, parallax vol. 12 no.1 (2006), pp. 81–94. 36. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 281. 37. Ibid., p. 282. 38. This opens too huge a question to be properly addressed here, briefly: if nonhuman animals are viewed as only eating in response to need then they might as well be described as Cartesian animal-machines. It would be extremely interesting to pursue the question of symbolic carnivory in nonhuman animals as yet another place in which lines between species change rather than remain static. 39. Derrida, ‘Eating Well’, p. 282. 40. See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, pp. 29–31. 41. Sara Guyer elaborates this point in ‘Buccality’, in Gabrielle Schwab (ed.), Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 80–1. 42. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’ [1972], in The Shell and the Kernel, trans. Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), pp. 125–38. 43. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p. xxxvii. 44. Ibid., p. xxxvii, emphasis original. 45. Ibid., pp. xxxvii, xxxviii, emphases original. 46. Derrida redescribes this demetaphorisation as a ‘hypermetaphorization’ in ibid., p. xxxviii. 47. Ibid., p. xxxviii, emphasis original. 48. Abraham and Torok, ‘Mourning or Melancholia’, p. 128. 49. Derrida, ‘Fors’, p. xvi. 50. Ibid., p. xxxix. 51. Vicki Kirby is currently doing much to bring out this underappreciated vein of Derrida’s thought; see ‘Original Science: Nature Deconstructing Itself’, Derrida Today vol. 3 no. 2 (2010), pp. 201–20. 52. The script makes the direct analogy (Sharp, Dean Spanley, p. 243), deleted but deducible in the film itself. 148

Animal Melancholia

53. Dunsany, My Talks with Dean Spanley, p. 247. 54. Nudity is very much at stake in Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am, together with clothing positioned as a form of technology. I have discussed this at length elsewhere; see ‘When Species Kiss: Some Recent Correspondence between animots’, Humanimalia vol. 2 no.1 (2010), pp. 60–85. 55. See Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 4; Lawlor, This Is Not Sufficient, p. 135n6. 56. Erica Fudge argues that a prime function of the pet is to ‘come home’; see Pets (Stocksfield: Ashgate, 2008). 57. For Derrida’s critique of the difference between the proper death of Dasein and the perishing of the animal in Heidegger, see Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 30–1. 58. Sharp’s script has Fisk also mention Wag to Mrs Brimley, but this is edited out of the film (Dean Spanley), p. 267. 59. In spite of Fisk’s earlier protestations that he could never hope to have another dog like Wag – one of the ‘seven great dogs’ alive at any time according to his idiosyncratic mythology. 60. Henslowe showed his own distress over her death earlier in the film. 61. The picture frame enclosing Mrs Fisk might also be read in this light. 62. Rather more jovial than the melancholic Fisk, Mrs Brimley is not unlike him in her literality: when someone dies, that is all there is to it; she may be talking to a chair but it was just like that when her quiet husband was alive. 63. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 12; and Derrida, Politics of Friendship, p. 149. 64. Laurence Rickels, ‘Pet Grief’, in gorillagorillagorilla, Diana Thater ex. cat. (Cologne: Walter König, 2009), p. 71. 65. As Claire Denis might say, ‘Trouble Every Day’, in light of her film of that name and the cannibalism afflicting her protagonists (France, 2001). 66. Rickels, ‘Pet Grief’, p. 72. 67. Ibid. 68. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 8. 69. See Lynn Turner, ‘When Species Kiss’, p. 73. 70. Kelly Oliver reverses the stakes and asks after the now established ability of elephants to mourn in her chapter ‘Elephant Eulogy’ in my The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 71. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, p. 27. 72. I thank Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon for their assiduous editorial advice.

149

Julian Murphet

9 King Kong Capitalism I The animal moves:1 it is, in itself, a kind of ‘movement-image’,2 defined against its environment by the rootless and apparently arbitrary trajectories it traces in a complex quest for food, sexual coupling, shelter, seasonal relocation, territorial dispute or even play. Rivers, ocean currents, winds and airs, vegetable life, atomic particles, the earth itself and the heavenly bodies, all may ceaselessly change position; but even this cosmic congeries of motion serves merely as a background and foil to the aleatory deliberations of the humblest slug as it leaves its slimy trail behind it on the garden path. The animal moves; everything else is in motion or at rest, relatively speaking. Even when it does not move, it moves; its breath and heartbeat, digestion, the twitching of its limbs, the constant circulation of its plasma, all attest to the grounding of this being in movement, and to movement’s exorbitant investment in the animal, reaching truly epic proportions in those sublime murmurations of starlings, migrations of wildebeests and vast schools of fish which seem to set an existential limit on our capacity to comprehend movement as such. Movement is animal, or at least its image is. What, then, is techne? Applied to the greater history of human development, the term can be defined as a kind of cognitive motion capture, according to which an otherwise complex and opaque system of goal-directed human movements is rationally disarticulated into its component part-images, in order that it may be passed down as a tradition, a knowledge, a craft.3 For as long as crafts and guilds maintained a monopoly on techne, the movements associated with human labour were the collective property of those responsible for productive activity. However, with the rise of capitalist relations of production, and the progressive rationalisations of the division of labour, one of the definitive conditions of modernity clarified itself as the sequestration of techne from the operators of laborious motion, and its alienation to the owners of the means of production. Modern technology existed apart from its operators.4 Techne’s new role in the dispensation of modern capitalism was as an instrument for breaking apart the immemorial integration of conception and execution in the labour process: ‘The managers assume … the burden of gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past has

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating, and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws, and formulae … .’5 Taylor’s blunt axiom clarifies the stakes: those who execute movement at work will henceforth be divorced from its conception. Techne thus arrives, in its complete and autonomous form, as the wedge that divides movement’s consciousness from its enactment, the shadow that falls ‘Between the conception/And the creation’.6 One of the critical cultural conditions for the collective acceptance of this capitalist division of labour, intriguingly, was the technical development of means of representation of movement itself; machines of motion picture manufacture and mass production in which, in a symptomatic homology, erstwhile organic and aleatory movements were first disassembled into frozen corpuscles of rationally analysed motility (whether these were pixels, drawings or photograms), and then reassembled mechanically into a semblance of their original dynamism. As Benjamin put it, film’s dialectical formula is that ‘Discontinuous images replace one another in a continuous sequence.’7 In what clearly serves as a proto-allegorical template for cultural modernity as such, the kinetoscope and all its progeny in the art of motion pictures have consistently (and automatically, invisibly) separated movement from itself, and, according to a technical set of ‘rules, laws, and formulae’ far beyond the ken, and behind the backs, of virtually all their subjects, reintegrated its reified cellular forms into commodities for sale on the marketplace for cultural goods. Motion pictures are the apt popular form taken by the disintegration of the traditional labour process; they are that disintegration repackaged as entertainment, and as a ‘complex kind of training’ for the worker who is no longer expected to ‘make use of the working conditions. The working conditions make use of the worker.’8 As a last introductory word, we may now comment on the role of the ‘animal’ in all of this. If, as we have speculated, movement’s image is itself animal, and if animals played a formative and irreducible role in the evolution of both Marey’s and Muybridge’s chronophotography, then what function did their image have in the progressive alienation of knowledge from productive human movement, and in the general conquest of non-poetic techne over any more ‘ecological’ model of human labour? The questions are simply too vast, and this chapter will only tug at some loose thread in their hems; but a few initial points can be made. First, we need to attend to what Akira Lippit has called the ‘mnemonic’ function of moving animal images as regards the rapid extirpation of wild creatures from human habitats at the same time that Taylorised industrial relations and urban growth expanded.9 The compensatory and utopian function of moving images of animals now far distant from everyday life, as well as their openly ideological and manipulative effects (moral personification of beasts, demonisation, exoticisation, etc.), requires much more extensive work than has currently been done. Second, it is well worth meditating on what Nicole Shukin describes as the genesis of assembly-line technology and industrial Fordism in the stockyards and ‘bovine city’ of Chicago – vast abattoirs equipped with all sorts of mechanical movement 154

King Kong Capitalism

designed to disassemble living beings into meat products, leather materials and other byproducts of animal slaughter (one of which was the gelatin used to fix and distribute film itself).10 Third, and finally here, as we are about to see, cinematic animation requires special philosophical attention as a procedure internal to the development of film technology, yet possessed of unique ideological energies that cut against the grain of outright accommodation and collective adjustment to a new regime. As Esther Leslie among others has pointed out, stop-motion animation, whether of hand-drawn cells or manually animated puppets, not only excelled in giving dynamic and perverse form to the structures of modern life, it did so often in animal guise; as if animals were the most fitting figures available for a life lived in absolute separation from any idea; such that Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat or Donald Duck were more representative bearers of alienated human movement than any but Chaplin himself.11

II It is one of the salient contradictions of capitalism that, in it, what is most advanced and rational, is simultaneously what gives onto (and draws from) the most primitive and atavistic layers of social and psychical life. In Capital Marx writes of the radical division of labour in manufacture that, even as it leads to higher levels of productivity, also drives the wage-labourer further away from that well-rounded set of competencies that defined the older handicrafts, and towards the stunted one-sidedness of an otherwise useless narrow specialisation. It was of such a palsied state of unskilled labour-power (in the Pennsylvania steel mills) that F. W. Taylor was notoriously to write, in Principles of Scientific Management, that ‘This work is so crude and elementary in its nature that the writer firmly believes that it would be possible to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be.’12 This moment of devolutionary indecision between man and gorilla is typical of a mode of production which ensured that, ‘as craft declined, the worker would sink to the level of general and undifferentiated labour power, adaptable to a large range of simple tasks, while as science grew, it would be concentrated in the hands of management’.13 Here, nature and capital entertain an asymptotic relationship of convergence, in the sense that the higher the level of economic development, the lower, the more ‘natural’ the level of humanity required to make it move. Socially, ‘hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human’.14 Antonio Gramsci was haunted by Taylor’s quip about the semi-skilled simian. Like Lenin a stalwart admirer of scientific management, Gramsci half-heartedly maintained that purely physical labour does not exist and that even Taylor’s term ‘trained gorilla’ is a metaphor to indicate how far one can go in a certain direction: in any physical 155

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

work, no matter how mechanical and degraded, there is a minimum of technical skill, that is, a minimum of creative intellectual activity.15

But the metaphor is a jarring one, as Gramsci well knew, since its function was to illuminate how to develop the worker’s mechanical side to the maximum, to sever the old psychophysical nexus of skilled professional work in which the intelligence, initiative, and imagination were required to play some role, and thus to reduce the operations of production solely to the physical aspect.16

Again, it appears as if the maximal development of the ‘mechanical side’ of the labour process leads to such a haemorrhaging of labour’s ‘intelligence, initiative, and imagination’, that the result is a metaphor dangerously on the verge of actuation – a generalised, social ‘trained gorilla’ possessed of some ‘bare minimum of creative intellectual activity’, but otherwise bereft of any human coordinates or world. A perfect creature, neither beast nor man, of Fordism. At an altogether different level, capitalism and ‘the primitive’ were connected by another twisted cord of implication during the period of Taylor’s conquest of industrial management. So-called ‘natural economies’ like those preserved in the pre- and non-capitalist zones of the peripheries, and increasingly drawn into capital’s maw through conquest, pillage and trade, are not simple ‘externalities’ or incidental phenomena of that mode of production. If imperialism was, as Lenin put it, the ‘highest stage of capitalism’, then it tended to operate according to a dialectical logic of primitive incorporation, nowhere better outlined than by Rosa Luxemburg: Non-capitalist organizations provide a fertile soil for capitalism; more strictly: capital feeds on the ruins of such organizations, and although this non-capitalist milieu is indispensable for accumulation, the latter proceeds at the cost of this medium nevertheless, by eating it up. Historically, the accumulation of capital is a kind of metabolism between capitalist economy and those pre-capitalist methods of production without which it cannot go on and which, in this light, it corrodes and assimilates. Thus capital cannot accumulate without the aid of non-capitalist organizations, nor, on the other hand, can it tolerate their continued existence side by side with itself. Only the continuous and progressive disintegration of noncapitalist organizations makes the accumulation of capital possible.17

Note that this is not simply a question of the raw materials out of which commodities are then industrially produced in the core countries; nor of the institution of political and military control over such tropical source locations, increasingly restructured to produce exclusively one or two types of product. It is veritably a question of the systemic incorporation of primitivity and underdevelopment (itself 156

King Kong Capitalism

produced) as such, as a motor engine of expansion and growth. It is a motor, indeed, whose distinctive property it is to endow its user with the characteristics of the very thing it is assimilating: imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the noncapitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts among the competing capitalist countries. But the more violently, ruthlessly and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of non-capitalist civilizations, the more rapidly it cuts the very ground from under the feet of capitalist accumulation.18

Freud’s model of the modern subject, a fragile isthmus of civility and enlightenment protected by a wall behind which the darkest pulsions and forces lurked; and Conrad’s artful rendition of Casement’s harrowing dispatches from the Congolese ‘heart of darkness’ itself; both coincide with a systemic truth of contemporary capitalism: that its most modern and progressive aspects went hand in hand with barbarity, mass murder and the catastrophic destruction and depletion of the natural world. The assembly line, a triumph of technical ingenuity, was also a conga line of ‘trained gorillas’. The disappearance of the animal from lived human habitats dovetailed with Freud’s dispiriting reanimation of the Hobbesian law of homo homini lupus to characterise present-day human affairs.19 The Great War itself was to have unleashed itself ideologically in so many reckless and unjust animal figurations, none so savage as that enshrined in the well-known enlistment poster for the US Army. Even as industry turned more and more on the ‘trained gorilla’ of mass labour, the world economy at large battened on and emptied the native habitat of actual gorillas, and projected its fiercely competitive, nature-soaked self-image onto the screen of the competing capitalist countries themselves: the gorilla is meant to ‘move’ here in various capacities, articulating a contradictory image of monopoly capital as a simultaneity of progress and regress, science and brute labour, civility and bestiality. The end result is that what is most ‘natural’ is now capital itself, an ineluctable law of being-in-the-world, about which it is as redundant to ask ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ as it is to hesitate over taking up arms to slay the simian brute with the blonde maiden in its grip. As a rule, of course, the effort to naturalise capital is redundant. It is capitalism’s innermost tendency as a system ceaselessly to efface both its future and its past; and to institute an existential plenum of repetitious presentism that appears as natural as sunlight or the taste of honey. The ‘eternal virginity’ that capital secretes for itself is as innocent of ends as it is of origins; just as the former are eclipsed by the addictive highs of profit, so the latter are subsumed within that infinite iteration of ‘mere repetition’ we know as exchange. ‘This is’, writes Fredric Jameson, ‘the way in which the present of capitalism as a system “extinguishes” its seemingly constitutive moments and elements in the past. This is the sense in which capitalist production is an infernal machine, an autotelic system’ as ‘eternal’ 157

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

as the movements of the heavenly bodies.20 What is true of time is as true of space: so that the pre- or non-capitalist ‘dark places of the earth’ are willy-nilly converted into nodes of the primitive accumulation of capital the moment they come into contact with their positive term. As Marx more or less shows, capitalism could not have evolved piecemeal; but having come into being (like language, all at once), it so reconstructs reality around it that it almost as certainly could never not have been. And yet, despite the seamless virtuality of this enclosed and worldless world (something like the endless day of a Vegas casino), there have always been determinate moments when the machine ceases to function properly, and suddenly – the way Heidegger’s equipment, the moment it stops working, elicits the anxious state of a conspicuous unreadiness-to-hand 21 – , as Marx puts it apropos of faulty products, our attention [is brought back to] their character of being the products of past labour. A knife which fails to cut, a piece of thread which keeps on snapping, forcibly remind us of Mr A, the cutler, or Mr B, the spinner.22

At moments of systemic crisis, the towering edifice of capital’s perpetual present begins to crumble and give evidence of its having been produced. What has been ‘extinguished’ returns to haunt that in which it was extinguished. It is at such moments that the ‘naturalness’ of capitalism is radically compromised, since if it now appears that that very quality was a kind of product in its own right, the game is effectively, for the time being, up. In moments of crisis it becomes possible to imagine things otherwise, a feat that had been more or less unimaginable up to the very moment that the screen wobbled and the soundtrack separated asynchronously from the spectacle. It is only with Toto’s unmasking of the Great Oz, the exposure of the wires, ducts and smoke machines, that what seemed insuperable a minute before not only begins to look frail and mortal, but replaceable. Crisis sets the frozen naturalness of capital’s narcissistic self-image in motion again; the highstrung web of infernal self-evidence gives way to the drama of spider and fly.

III It was Fredric Jameson who many moons ago stipulated, after Ernst Bloch, that any product of mass entertainment was bound to deliver as much in the way of collective utopian wish-fulfilment as it did of manipulative emotional engineering.23 In the midst of a crisis such as the stock market crash and Great Depression of 1929–36, what we are interested in determining is to what extent the privileged medium of Taylorism, film, participated in the production of a collective fantasy flexible and amphibious enough both to re-naturalise the collapsing legitimacy of bourgeois ideology at its moment of maximum objective precariousness, and to tap into the awakening political energies lying dormant in the systemic separation of manual from mental labour. Since the specific case study we are building towards is precisely the fantasy of a gigantic gorilla,24 it will be useful to take a quick look 158

King Kong Capitalism

at how the chief spokesman of a negative herneneutics of industrial culture first drew the links between the ‘trained gorilla’ of capitalist productive relations, and the giant gorilla of Hollywood fantasy. Midway through his Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (2005), Adorno reflects on the recent discovery of a preserved mammoth: Mammoth. – Some years ago American newspapers announced the discovery of a well-preserved dinosaur in the state of Utah. It was stressed that the specimen had survived its kind and was millions of years younger than those previously known. Such pieces of news, like the repulsive humoristic craze for the Loch Ness Monster and the King Kong film, are collective projections of the monstrous total State. People prepare themselves for its terrors by familiarizing themselves with gigantic images. In its absurd readiness to accept these, impotently prostrate humanity tries desperately to assimilate to experience what defies all experience. But the imaging of primeval animals still living or only extinct for a few million years is not explained solely by these attempts. The desire for the presence of the most ancient is a hope that animal creation might survive the wrong that man has done it, if not man himself, and give rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life.25

This passage, for all its bilious contempt, will repay a closer reading in order to determine the true function of popular ‘collective projections’ in a time of crisis. In the first place, Adorno assimilates the fantasies about enormous extinct creatures to a defensive psychic preparation for the inevitable political consequences of a crisis: enhanced state powers, the ‘monstrous total State’ whose fascist form dictated the terms of Adorno’s traumatised wartime imaginary. At this level, the craze of the ‘trained gorilla’ for King Kong (1933) is simply the preparation for further terrors and assaults on that bare minimum of human being that Taylor had allowed in the modern worker. There is, however, another level to Adorno’s critique, at which the craze for Kong translates into something much more profound. Here, the Fordist worker’s ‘becoming-animal’, his ‘primative’ bare life or zoe, finds utopian magnification and release in the dimension of an evolutionary longue durée; Kong is, at this level, the ‘trained gorilla’ made epic and heroic, a subject of metahistory and a promissory note on a ‘better species, one that finally makes a success of life’. If crisis engenders terrors of totalitarian capture, the elimination of all traces of human depth and difference, so too it triggers this utopian dimension of species hope and the collective overcoming of subdivided specialisations. As Adorno wrote later in Minima Moralia, allowing himself one utopian thought, which was also an animal image: Rien faire comme une bête, lying on water and looking peacefully at the sky, ‘being, nothing else, without any further definition or fulfillment’, might take the place of process, act, satisfaction, and so truly keep the promise of dialectical logic that it would culminate in its origin.26 159

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

IV So much, for now, for the workers’ craze for ‘the King Kong film’, a film that, in various ways, adopts a position in manifest sympathy for the alienated gorilla who discovers himself ensnared in a capitalist concrete jungle, positioned as a hapless generator of capital, and is then set loose to wreak havoc on the forces exploiting him. We need now to come to terms with what King Kong meant for its producers, specifically David O. Selznick, appointed to Head of Production at RKO just as the Depression really began to affect the industry in 1931. The story of Selznick’s corporate strategies is a long and complicated one; suffice it to say here that RKO’s specific needs and difficulties, as ‘the most vulnerable’ of the majors, required ingenious industrial adjustments.27 RKO was, of course, ‘a child of the radio industry’,28 a spinoff of RCA (the Radio Corporation of America), which owned the radio network NBC, many of the key radio patents, the Victor Talking Machine Company and its affiliated products (victrolas, phonographs), and was an early pioneer of television technology. The move into motion picture production was precipitated by The Jazz Singer’s (1927) successful use of synchronised sound, and motivated by the excellent electronic resources at RCA’s disposal to develop its own sound-on-film technology, the RCA Photophone; RKO was duly incorporated with the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of theatres, and feature production got underway in 1929, just months before the crash. Investing heavily in fixed capital (theatres above all) even as the economy faltered, RKO rapidly stockpiled debts; these were unbalanced by significant boxoffice success beyond its peak summer season of 1930, and exacerbated by the purchase of Pathé pictures, profligate production costs and a costly stable of stars. Selznick’s appointment in late 1931 was intended to correct a deeply inefficient business model (losses of $5 million that year proved this), and his first task was to restructure the mode of film production itself: dismantling the central producer system in favour of devolved, lower-cost production units. Pivotal to this, in the language of industry puffery, was the relative ‘emancipation’ of the director as a locus of artistic meaning. ‘Under the factory system of production you rob the director of his individualism’, Selznick argued, ‘and this being a creative industry that is harmful to the quality of the product made.’29 Directors like George Cukor, Merian C. Cooper and eventually Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, were given exceptional authority over individual projects at RKO, thanks to Selznick’s restructuring. The hard edge of Selznick’s reforms, however, is less often trumpeted: ‘Selznick evaluated all RKO personnel. Many studio employees were fired or laid off, and those who weren’t had sixty days to prove their worth to the company.’30 And yet, despite a relative recovery of critical fortunes after a string of memorable Cukor pictures, the studio’s finances were in a disastrous condition in early 1932. Going into receivership thanks to a 40 per cent drop in attendance and no real box-office successes, things looked bleak.31 One of the projects underway on the studio lots was a looming financial disaster under the direction of Willis H. O’Brien, contracted from First National after 160

King Kong Capitalism

the success of The Lost World in 1925. This project, ‘Creation’, a human drama set among prehistoric creatures, was already over a year old and $120,000 down in expenses, with little more than twenty minutes of footage and an unfilmable script to show for RKO’s excessive investment. It was a clear candidate for cancellation under Selznick’s new broom; and his newly appointed executive assistant, Merian Cooper, duly advised just that. No project, to be sure, could have resonated more with Adorno’s critique of ‘the repulsive humoristic craze for the Loch Ness Monster’ – O’Brien’s unfinished project was to have been the summa of a collective fantasy about preserved prehistoric gargantuan life forms. It was perfect ‘crisis’ material, in the abstract. What it lacked, simply, was a star and a credible story. These it was Cooper’s own destiny to provide, since one of the key reasons he agreed to Selznick’s offer to return to the movies after starting up Trans World Airlines (TWA) was the guarantee that he could work up his idea for a ‘gorilla picture’ as a producer in his own right at RKO. Seeing in O’Brien’s pioneering use of stop-motion photographic techniques an affordable ready-made stage on which to set this ‘gorilla picture’, Cooper simply rewrote the terms of O’Brien’s contract so that he was now a technical assistant on Cooper’s own project, King Kong. Kong was easily the most ambitious RKO project initiated during Selznick’s regime, and it was virtually the only prestige picture that Selznick left alone once it was approved and under way. Cooper later commented that Selznick ‘never interfered, never tried to tell me what to do’.32

The investment and faith in an otherwise unsaleable idea paid off: ‘Produced at a cost of $672,000, King Kong grossed close to $2 million during its first release and saved the studio from going under.’33 Having shredded dozens of studio contracts, put as many men and women on the breadlines, cancelled and absorbed an astonishingly ambitious independent project and ridden roughshod over the press and studio bosses, Selznick and Cooper got what they wanted out of their ‘gorilla picture’: the vindication of capital. If, in the three years following the crash, ‘an average of 100,000 workers were being discharged every week’, and if ‘Unskilled laborers, particularly blacks, were the shock troops’,34 then this Great War on the home front, in which the ‘trained gorilla’ lost his last grip on the means of production, could be re-engineered to chase those same unskilled jobless back into the cinemas to watch their own distorted self-image: a movement-image of an animal so large and so powerful that it momentarily became a self-sustaining desiring-machine. ‘Kong celebrates as it disavows not repression but the sublimation, the rendering sublime, of desire in the form of spectacle.’35 This is what Selznick and Cooper had banked on: that desire would supersede political thought, and pull America out of Depression by the force of its subjection to this new machine, the new monolithic State of which Adorno said Kong was the jungle-born avatar. 161

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

V We now need to come to grips with Kong’s very peculiar animal movement-image, and so begin to tie the threads of our argument together. To do so, we need very concretely to comprehend the signature technique, the application of techne, of which he is the spectacular product. Stop-motion photography animation is, of all the ways to make a moving picture, by far the most labour-intensive, and, at the time when it reached these great heights in 1933, entirely an in-house craft secret. One of the unexpected effects of Selznick’s dismantling of central authoritative transparency in RKO’s studio panopticon, and of Cooper’s formal subsumption of O’Brien’s workshop, was to have secured within the folds of a ruthless capitalist corporation something like a living fossil of guild-style handicraft. O’Brien’s soundstage, so firmly shut to the prying eyes of the press that no image exists of him at work on Kong, staffed by hand-picked and specially trained technicians and craftsmen – men like Marcel Delgado, Mario Larrinaga and Linwood Dunn – who made all of their own materials and models on the premises, constituted something like a feudal ‘fold’ within the breakneck industrial efficiency of most Hollywood production. A single sequence such as the fight between Kong and the Allosaurus, amounting to less than three minutes of screentime, must have taken the team no less than seven weeks to film. Not even the Disney studios would have accepted such an absurdly protracted labour process. Stop-motion animation, as we have suggested, is an allegory in nuce of the fragmented and subdivided Fordist labour process that, for the time being, had stumbled on a crisis of accumulation. Recall that Taylor’s path-breaking development of time-and-motion studies at the workplace had exploited the contemporary photographic motion-capture experiments by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth on productive movement: their chronophotographic photostrips taken of real workers mercilessly exposed all lapses of efficiency, and served as instruction tools in the improvement of speed and best practice. Film’s application to labour was radical, and labour responded to film as a mode of discipline and control. O’Brien’s staff effectively mimed in reverse that whole motion-capture process: using an 18-inch, handbuilt scale model (a steel-and-aluminium armature coated with cotton wadding and a skin of rubber and rabbit fur), they painstakingly mimicked imaginary gorilla movements (most often enacted by the men themselves) and reconstructed them, one reified pose at a time, at twenty-four frames per second. The result is an extremely touching image of animal movement: lacking the natural fluidity and grace of an actual gorilla, Kong proceeds, relentlessly, in spasmodic hiccups of motion and stasis, with a sensible pulse just beneath the surface of perception. For all his erratic discontinuities of natural movement, however, Kong absorbs from his handlers the haptic qualities of a discernible tenderness and care, visible not least in the constantly changing, otherwise inexplicable ‘grain’ of the rabbit fur that covers his back and arms, stroked by the invisible hands of O’Brien as he slightly alters his puppet’s position between each frame-take. What Benjamin had written of Charlie Chaplin’s staccato movements can be applied ipso facto to Kong: 162

King Kong Capitalism

The innovation of Chaplin’s gestures is that he dissects the expressive movements of human beings into a series of minute innervations. Each single movement he makes is composed of a succession of staccato bits of movement. Whether it is his walk, the way he handles his cane, or the way he raises his hat – always the same jerky sequence of tiny movements applies the law of the cinematic image sequence to human motorial functions.36

So it is of Kong. The innovation of Kong’s gestures is that they are, literally, the product of a laborious handicraft whose ‘staccato’ bits of movement are (like the Gilbreths’ filmstrips) moments of stasis arrived at by the producers’ expert techne. Kong’s ‘jerky sequence of tiny movements’ is distilled exactly from the ‘law of the cinematic image sequence’ of which it is the expressive product. Here, then, the alienated labour of Taylorisation attains to something like an aesthetic moment of mimesis and redemption. It is as animal movement, not human movement, that this aesthetic redemption takes place, and that has its logic too. At the level of the filmed movement-images of which this film is composed, we quickly realise that the gap between those involving human beings, and those involving Kong and his world, is ontological: these beings, divided not only by species but by scale and evolutionary period, move differently and in different orders of world. The movement of the animals in this film is all of a piece with that of Kong – evidently artificial, jerky, innervated, clumsy, unnatural and the result of some unspecified techne, it is thanks largely to the sound department and Max Steiner’s didactic score that we take any of it for what it purports to be. The motion of the humans is like that in any other Hollywood film of the period: physically stolid, mannered and emphatic in every gesture, but recognisably ‘ours’ in a way that the movement of the beasts simply is not. And yet the paradox immediately affirms itself at the level of pathos and affect: as soon as these two logics of movement come into contact, we have always already sided with the creatures so obviously not of our world. It costs us nothing to witness the routine eating, crushing, smashing, hurling and monstrous dismantling of ‘our own’ kind, while the shooting and slow death of the stegosaurus, the ferocious killing of the Allosaurus and, above all, the demise of the mighty Kong himself, impart an emotional power out of all proportion to the scale models and painstaking work that produced these images. The opposition is duly deconstructed by the Venture’s cook’s pet monkey, Ignatz, who regards the human world to which he is abandoned with a horrified rictus of incompossibility – as if to say that free animal movement will simply not coexist with ‘man’ as currently defined. Iggy’s chained, frantic hopping and excruciating grimaces constitute a black hole of species-being out of which the gargantuan pre-Cambrian excesses of Skull Island then, as if on cue, emanate. Ignatz’s dream, if that is what King Kong is – a monkey’s long Freudian wishfulfilment of physical engrossment, prize female conquest,37 violent defence of territory and destruction of the enemy’s redoubt – assumes the cryptic form of a displaced corporeal counterpart: the ‘trained gorilla’ that capital has made of the 163

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

working class. In the zone of indiscernibility opened up between species here (between a fantasmatic tropical world and the urban world of accumulation) is the habitat of that Freudian ‘thing’ that Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) defines as something ‘neither beast nor man, something monstrous, all-powerful, still living’,38 which will explode onto screen in a nocturnal proscenium formed by the torches of Indian Ocean ‘natives’ played by African American extras and actors, ‘shock troops’ of unemployment and discrimination, many of them dressed in makeshift gorilla costumes.39 It is they who conjure Kong’s thunderous appearance. Denham (a specialist in animal movement-images, who makes ‘moving pictures in jungles and places’, ‘with those darling monkeys and tigers and things’; who would have got ‘a swell shot of a rhino’ once in Africa if the cameraman hadn’t ‘got scared’40) goes to the tropics to bring back a moving picture of this animal ‘thing’, neither beast nor man, in order to charge rent on that image in perpetuity, at 10c a ticket, from a witless ‘public’ who only thinks it wants ‘romance’ and ‘a pretty face’. In the event, obliged to rescue his hired ‘pretty face’ from the clutches of this ‘mad brute’, like the counter-revolutionary and anti-Bolshevik mercenary that his model Merian Cooper was, Denham seizes hold of the Real itself to bring it home as raw material, something ‘more in the nature of a personal appearance’, ‘worth more than all the movies in the world’, that he can charge $20 a ticket for and make $10,000 on in a single evening. Only, the supposed ‘Real’ that this rapacious capitalist (‘We’re millionaires, boys!’) expropriates by force from its native environment, turns out to be an aestheticised image of his own world’s labour process, itself neither beast nor man. Iggy’s dream perversely yields to Denham what is due to Denham: an image of the ‘trained gorilla’ who makes monopoly capital possible, conjoined with the fantasy of a ‘natural economy’ that capital must ‘corrode, assimilate and disintegrate’ in order to become such in the first place. It is just that, unstable as such a superimposed image must be, it proves violently uncontrollable. What is then properly utopian in Kong is precisely his movement as such, the sheer physical exhilaration of exploiting a titanic muscular power: uprooting trees, leaping gorges, dumping a dozen pursuers into a chasm, wrestling and killing giant predators, hurling massive objects, smashing down Cyclopean walls, destroying an entire village, tearing himself out of chrome steel chains, tossing aside marquees, kicking away automobiles, scaling hotel walls to find his love, demolishing an entire section of elevated train tracks and pulverising a packed train car, before mounting the tallest building in Manhattan and taking out a couple of biplanes, all with his bare hands. And then there is his reflective side: toying with Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) in his cliff-wall cave like a kitten, playing in dumb fascination with the ruined jaws of the dying Allosaurus, peeling away the diaphanous layers of Ann’s clothes and sniffing his fingers, and, in his last moments, simply being, with the whole world of capital spread out before him like a broken dream. There has been, Milton’s Satan aside, nothing in the annals of human culture to compare with the unbounded physical liberty of Kong’s on-screen career, no single 164

King Kong Capitalism

body so given to movement in a utopian key, so prodigious and melancholy and grand. That it is, all, entirely the deliberated product of laborious hand-animated craft, out of sight and out of mind, does not, pace Susan Buck-Morss, make it outright reprehensible – Buck-Morss writes that ‘what cannot be seen remains misunderstood. The fact that the means of production of a cultural commodity is invisible is the trademark of capitalist spectacles. They are phantasmagorias that seduce the senses, a shadowland of the fulfillment of desire.’ 41 To be sure, Cooper’s and Selznick’s complicity in keeping O’Brien’s process hidden from public view is consistent with the logic of commodity production in general, and with their own marketing strategy in particular. But Kong’s movement, his irrepressible ‘animal spirits’ and dynamism, are hardly to be circumscribed by the terms of this critique. For what we see in his movement is the uncanny cohabitation of the same body by artisanal labour, Taylorised labour, the cellular cinematic law of motion, colonial political rage, and an imaginary animal movement refracted by each of these social and technical phenomena. It is the unnaturalness, the manifest artifice, of this movement that preserves it against the charge of simple commodity fetishism – that something about it ‘doesn’t work’, that it is imperfect and often clumsy, means that it resists the spell of the fetish in its innermost constitution as an image. No doubt such fetishism (indeed, iconicity) is constantly, even aggressively being attributed to it, in the film’s diegesis and marketing campaign; but in itself, Kong’s more commonly graceless movements emanate other signals, and are possessed of a very different kind of charm. This charm, which it shares with most naïve art and with amateurism and pre-capitalist modes of production more generally, is irreducible to the purpose for which the film that it animates was conceived and disseminated. It exerts a counter-spectacular force in the very tissues of the spectacle. A simple thought experiment should bring the point home. Imagine that Kong had been greenlighted prior to the formal subsumption of O’Brien’s ‘Creation’ soundstage, and that Selznick had funded Cooper’s initial conception of its production: a trip to Africa to gather several wild gorillas, followed by a trip to Komodo, where Cooper would stage various live ‘battles’ between his captive primates and the native ‘dragons’, which he would later artificially magnify for effects of gigantism. The horror of that conception scarcely needs amplifying. The point is that in this case, real animal movement would have underwritten a spectacle of manipulation and degradation, a nauseating epic without grace or charm. As against this, O’Brien’s efforts ensured not only that ‘no animal was harmed during the making of this film’, but that, after the two shots involving Ignatz, no animal would even appear that was not a special effect, a product of deliberative manufacture. The animal movements that impel this film forward, mercifully displacing the witless human ‘drama’ about primitive accumulation, are each of them the exhaustive results of untold hours of labour time – not unskilled, undifferentiated labour, but labour undertaken more or less at its own pace, expert artisanal labour in which conception and execution are one, and 165

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

whose ‘management’ is unscientifically obliged to adopt a patient, hands-off approach. What moves us in Kong is precisely this image of unalienated labour, preserved like a fossil within the intestines of a vicious capitalist machine; and it is in that sense that the argument around atavism makes most sense. Buck-Morss writes that Kong is an ‘atavistic residue from a past era, a return of the repressed. … [Kong] embodies the force of our own desire to find a romantic dreamworld solace for the industrial civilization that brutalizes the physical animals all of us remain’.42 But that romantic dreamworld is nothing other than the world of handicraft and guild mastery, dimly remembered from a pre-industrial era, which has here and there been preserved amid modernity’s uneven development like a prehistoric residue. Kong’s sublime, haltering movement is its index and trace.

VI If Kong depicts ‘Hollywood’s already Promethean sway over the public imagination’,43 if it is a delirious projection of an endangered ‘corporate identity’ as robust and larger than life in a time of ruinous crisis,44 if its substitution of ‘a gorilla for an African or African American body reflects the worst kind of Spencerian Darwinism’,45 if it ‘was escapist entertainment for a public in the throes of the Great Depression, channeling antisocial forces into romance and adventure while showing the animal symbol of the crowd as defeated definitively’,46 and if ‘the repulsive humoristic craze for the Loch Ness Monster and the King Kong film, are collective projections of the monstrous total State’,47 then none of this even begins to account for the extraordinary effect of Kong’s animal movement as such in this monstrous (and evidently self-damning) spectacle. The almost myopic stupidity of so much Kong criticism, one-dimensionally attuned to the ‘careful symbolic containment structures’ that defuse and defang the ‘fantasy content’ of an aroused and limitless liberty of movement,48 suggest a systematic repression of what that content really is: an image of unalienated labour in the guise of animal movement. It pays simply to recall that, for the millions of Fordism’s ‘trained gorillas’, let alone the starving unemployed lumpens that the Depression made of them, the paralysing hell of the Taylorised workplace consisted first and foremost of a total foreclosure of the freedom of movement as such. To be consigned to a fixed place on the assembly line, restricted to two or three of the most basic, repeated operations ten hours a day is, as Marx wrote of a much earlier mode of exploitation under manufacture, to be ‘mutilated’, turned into a fragment of oneself, a ‘crippled monstrosity’, ‘divided up and transformed into the automatic motor of a detail operation’.49 The habit of doing only one thing converts [the worker] into an organ which operates with the certainty of a force of nature, while his connection with the whole mechanism compels him to work with the regularity of a machine.’50 166

King Kong Capitalism

What was true of late eighteenth-century manufacture was a fortiori true of Ford’s labour process, as Chaplin’s performance at the beginning of Modern Times (1936) proves at the bar of eternity. Gramsci’s notorious propositions regarding the mental ‘state of complete freedom’ that adaptation to such mechanical movements might foster bear repeating as evidence of a utopian imagination gone sour in a fascist prison cell: ‘Physical movement becomes totally mechanical; the memory of the skill, reduced to simple gestures repeated with rhythmic intensity, “makes its home” inside the bundles of muscles and nerves, leaving the brain free for other occupations.’51 Gramsci continues, absurdly: American industrialists have understood this very well. They realize that the ‘trained gorilla’ still remains a man and that he thinks more, or at least has greater opportunities for thinking. … Not only does he think, but the lack of direct satisfaction from work and the fact that, as a worker, he has been reduced to a trained gorilla can lead him to a train of thought that is far from conformist.52

No; what ten hours of nut-tightening does to a man whose every gesture and act has been meticulously prescribed by a ‘scientific management’ is precipitate dreams of free animal movement – all his muscles and nerves at liberty to bear the whole man forward as a complete movement-image, instead of partial operations endlessly reiterated. Kong is that dream pressed through the scrim of artisanal labour, and projected ironically on behalf of the monstrous State and corporation. His movements are those of the ‘trained gorilla’ himself, minutely subdivided down to the subliminal limit of twenty-four poses per second, and yet inflated to the scale of a two-island-straddling behemoth – free if only in fantasy to break from the fetters of an impossibly constraining labour discipline, and develop its powers and potentialities on the other side of a ‘humanity’ unworthy of its name. In Kong, the ‘trained gorilla’ catches a glimpse of ‘animal creation [surviving] the wrong that man has done it, if not man himself, and [giving] rise to a better species, one that finally makes a success of life’.53 This species, neither man nor beast, but both, is the pure product of a capitalism that must devour its own conditions of possibility in order to thrive. Kong is the avant-garde of its collective gravedigger, his movements cryptic traces of the Bolshevik beast that Cooper himself spent months as a mercenary shooting out of the skies, just as he was to do again in Kong; his on-screen cameo as a US Army pilot has the beast of the proletarian apocalypse firmly in his sights.

Notes 1. ‘All animals move alike, four-footed and many-footed; in other words, they all move cross-corner-wise.’ See Aristotle, The History of Animals, Part 5, at http://classics. mit.edu/Aristotle/history_anim.1.i.html. 2. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London and New York: Continuum, 1986). 167

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

3. ‘Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic.’ In Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, trans. William Lovitt and David Farrell Krell, in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Basic Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 318. 4. ‘[T]he revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis’ (ibid., p. 320). 5. F. W. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1914), p. 36. 6. T. S. Eliot, ‘The Hollow Men’, The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), p. 85. 7. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Dialectical Structure of Film’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings, 1935–1938, vol. 3, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 94. 8. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writings 1927–1934, vol. 2., trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 328. The latter phrases are quotations from Marx’s Capital. 9. ‘And thus while animals were disappearing from the immediate world, they were reappearing in the mediated world of technological reproduction.’ In Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 25. 10. See Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), pp. 87–130. 11. Something that Eisenstein himself was not far from thinking. See Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde (London and New York: Verso, 2002). But see also Norman Klein, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (London and New York: Verso, 1996). 12. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, p. 40. 13. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1998), p. 83. 14. Ibid., p. 87. 15. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 200. 16. Ibid., pp. 215–16. 17. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, 2nd edn, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 397. 18. Ibid., p. 426. 19. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 104. 20. Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London and New York: Verso, 2011), pp. 106–7. 21. Mulhall elaborates the spell that is otherwise cast on ‘everyday’ praxis by inauthenticity: 168

King Kong Capitalism

Average everyday Dasein relates to its work by forgetting itself, entirely subordinating its individuality to the impersonal requirements of its task. So it represses its pastness rather than repeating or recovering it … average everyday Being-in-the-world is a making-present which awaits and forgets. See Mulhall, Heidegger and Being and Time, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 171–2. 22. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 289. 23. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 11–46. 24. Which has reappeared, with the unflagging logic of a symptom, at or around each of the major crises in capitalist accumulation since 1925: 1933, 1976 and 2005. 25. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 115. 26. Ibid., p. 157. 27. Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 16. 28. Mark McGurl, ‘Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong’, Critical Inquiry vol. 22 no. 3 (Spring 1996), p. 418. 29. Janet Staiger, ‘Part Five: The Hollywood Mode of Production, 1930–60’, in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 321. 30. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (London: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 128. 31. Balio, Grand Design, p. 16. 32. Schatz, The Genius of the System, pp. 129–30. 33. Balio, Grand Design, p. 305. 34. Ibid., p. 13. 35. Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. 176. 36. Benjamin, ‘Dialectical Structure of Film’, p. 94. 37. Iggy ‘likes [Ann Darrow] more than he does anyone else on board’, much as his gargantuan avatar will later. 38. Denham is here channelling Cooper’s hero Paul Du Chaillu, who wrote that the gorilla is a ‘hellish dream creature – of that hideous order, half-man, half-beast’. See Mark Cotta Vaz, Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong (New York: Villard, 2005), pp. 14–17. 39. Of note here is the fact that Cooper’s lifelong inspiration as an adventurer, Du Chaillu’s 1861 book, Explorations & Adventures in Equatorial Africa, remarks how ‘some natives’ believe that mountain gorillas contain the ‘spirits of departed negroes’. See Stuart and Elizabeth Ewen, Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality, rev. edn (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), p. 426.

169

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

40. In this, of course, he was true to his real-life model, Cooper, whose practices were notorious. Leopards and tigers were captured in traps for the movie [Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (Cooper & Schoedsack, USA, 1927)] and forced to fulfill their ‘malevolent’ roles in the script. Several were killed on camera. Kru and his fellow tribesmen were given rifles and were then directed to dispense with the ostensibly marauding cats, but given the Laotian’s taboo against killing tigers, the cats were executed by Merian Cooper off camera. … The mythical elephants were rented for thirty thousand dollars from the private herd of the King of Siam. (Ewen and Ewen, 2008, p. 425) 41. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 180. 42. Ibid., pp. 179–80. 43. Ewen and Ewen, Typecasting, p. 429. 44. McGurl, ‘Making It Big’, p. 417. 45. Paul Young, The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films from Radio to the Internet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 117. 46. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 180. 47. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 122. 48. Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’, in Signatures of the Visible (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 33. 49. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, pp. 481, 482. 50. Ibid., p. 469. 51. Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, p. 219. 52. Ibid., p. 219. 53. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 123.

170

Robert McKay

10 Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema Velma Johnston, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller and John Huston’s The Misfits Marilyn noticed that the trussed horse was bleeding from a cut in his chest. Arthur Miller told her the horse had cut himself on the fencing of the temporary corral, and Marilyn fell completely into character as Roslyn by asking John Huston if he wouldn’t just let the horse up and forget the scene that was being shot. James Goode, reporting from the set of The Misfits in 19601 In one of these pictures is a yearling colt with his entire chest open where he had come in violent contact with wires [of a corral]. The wound was never cared for, and the pictures were taken on the sixth day. Velma Bronn Johnston, speaking before congress on 15 July 1959 2

The Misfits, written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston, had the misfortune to appear as an artistically conceived film, and with a big theatre name on the credit to boot, just as debates about the integrity of film art were at their hottest; so it is not surprising that when they saw it contemporary critics reached for the vitriol. I want to begin by focusing on three of the best of these – Stanley Kauffmann, Arlene Croce and Pauline Kael – specifically because I am interested by the consistency in what they do not like about The Misfits. Broadly speaking, this is the film’s desire for political, social or moral influence, an effect of what Kauffmann and Croce disparage in turn as Miller’s ‘generally orthodox and socially utilitarian’ and ‘functionalistic concept of art’.3 The general drift of the criticism here is that overt interest in social agency, the heart on the sleeve, indicates failure in post-war cinema. Such commitment, with its utopian yearning, is evidence of both moral and creative puerility, or ‘callowness’, as Croce puts it. Kael locates the epitome of this failure of proper artistic virility in the figure of Marilyn Monroe, but as a telling case of a more general problem. The ‘admiration and sympathy and “understanding”’ asked of the public by Monroe’s early 1960s public image as much as by her ‘uncontrollably nervous’ performance as Roslyn Taber in The Misfits are simply the extension of the misogynist derision displayed by ‘junior-high-school boys’ interested in ‘nudie-cutie magazines’.4 For Kael, the potential of film to occasion an aesthetically rich encounter between

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

The Misfits (1961)

artists and viewer is now the debased fantasy of the art-house audience: ‘wish fulfilment in the form of cheap and easy congratulation on their sensitivities and of their liberalism’.5 This all might tell us much about early 1960s critics’ hopes for what film art might be (after all, the preference for formal complexity over political expression is not unusual in post-war cultural criticism). But I am interested specifically in what Croce, Kael and Kauffmann do not want us to see as worthy of serious consideration in The Misfits. If we turn to how their critical stance affects their response to the film’s narrative content, then, it is interesting to note that Croce would prefer the ‘three [male] characters presented as a straight vocational study’. Echoing Kael’s belief that social purpose in film can be equated with a certain excess of femininity, she thinks this could have delivered the kind of ‘dry, hard-swallowing, mutely effective kind of movie John Huston used to make’; ‘a good film about the decline of mustanging’.6 This would be so much better than the film she thinks we do have, which resolves, through Monroe’s portrayal of Roslyn as ‘something of an intuitive genius with an innate sympathy for the suffering of others’ (both humans and animals, that is), towards what Croce witheringly calls ‘a starlit, and conceivably vegetarian future’.7 Kael similarly satirises the tendency towards moral conviction in Monroe’s portrayal of Roslyn ‘with the sure instincts of the faithful dog, and the uncorrupted clarity of the good clean peasant’.8 Kauffmann cuts closer to the bone, suggesting that even within the film’s own (for him, failed) artistic terms Roslyn’s moral purpose does not make sense. He writes: and how does she effect a resolution in Gay? Through her extreme revulsion against pain – specifically against hunting. [When] she learns that the mustangs are to be killed for dog-food she becomes so frenzied that Gay gives up the hunt and hunting and decides to change his mode of living.

And yet, Kauffmann continues, ‘her hysteria is not persuasive’ in having this effect: ‘she would presumably have been equally hysterical in 1850 if he had been killing deer to feed himself and her. Her outburst is unrelated to the modern debasement of his mustanging, as such.’9 172

Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema

Kauffmann is referring to the contemporaneous humanitarian objection to the hunting of wild horses in the US, a cause that took shape through the second half of the 1950s, propelled in the main by a woman who can be seen as the forerunner of the film’s critique of animal abuse in the character of Roslyn. Velma Bronn Johnston was a Nevadan ranch owner who orchestrated a nationwide publicity campaign through the second half of the 1950s, prompting many hundreds of letters to congress, and worked to lobby federal legislation into statute. At national level, H.R. 2725 – a bill known as the ‘Wild Horse Annie Act’ after the moniker embraced by Johnston – was passed in August 1959, about a year before The Misfits began shooting. Much of the public and congressional debate aimed, in the words of the bill, ‘to prohibit the use of aircraft or motor vehicles to hunt certain wild horses or burros on land belonging to the United States’ for slaughter as pet food.10 That is, its focus was specifically the mechanisation and commercialisation of hunting to serve a recognisably new consumer market (the post-war explosion in pet keeping). This, then, is the peculiarly modern debasement of mustanging offered by post-war humanitarianism; Kauffmann refers to it as the issue which (he believes) Roslyn misconstrues in the ‘hysteria’ of her indiscriminate revulsion against pain and hunting. Coming back to Croce, she parses this point about Roslyn as ‘Miller’s insistence on Life [which] has the table banging desperation of liberal evangelism down to its last Big Idea’.11 Here, then, we finally see the complex of artistic priorities that these critics’ understanding of film aesthetics explicitly disavows. It is the idea of cinema not only as a moral encounter with the problematics of modernity but precisely as an attempt to redress the wider problems of social and ethical detachment that (for Miller at least) characterise post-war life. More profoundly still, the film is an indictment of the violence against both human and animal life, which is not exclusive to modernity but nevertheless become ever more present in it. As a way to frame a reading of the film in these terms, I would like to draw out the impact on animal life of the modernity that it takes as its critical object. In common with the post-war economics that massively intensified all food production, the pet food economy was itself driven by vigorous commercial investment that linked technological development with the recruitment of health professionals (veterinary dieticians) actively to promote commercially produced meat products as the best route to the ideal of animal health. In this light, hunting horses for canning is only a late phase in the passage towards a fully industrialised and laterally integrated food production in the post-war period which was aided by the application of extrusion technology to pet food manufacture, developed by Ralston-Purina in 1957.12 Post-war animal life (both pets and meat animals) is thus taken over into what Michel Foucault terms biopower, in which biological life is produced and shaped by political, economic and technological means.13 If the mustang hunt has a peculiarity in this economic history, it is only that by requiring non-routinised manual labour – the quality all three key male characters stress in their obsessive claim that the hunt is ‘better than wages’ – it retains the flavour of a pre-industrial agricultural arrangement of human–animal relations. In 173

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

this, it is a synecdoche of Kauffmann’s 1850 world of an untroubled compact between humanity and the natural world, in which animals’ lives and freedoms are sacrificed in the achievement of human domesticity. Of course, The Misfits will make clear that the memory of such a world can be no more than vestigial when the mustang hunt requires mechanical capability (Gay’s truck and Guido’s plane) and results in trading for slaughter and industrial canning. So much is revealed in Gay’s (Clark Gable) final disconsolate recognition about his cowboy life, that ‘they smeared it all over with blood’ – his melancholy attachment to an obsolete heroism is captured well by the desperate need to personify the faceless systematic historical conditions of post-war life. If sacrifice is the word that names the anthropocentric fantasy of animal killing without violence, then it is an eventual purpose of the film, or rather of Roslyn’s embracing of life – and with it her attack on suffering and killing per se – to point up the violence within this foundational biopolitical ideal. It is, of course, a much harsher truth than the one posed by an environmental-humanist critique of industrial modernity, which would celebrate some restorative engagement with the wild (of the sort that motivates the movement for wilderness protection, which was being debated in congress at the same time as the wild horse legislation). It is to take seriously a genuine critique of the foundational violence inherent in animal use, something that cannot be imagined by Kauffmann and is explicitly compromised away by animal welfare-focused humanitarians like Velma Johnston. One of the most powerful aspects of her statement to the House Judiciary Subcommittee offers up an attack on the support given by the Federal Bureau of Land Management to the ‘private interests [which] have again won in their demands for the monopolistic use of the ranges to the exclusion of everything that is not commercially profitable’.14 Precisely foreshadowing Roslyn’s commitments, Johnston states: nothing will ever eliminate cruelty to animals completely. We are dealing with … individuals to whom a life means nothing. Even an animal life. It has no part in their way of life. It seems to me that the fast dollar will always have a sadistic people.15

Here, the critique of capitalism, giving way to a basic attack on greed, voices a fundamental challenge to animal killing. And yet, the more troubling reality of this position is Johnston’s vision of a calculated biopolitical control of animal life in which ‘the horses [will] be placed under the strict ownership and control of the government, with skilled custodians to periodically dispose of the inferior animals by shooting’.16 The enthusiasm shown for such measures by witnesses Johnston marshalled on the humanitarian side may have been largely tactical, to ensure smooth passage of the bill. Still, this position clearly harbours an unresolved tension between the sympathetic respect for all horses’ lives that propels it and the various deathly interventions it licenses. 174

Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema

There are a number of scenes in The Misfits in which Roslyn and Gay discuss the morality of humans’ power to kill animals, thus making the political nature of relations between the species unusually explicit, and the crucial force of competing ideas about violence in Roslyn and Gay’s relationship becomes clear. In one, Roslyn challenges Gay’s righteous fury (and his reaching for a rifle) when rabbits infiltrate a lettuce patch he has planted while renovating the derelict house owned by Guido (Eli Wallach). Miller’s script sets in motion a key antinomy in the film: Roslyn’s capacious sense of justice, which radically extends across species lines, fights against Gay’s (equally radical) defensive conservatism. GAY: What have we here now? Just plain old rabbit. I’m gonna get ’im! ROSLYN: It’s just one lettuce; maybe he won’t do it anymore? GAY: No ma’am, once they’ve zeroed in on that garden it’s them or us. There won’t be a thing left inside of a week. ROSLYN: Couldn’t you wait and see? I can’t stand to see anything killed, Gay. GAY: Honey, it’s only a rabbit! ROSLYN: But it’s alive and it doesn’t know any better, does it?

Rather than attempting to resolve the politico-moral questions here – is it right to kill competitors for food? What is the value of a rabbit’s life? – both Gay and Roslyn instead demand that the other capitulate as a show of the respect that would prove romantic love. For Gay this is nothing less than a patriarchal right; but for Roslyn having to plead for a basic recognition of her feelings shows that her relationship with Gay has not obviated the problems that caused her divorce (which opens the film). The argument itself shows how intractable is the test that human–animal relations pose for morality and power, but it is rerouted and dissipated when the ground crucially shifts to personality. As with many determined attempts to take the status of animals seriously within a wider sociopolitical context, the scene cannot but risk bathos; not least because Gay’s desperation to patrol the domestic space so clearly plays out the paranoid political posturing of the Cold War by reworking the basic narrative setup of the Warner Bros. Bugs Bunny cartoon (1940–), with himself as Elmer Fudd. But perhaps the tone is right when the scene is framed by Guido, the redundant bomber pilot, flying over the garden – probably (as Gay points out) hired by sheep ranchers to shoot predatory eagles, paying no mind to their national symbolic status. It is a topsy-turvy society in which American ideals are emptied out of authentic significance and comfortably sacrificed in service of post-war agricultural priorities. What is fascinating about the shape of this scene, though, is its suggestion that the morality of human–animal relations is as inextricable from the interpersonal politics of gender and romantic love as they both are from the wider sociopolitical dynamics of post-war America. For it is within this complex of ideas that we can find the beginnings of Miller’s and in turn the film’s exposition of Monroe’s moral agency. 175

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

The unresolved tension over the ethics of human–animal relations is one of several elements in the film’s second act that compromise the rural idyll it tests out as an ideal post-war environment. As Guido’s debased new use for his piloting skills attests, these play out as increasingly desperate traits of masculinity. Gay’s continued and often discomfiting objectification of Roslyn – shown on the one hand by what Kauffman calls the ‘lubricious peering’ of Huston’s camera and on the other by Gay literally sizing Roslyn up in relation to his daughter – fails to alleviate his melancholy about having abandoned his children. Equally, Gay’s enthusiasm for the performed machismo of the rodeo is shown to be little more than a corrupt and ersatz paternity as he nurses Perce (Montgomery Clift) (a man whose own father was accidentally shot by hunters) to ready him for another painful fall. Roslyn sees here nothing but violence to both men and horses. When Guido shows her the application of the flank strap that ‘grabs [the horses] where they don’t like it’, he suggests the incorrect but widely held belief that it is applied to the genitals of male horses and claims there could be no saddle bronc contest without it; but Roslyn counters him bluntly: ‘then they shouldn’t have a rodeo’. Monroe delivers the line compellingly, with a frustrated anger that melts into powerless pity and fear. At this point, however, as the restorative ideal of Western rural domesticity and leisure is shown to be empty, Roslyn has little scope to alter the narrative’s redemptionseeking logic, which pushes with the men towards an ever more violent encounter with horses on the alkali flats. The crisis of masculinity, then, offers up many examples of the inauthenticity corrupting a film built on the image of a fifty-nine-year-old Clark Gable as the cowboy reduced to selling horses into an urban pet economy. Miller’s inspiration for the first composition of ‘The Misfits’ as a short story for Esquire in 1957 was a surreal meeting outside Reno with two rodeo men turned mustang hunters who passed their time reading ‘Playboy and its clones and Western stories’. For them, ‘the movie cowboy was the real one, they the imitations. The final triumph of art, at least this kind of art, was to make a man feel less reality in himself than in an image.’17 It is almost certain that these two men – the inspirations for the Western roper Gay Langland and the Italian-American pilot Guido DeLinni – were in fact Hugh Marchbank and Bill Garaventa, mustang hunters who feature in just these roles in a satirical portrait of Reno life published in the New Yorker by A. J. Liebling in 1954.18 If so, this would establish the most direct of connections between The Misfits and the 1959 legislation. Photos exemplifying the cruelty of the hunt with which Johnston accompanied the submission that convinced congress to ban the hunt were taken secretly on a mustanging trip in 1951 that was led by Garaventa.19 As Miller develops the short story, its meaning is profoundly shaped by his experience as a writer of the Cold War. Living in England with Monroe for the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), Miller is approached by a provincial policeman who delivers him to be gently questioned by a British Foreign Office official about his plans. The scene plays out like a cross between Franz Kafka and 176

Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema

the Boulting Brothers. After it is made tacitly but firmly clear that he must return to the US, Miller is chauffeured home. He writes: no wonder it was so difficult to name the real, to touch it, and to feel one’s bedrock authenticity … I had my twin in the car with me, an impersonator whose face I shaved every morning … but who apparently had only the barest resemblance to me, else how could I have been imagined a candidate for flight from the United States, a country I loved as much as my twin was reputed to hate it.20

For Miller, this psycho-political splitting is a dehumanising of the self, an existential duplicity that bespeaks a broader Cold War reality: ‘the worst war in history only a decade past, the two main allies against Hitlerism were at each other’s throats, or almost. Pointlessness was life’s principle, and it spread its sadness.’21 The duplicity of the Cold War, by shaking the sure grounds of individual authenticity, results in politico-ethical negativity in the form of depression, enervation, and pessimism. He senses that this negation has a profoundly destructive, indeed violent, effect on American society. Putting this in the terms of the ‘The Misfits’, he writes: ‘three men who cannot locate a home on earth for themselves … for something to do, capture wild horses to be butchered for canned dog food’.22 The optimistic humanism of Miller’s response to this vision of Cold War social reality is recognisable in his insistence that alienation can be counteracted by a renewed personal authenticity. On the one hand, this takes the form of an attempt to reawaken an environmental ethic. Miller says when he is developing the story into a novel in 1959 that it ‘is concerned with the intimate relationship between people and nature, our responsibility towards natural things, animal life, that does exist however deep it may be buried, and which must be reasserted’.23 His focus on redemptive intimacy coupled with responsibility for life is a characteristic statement of post-war environmental humanism. As the garden scene shows, however, reasserting responsibility for animal life in the context of interpersonal relations complicates this fuzzy and generalised environmentalist intimacy by dramatising moral conflict over particular animals’ lives. And for Miller, an awakening to intimacy goes hand in hand with the reimagining of heterosexual romance. Thus, the alternative the story proposes to the cowboys’ displaced destructiveness is embodied by Roslyn: ‘a woman as homeless as they, but whose intact sense of life’s sacredness suggests a meaning for existence’.24 This, however, is one of his autobiography’s eponymously time-bent moments. Although the context for these reflections is Miller’s writing of the original short story in early 1957, he has clearly shifted his thoughts to the film. In the story, Roslyn only appears in characters’ thoughts and with none of the characteristics Miller mentions. It is clear that the key figure shaping the optimism of his imagination at this point is Monroe herself. He offers an interpretation of her character that allows him to reframe political morality in terms of both vulnerability and sensitivity, and through these towards an extensive commitment to ‘life’ that 177

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

compels compassion in others. This aspect of character given to Roslyn is, Miller says, explicitly learned from Monroe. He mentions, for example, an incident from around the time that the film was conceived, in which he feels obliged to intervene to stop Monroe ‘working the shoreline until she dropped’ rescuing by-catch discarded on a beach by local fishermen.25 ‘Whatever Marilyn was she was not indifferent’, he writes; ‘her very pain bespoke life and the wrestling with the angel of death. She was a living rebuke to anyone who didn’t care.’26 In Miller’s characterisation of Monroe as a moral agent here, there is a semantic linkage of ethical concern with personal pain and of this pattern with the valuing of life itself. Monroe challenges the political disaffection resulting from post-war duplicity and compromise. This challenge appears not in the form of conventional political speech or action but in that of an inarticulate and, crucially, living rebuke. Moral opprobrium is portrayed as coterminous with Monroe’s very being, rather than a detached or intellectualised moral rationality. In its very inarticulacy and direct connection with life, Monroe’s moral force enacts the authenticity that Miller sees everywhere destroyed in the post-war period. It is an authenticity in which ethical or political existence is no longer separated from a social self (as are Miller and his ‘twin’); a form of moral honesty that countermands the deleterious sociopolitical effects of the Cold War. Jacqueline Rose argues that the problem with this characterisation of Monroe is that Miller allows her only a pain that must bespeak its rebuke rather than the voice that might actually speak it in an act of social or political agency.27 This is because, Rose argues, his attitude recapitulates the wider fantasy of Monroe in post-war America, which seeks a kind of redemptive grace through her supposed innocence (a synonym for authenticity in this context) in the form of its obsession with her quasi-mythical natural beauty. Rose broadly accepts Miller’s diagnosis of the Cold War, in which ‘America was in yet another of her reactionary phases and social consciousness was a dying memory’, and continues: in this context, Hollywood escapism takes on a whole new gloss. Political hope fades and the unconscious of the nation goes into national receivership, with one woman above all others – hence, I would suggest, the frenzy she provokes – being asked to foot the bill, to make good the loss.28

Rose is certainly right to challenge the fetishism that idolises Monroe, or indeed Roslyn, in terms of the psychosocially restorative power of moral purity or authenticity; with this she is extending a line of critique also found in both Kael’s and Croce’s responses to the film. And there is certainly plenty of evidence in Miller’s autobiographical writings for just this position. However, a crucial but often overlooked scene in The Misfits – the meeting of the romantic leads – suggests that a much more self-reflexive reading of Monroe’s force on screen is possible; this focuses precisely on the questions of authenticity and celebrity and links these to responsibility to animal life. The scene unfolds as an ironic reworking of the 178

Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema

conventional meet-cute trope, in which the romantic leads encounter one another, especially in some socially awkward or otherwise flawed way. This trope functions in classical Hollywood comedy to announce simultaneously both the uniqueness and the fatefulness of the romantic encounter. As such, it countermands the danger that a romance played by two recognisable stars must necessarily be somehow generic or unreal, instead offering the relationship a kind of transcendental necessity that is all the better underscored by star status. It is the simultaneous effect of these two characteristics, uniqueness and fatefulness, that allows the generic trope of the meet-cute to produce the effect of authentic and genuine romance. Conventionally enough, Gay’s dog Tom Dooley occasions the meeting when Roslyn spots him in a bar, but she proceeds to ignore Gay’s obvious attempt to seduce her in order to feed table scraps to the dog. Whereas this misfiring should ordinarily act as a feint that silently signals a more profound romantic connection, this element simply stalls as Monroe plays the scene (against Miller’s stage direction) by keeping her focus intently, at times joyously, on feeding Tom Dooley.29 Her performance undercuts the generic code that performs authenticity in excess of celebrity. It does so by portraying a responsive and physical attention to an animal’s living being that is diametrically opposed to the murderous pet food economy of which mustanging is the film’s exemplar.30 The power of The Misfits comes, I am suggesting, from the film’s ability, in the character of Roslyn, to embrace life by staring down the fantasy that animal killing is a life-giving sacrifice rather than plain death dealing. I want to offer two further examples of this by interpreting a key moment for animal ethics in the film, in which Roslyn runs into the distance and indicts the men: ‘Murderers! Killers! Murderers! You liars! All of you Liars! You’re only happy when you can see something die? Why don’t you kill yourselves and be happy! You and your God’s country! Freedom … I pity you!’ For Rose, this scene is one in which the restricted moral vision of the three hunters is confirmed by a camera that views Roslyn from their perspective. She writes: Going against the screenplay, Houston [sic] does not bring her back into close-up for these words, but keeps her writhing and screaming at a distance, so when Gay [sic] says ‘She’s crazy,’ the camera tells him [sic] he is right.

The Misfits (1961) 179

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

[Monroe] was furious. ‘I convince them by throwing a fit… not by explaining why it’s wrong. I guess they thought I was too dumb to explain anything. So I have a fit. A screaming, crazy fit.’ She couldn’t bear that her character was not allowed to be mentally equal to the ethical task she is allowed, only screaming, to perform. [...] It could have been one of the most radical moments in her film career, the occasion where she offers up her diagnosis, explains what’s wrong with America[.] 31

Rose’s central claim is that the tragedy of Monroe’s celebrity in the post-war period is that she is forbidden to speak in the voice of political rationality. This is a worry that Johnston certainly shared, understanding precisely the rhetorical control needed to manage gendered expectations in the political arena. Speaking after her testimony, she explained that ‘because it is expected of a woman’ she had long avoided ‘the luxury of sentimentality’ so that she ‘could meet any opposition to our legislation with an objectivity that has commanded respect, if not agreement’.32 A hysterical Roslyn, on the contrary, may not participate in the liberal democratic (that is, humanist) ideal of reform in which the best index of moral rigor and action is the progressive revelation or explanation of truth. The problem with this ideal – or rather with the way that it follows Monroe’s portrayal of a choice between the innocent-hysteric and the reasoning political agent – is shown up by one of two important mistakes in Rose’s analysis of the film.33 Roslyn furiously responds to Guido when he offers to stop the horse hunt only if she gives him a reason (that is, by offering herself to him romantically): ‘a reason? You, a sensitive fellow … so sad for his wife. Crying to me about the bombs you dropped and the people you killed. You have to get something to be human?’ Misattributing the moment to an attack on Gay – and thus as part of a moral schema in which Gay is the problem and Roslyn the solution – Rose does not discuss its heaviest of ironies. By turning on the word ‘reason’, Roslyn’s response points up a fundamental risk in the ideal of morality, in which ‘reasons’ – that is, unprejudiced convictions – should provide the basis of moral duty. This logic, however, is easily perverted when moral action is made conditional on some pragmatic or self-centred benefit that stands as such a reason. In this case it is Guido’s hope of sexual reward, but the film is full of Gay’s corrections of Roslyn’s wilful idealism with rationalisations of animal killing – not least that it beats wage labour. In this context, rather than a principle of calm rationality that might well have a lot in common with a realism that condones killing, it is precisely the scathing sarcasm of Roslyn’s response to Guido that grants a broader power to her explanation and critique of the kind of self-interested rationalising that is used to limit moral responsibility. And alongside this, Roslyn’s outrage offers a simultaneous expression of her demand for a properly limitless ethical response that commands an end to killing. Indeed, Miller reports that Monroe especially decried what she called ‘“lallygagging”, temporising, the absence of strong and even miraculous liberating blows’.34 180

Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema

In the long quotation above, Rose also misattributes the assertion that Roslyn is ‘crazy’ to Gay instead of Guido; doing so, she cannot account for the extent to which this moment in the film works to institute a break in the hunters’ association. If all three men do watch Roslyn in the distance, they do not all see the same thing. Indeed, far from being confirmed by the camera, Guido’s misogynistic parrying of Roslyn’s attack marks just the moment that his alienation from Gay is assured. The tracking close-up, which frames Gay on the privileged left of the screen, portrays Guido’s petulant, misogynist complaint as the irrelevant counterpoint to the true moral action of the scene. This is Roslyn’s impact on Gay, which is aligned with the literally touching empathy between the horses at whom Gay looks down. Rose indicts Huston’s portrayal of Roslyn, affirming Monroe’s anger about it as well as her assumption that moral agency must take the shape of rational conviction to exist at all. And yet, I think we mistake the radical possibilities in Monroe’s portrayal of Roslyn if we insist on an opposition in which only reasonable articulacy equates to the properly political, in turn relegating to the realm of misogynist fantasy the idea of moral concern as a bespeaking of ‘life’. For, as the veiled threat of rendition Miller experienced in the UK makes clear, one ought not, in a culture of Cold War paranoia, to retain faith in the liberal ideal of a public sphere that can deliver moral clarity through reasoned argument and articulate expression. Seen through the critical lens of Miller’s humanism, post-war America has been perverted by political cant; bureaucratic technocracy; culture reduced to either trash or dogma; creeping commodity fetishism; and the simulation of identities in place of authentic lives. In this context, the ideal that agonistic democracy might offer moral clarity hosts an apolitical fantasy – a world in which agreement can be assured without violence – just as much as does Miller’s myth of Monroe as an ethical ‘living rebuke’.35 Moreover, even if it were the case that explanationas-truth-telling generally carries the moral-political force that Rose believes it does in the non-cinematic context of American society, it does not follow that it carries the same force on screen, at whatever point and in whatever cinematic form. Would that not be – at root – an argument for didacticism over art? During the filming of the mustang roundup, Huston’s camera cuts between Guido’s plane in flight and the horses galloping away from it, seen from the perspective of the pilot. Huston films the horses from a truck, though; in reality, the plane Guido is flying (a hubristically named model, the Meyers ‘Out To Win’) cannot fly slowly enough to drive horses in this way. By using editing technology to countermand the reality of aviation technology here, Huston’s camera works anthropocentrically, not only to effect the illusion of audience participation with Guido in a hunt, but, more profoundly to present the roundup itself in terms of a ‘hunt’. Editing shapes the repeated aerial passes required to round the animals up into a chase, a more recognisable form of conventional dramatic excitement.36 By contrast, in the crucial moment in which Roslyn indicts the hunters, anthropocentrism is radically undermined by what is for Huston a very uncharacteristic 181

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

moment of modernist direction. Whereas Miller’s script repeatedly calls for long shots of the characters, intending to evoke a sense of existential abandonment, this is the only proper example of such a shot that Huston allows. ‘The effect’, as J. M. Coetzee puts it in his essay on The Misfits, ‘is disturbing.’ Against the convention of narrative cinema, the camera does not present Roslyn’s apostrophe in close-up shot/reverse-shot/two-shot (what Coetzee calls ‘an opportunity for acting in an old fashioned sense’).37 This would be to frame her words as the fundamental expression of her moral self – with Roslyn emerging as an authentic human being in the moment of expressing to the others her sympathy for animals and showing her rage against violence and its incorporation into society. Such would be the technique of a humanist cinema, portraying Roslyn’s indictment of mustang hunting as a humanitarian ethical event that emerges only within the human constituency that it would thereby ensure. Instead, Huston offers an all-too-brief assemblage of camera, character-actor, listeners-audience, landscape and the horses that inhabit it. Running away, like the horses from the hunters, Roslyn’s moral agency is embodied in space as much as it is articulated in words; it is therefore commensurate, precisely, with her expression of affinity for animal life. This makes perfect sense as a portrayal of Roslyn’s fundamental attack on a humanism that is in the broadest sense founded on violence against animals. But a recalcitrant problem exists in the mythic parcelling out of moral agency in the film narrative overall into the realm of ethical recognition and influence on the one hand (Roslyn) and human impact on the world more broadly on the other (Gay). This means that the only effective recognition of human violence – a recognition in which moral influence is internalised and becomes properly authentic action – emerges in and through another violent human encounter with nature. This is the virtuoso three-minute climactic sequence in which Gay catches and then subdues the wild stallion that has been released by Perce; he does this only to release the mustang in an act designed to confirm his ultimate authority: ‘I don’t want nobody making up my mind for me, that’s all.’ If the long shot of Roslyn’s indictment is a moment when cinema offers a posthumanist critique of anthropocentric animal killing, then here is the paradoxical limit-point of Miller’s humanist imagining of moral agency in the script. It is caught in a mythic replaying of violent domestication in which Gay (and only Gay) with ultimate irony must risk his own body in the violent domination of a horse so that he can assume the moral authority to release it. The fact that such principles are so clearly gendered is another complicating factor in this parcelling out of agency as we look to the restorative significance of romantic resolution in the film. For to the extent that Roslyn finally aligns herself romantically with Gay, reaffirming him as the romance hero, her moral influence becomes subsumed into his larger moral heroism. The apparent completion of this resolution is signified when Gay stops the truck in which he is driving Roslyn back to the city so that she can fetch the dog, Tom Dooley. Roslyn is able to do this on her own terms: he is no longer a harbinger of death, but a figure of shared life. Coupled with Roslyn’s apparent willingness to 182

Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema

bear Gay’s child, then, taking in the dog enacts the film’s trust in the possibility of social renewal. But it remains a tentative, ambivalent ending in which the symbolism of a hoped-for domesticity is overdetermined by the resonances of alienation and an unknown futurity. Roslyn’s influence has put a possible new life into motion; but for all that she has brought him to a masculinity that abjures violence and destruction, it is Gay that drives them through the empty landscape. Here it is crucial to return to my epigraphs – to Monroe herself and to Velma Johnston and to the reality of human violence against animals that their pity for horses allowed them to see and forced them to reject. For these moments simultaneously exceed and shine a critical light on the compromises of humanist/humane action in post-war politics and cinema. I have suggested that The Misfits achieves its combined artistic and socio-ethical purpose – that is, its cinematic meaning – by insisting through its affirmation of Gay’s climactic encounter with the stallion that post-war morality must only emerge in the paradoxical acceptance and rejection of violence. And yet, the precondition of that climactic point is Monroe’s portrayal of Roslyn, which points up the reality of humanity’s violence towards animal life. In this collapsing of heroic action and moral influence we must not overlook a slippage between the real and represented moral worlds of the production. Precisely because of its complex recognition of the sacrificial logic of post-war morality, the

‘Wild Horse Roped to Tire’, Gus Bundy (courtesy of Special Collections, University of Nevada, Reno Libraries) 183

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

United Artists production The Misfits cannot escape the (considerably quieter) indictment that Monroe’s concern for the bleeding horse offers of the production’s own violence. Her presence in the film insists that violence against horses cannot be rationalised as a necessary sacrifice to non-alienated labour; to masculine prowess or pride; to a coherent national identity; to community leisure; to the need for pet food; nor, finally, to film art. If this is the case, then the film’s artistic revision of post-war morality cannot license its animal trainer Corky Randall’s recourse to violence in forcing a stallion to rear up in order to capture a close-up for that climactic final scene. This is something Randall did, despite the presence on set of one Colonel Paul Ridge of the ASPCA, by firing his air rifle into the nose of ‘Boots’, a seasoned actor with twenty years of work behind him, who doubles for the wild horse.38 Neither, more generally, can the film be absolved of uneasy complicity with the very business whose abusive nature it so effectively calls to account. For the production relied on a large team of wranglers led by Randall’s former boss, Bill Jones at Republic Studios, to capture and ‘break’ no fewer than thirty wild horses from the Nevada mountains and hire dozens more animals from the rodeos of the Midwest.39 What happened to these displaced cast members after filming wrapped is nowhere recorded. How, then, might cinema work to resist not only this kind of sacrifice of animals but its very basis: the supposedly rational necessity of human violence toward animal life? This remains the challenge of The Misfits.

Notes 1. James Goode, The Story of the Misfits, (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), pp. 237–8. 2. US House. Subcommittee No 2. of the Committee on the Judiciary. Transcript of the Hearings of […] Subcommittee […], 15 July 1959 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1959), p. 34. 3. ‘Across the Great Divide: Arthur Miller’s The Misfits’, New Republic (20 February 1961), http://www.tnr.com/article/film/across-the-great-divide; Arlene Croce, ‘Review of The Misfits’, Sight and Sound vol. 30 no. 3 (1961), pp. 142–4, 142. 4. Pauline Kael, ‘Fantasies of the Art-House Audience’, in I Lost It at the Movies: Film Writings 1954–1965 (New York: Marion Boyars, 2007), pp. 31–43, 37. 5. Kael, ‘Fantasies of the Art-House Audience’, p. 31. 6. Croce, ‘Review of The Misfits’, p. 143. 7. Ibid. 8. Kael, ‘Fantasies of the Art-House Audience’, p. 37. 9. Kauffman, ‘Across the Great Divide’. 10. See US House. Subcommittee No. 2 of the Committee on the Judiciary. Report of […] Subcommittee […], 15 July 1959 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1959), pp. 22–36. See also David Cruise and Alison Griffiths, Wild Horse Annie and the Last of the Mustangs (New York: Scribner, 2010). 184

Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema

11. Croce, ‘Review of The Misfits’, p. 144. 12. Lew Olson, Raw and Natural Nutrition for Dogs: The Definitive Guide to Homemade Meals (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010), pp. 3–7. 13. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 135–45. 14. US House. Subcommittee No. 2. of the Committee on the Judiciary, Report, p. 29. 15. Ibid., p. 55. 16. Ibid., p. 31. 17. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 382. 18. Elmer C. Russo also makes this claim in the introduction to his A. J. Liebling: A Reporter at Large (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2000), p. xix. 19. The archive of Gus Bundy, including the 1951 photos of Bill Garaventa’s hunt that were used by Johnston at the committee hearings, is held at the library of the University of Nevada, Reno. 20. Miller, Timebends, p. 438. 21. Ibid., p. 439. 22. Ibid. 23. Kenneth Allsop, ‘A Conversation with Arthur Miller’, Encounter vol. 13 (July–December 1959), pp. 58–60, 59. 24. Miller, Timebends, p. 438. 25. Ibid., p. 457. 26. Ibid., p. 439. 27. Jacqueline Rose, ‘A Rumbling of Things Unknown’, London Review of Books vol. 34 no. 8 (2012), pp. 29–34. 28. Ibid., pp. 32–3. 29. See the shooting script from September 1959, in George P. Garrett, O. B. Harrison, and Jane R. Gelfman (eds), Film Scripts Three (New York: Irvington, 1989), pp. 202–382, 224. 30. The dog as an ambivalent symbol of both death and life: Tom Dooley is the name both of a nineteenth-century murder ballad that was a popular hit for the Kingston Trio in 1958 and of a widely known doctor working in Laos and Vietnam (who also happened to be a CIA informant): see James T. Fisher, Dr America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961 (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). 31. Rose, ‘A Rumbling of Things Unknown’, p. 34. 32. Representative Baring, ‘Velma Johnston Feted by Defenders of Wildlife’, Congressional Record 105, 16 July 1959, p. A6164. 33. These errors are repeated in her Women in Dark Times (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 133–4. 34. Miller, Timebends, p. 467. 35. Ibid., p. 439. 36. In this case, the coincidence of anthropocentric technique and animal suffering is unavoidable: in ‘Making The Misfits’, part of the Great Performances series 185

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

broadcast on PBS (dir. by Gail Levin, 2002), it is claimed that a horse was struck by the plane during the shooting of this scene which the unit director, Tom Shaw, had encouraged to fly as low as possible. 37. J. M. Coetzee, ‘Arthur Miller, The Misfits’, in Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000– 2005 (London: Harvill Secker, 2007), pp. 222–7, 225. 38. Goode, The Story of the Misfits, pp. 195–7. 39. Ibid., p. 198.

186

Nicole Shukin and Sarah O’Brien

11 Being Struck On the Force of Slaughter and Cinematic Affect How might we approach the visceral copula of cinema and slaughter? While seemingly incomparable in their workings, slaughter and cinema – the former weighted with the material gravity of death, the latter in the lively business of moving images – can in unexpected ways be seen as sympathetic and continuous. Numerous critics have probed the material-historical relationships between moving images and the killing of nonhuman animals by observing, among other things, that ‘shooting’ with a camera sublimates the violence of hunting with a gun (Sontag); that in their linear progression and direction slaughter and cinema follow uncannily parallel lines (in describing tours of slaughterhouses, Noëlie Vialles remarks that ‘seeing round an abattoir in the opposite direction would be like watching a film backwards’); that the early photochemical development of moving images is literally contingent upon the rendering of animal remains (Shukin); and that as post-industrial cineplexes come to occupy old abattoirs in many urban centres, the spectral economy of moving images turns the material space of slaughter on its head (Brantz).1 In what follows, we initiate a different approach to the biopolitics of moving images and slaughter. It is one that draws attention to traces or residues of the sovereign power of slaughter in the aesthetic registers of cinema and, more specifically, in its powers of affect. Following Foucault, we understand sovereign power as ‘the right to take life or let live’, although Foucault has only humans in mind when he discusses those subjected to this form of power. Complicating film philosophies and practices that associate the affect excited by moving images with positive critical or transformative force, we propose that it is when artists calculate affect’s power to move bodies – when cinema’s aim is aesthetically and biopolitically formulated as making feel – that its methods unexpectedly evoke those of slaughter. Expanding upon Foucault’s definition of biopower as the power ‘to “make” live and “let” die’ (in contrast with sovereign power), we explore how the instrumentalisation of cinema’s power to make feel marks a site where the taking and the awakening of life paradoxically share techniques even as they dramatically differ in their material effects.2 We examine the resemblance between techniques of slaughter and cinematic affect via readings of two films that explicitly deploy affect to political ends. The

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

first, Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal early film Strike (1925), compels analysis of how dialectical montage as a technique that collides images toward the communication of maximum affect is formally modelled upon the delivery of the stunning blow that fells an animal.3 We ourselves are struck by the image and idiom of ‘striking’ in Eisenstein’s film as it marks the site of an unexpected continuity between humans’ sovereign power to take animal life and cinema’s aesthetic power to make feel. Far from an isolated example specific to Eisenstein’s philosophy and experimental practice of montage, we suggest that political cinema across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and particularly the charged genre that Jonathan Burt terms ‘pro-animal film’, represents an intensifying paradox to the extent that its aggressively directed affect re-enacts the sovereign force – paradigmatically executed in the human slaughter of animals – against which it agitates.4 The 2009 documentary The Cove can in this sense be read in genealogy with Eisenstein’s Strike, despite the historical distance and profound differences separating Eisenstein’s vision of a socialist, revolutionary cinema from The Cove’s quasi-paramilitary mobilisation of cinematic capital in a documentary designed to expose the scandal of slaughter.5 We seek to amplify the contradictions in The Cove between its ends and its means, that is, between its political aim of moving spectators to feeling and social protest against an annual slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, and its own morally justified use of cinematic affect as a striking tool. If ‘striking’ as a filmic idiom and technique implicates the visceral force of cinematic affect in the death blow of slaughter, drawing attention to it not only complicates the politics that disparate films like Strike and The Cove attach to their techniques of making feel, but has ramifications for how the larger relationship between aesthetics and politics is conceived at the intersection of cinema and animal studies. The imbrication of cinema in slaughter prompts further analysis of cinema’s relation to what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’ (partage du sensible). The distribution of the sensible is Rancière’s term for an aesthetic ordering of perception that partitions bodies, knowledges and abilities into the times, spaces and activities to which they ostensibly belong, apportioning certain shares or parts in the political community to some members while excluding others. As Rancière writes, the distribution of the sensible ‘is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise’.6 He even describes it as ‘an a priori distribution of the positions and capacities and incapacities attached to these positions’.7 For Rancière, the aesthetic practices of literature, theatre, painting, photography and cinema name relationships between the visible/invisible and sayable/unsayable, thus holding a potential to propose new relations between them. It is this potential that Rancière sees as the dissensual essence of politics. As he writes, ‘cinematic images are … relations between the sayable and the visible’.8 Moreover, Rancière reads cinema within the historical framework of an ‘aesthetic regime’ that introduces democratic possibilities for dissensus into the given distribution of the sensible. As Jean-Philippe Deranty elaborates, 188

Being Struck

the task of political action … is aesthetic in that it requires a reconfiguration of the conditions of sense perception so that the reigning configuration between perception and meaning is disrupted by those elements, groups or individuals in society that demand not only to exist but indeed to be perceived. A partage du sensible is thus the vulnerable dividing line that creates the perceptual conditions for a political community and its dissensus.9

Yet despite his concern for those parts that are excluded from common life, Rancière fails to address the ‘vulnerable dividing line’ between humans and other animals. Although Rancière hints at the possible interruption of a community of sense by nonhumans in his complex theorisation of a ‘‘‘dumb” art’ that allows for ‘the silent speech of things’, he routinely presupposes that the subject of politics is the ‘human animal’ who possesses a capacity for speech and, collectively, ‘a community between human beings’.10 We will refer to this partition that itself subtends the work of Rancière as a distribution of the species. Foregrounding the partitioning of species that goes unquestioned within the very concept of the distribution of the sensible, we simultaneously draw upon Rancière’s study of cinema and note its limits as we trace the unexpected continuity between the sovereign power of slaughter and an aesthetic power of cinematic affect. Even when its political objective is to excite social action against slaughter, how might cinema protect an intransigent distribution of the species that reveals the limits of the aesthetic politics ascribed to it by Rancière, among others?

Striking tools: moving images and making feel In Strike, Eisenstein sought to deploy techniques of cinematic montage to startling effect by crosscutting shots of a bull’s stunning and slaughter with shots of a brutal suppression of striking factory workers. This particular image sequence begins with a series of long shots showing hundreds of insurgent workers scrambling over an escarpment. It cuts to three shots which, in three flashes, condense the scene of the bull’s slaughter: a hand thrusts a pole-axe in a downward motion, the weapon strikes the bull’s head and the animal instantly collapses. There is a cut back to the woods, where the militia is shown closing in on the workers, then a cut back again to the bull with a staggered series of shots of its bloodletting.11 The sequence closes with several long shots of workers who have been slain by gunfire, a closing which suggests that the images of slaughter are emotionally instrumental, finally, to a socialist cinema agitating not against the plight of animals but of workers. Eisenstein calculated (overly optimistically, as it turned out) that the dialectical montage generated by the collision of shots in this image sequence would be synthesised by his spectators into a form of revolutionary consciousness, spurring socialist movement against the deadening conditions of capitalist labour. For Eisenstein, the affect produced by the editing technique of montage was a precise, well-aimed striking tool. Not unlike the pole-axe that stuns the bull in the 189

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Strike (Stachka, 1925)

piece of found footage used in this particular image sequence, and not unlike the gunfire with which soldiers cut down the mass of striking factory workers in the simulation with which it is crosscut, Strike itself fired images as affective projectiles designed to strike with scientific precision and ballistic impact upon spectators’ senses. Eisenstein was committed to a cinema that could deliver ‘a series of blows to the consciousness and emotions of the audience’.12 As Jonathan Beller notes, ‘Even Eisenstein himself was interested in the force of his films far more than in their particular contents.’ Beller identifies the paradigm shift effected by films like Strike as a shift from the representational content to the form (and force) of the image, or from ‘meaning to stimulation’. In other words, Eisenstein is credited with inaugurating a modern cinema in which ‘meaning recedes before pure affect’.13 As Rancière describes it, the new aesthetic regime in which Eisenstein participated sought the ‘becoming-life of art’, perceiving images not in terms of mimetic resemblance but in terms of the ‘affective power of sheer presence’.14 The calculative rationality that Eisenstein brought to bear upon animal death – scientifically gauging the power of its affect to viscerally agitate human spectators – challenges any temptation contemporary critics may feel to view the slaughter–strike sequence as mutually politicising of both of its subjects. Rather than presenting the violence of animal slaughter as reprehensible by formally crosscutting it with the bloody quashing of a workers’ uprising, a sympathetic relay of another sort is arguably effected by this famous sequence in Strike. This relay 190

Being Struck

involves the way cinema affectively, formally and historically takes up, as in the passing of a baton, the pre-industrial force of the pole-axe as a metonym for the modern ‘cine-fist’, as Eisenstein described the aggressive hand of cinematic montage.15 Eisenstein’s laconic method is one of the things announced by the film’s title, which in Russian (Stachka) reads as both verb and substantive (‘to strike’ and ‘the strike’). Strike does not mince words: in fact, the film less represents and more demonstrates or performs montage to be a laconic method, namely, a method that delivers an affective blow as tersely as possible. Beller contends that Strike is less interested in ‘speaking’ about revolution than it is intent upon the very ‘transferring of revolutionary movement’ through the energy of its colliding images.16 The laconicism of Eisenstein’s method replicates the non-sentimental efficiency of the pole-axe, the economy of slaughter. As Beller writes, ‘the film [Strike] is itself conceived as a tool’.17 Yet Beller views this tool as the third of ‘three belts’, the first consisting of the belts of the assembly line on which workers labour, and the second of the pants strap with which one of the workers hangs himself. We propose, instead, that the tool-likeness of Eisenstein’s method triangulates with the power of the pole-axe and the rifle to deliver a physical blow. This reading enables us to shift critical attention from the plight of the worker, to the way the film forwards an anthropological rite in which humans execute a power of death over other animals. This canonical sequence in Strike suggests, in other words, that the technology of montage is developed in formal sympathy with the power to stun and fell animals. While filmic images of slaughter are deserving of representational analysis, we are most interested in how they divulge something about cinema’s formal techniques, and about its continuation rather than break with a sovereign use of force and distribution of the species. Images of slaughter compel one to ask how practices of cinema might themselves partake in an unequal allotment of parts and powers to humans and other animals. And as we see it, ‘striking’ marks one of the spots where slaughter’s unequal distribution of the species is transposed into the language and techniques of early cinema. The species distribution at stake might be further described as an anthropology of sacrifice, that is, a culture in which ‘man’ assumes the right to slaughter other animals with impunity. ‘Striking’ indeed resonates with what Derrida describes as a culture of carno-phallogocentrism centred around a ‘virile figure who accepts sacrifice and eats flesh’. A carno-phallogocentrism that Derrida traces back through two centuries of Western culture – the impunity that surrounds the sacrifice or ‘non-criminal putting to death of animals’ – is the sovereign sense whose trace or residue we’re arguing can be glimpsed within a practice of cinema that rationalises the power of making feel.18 However, in the domain of cinema, the spectator takes the place of the animal body that receives the blow – and the blow, moreover, is aimed at rousing the spectator to feeling and action rather than at stunning and felling. The executive power of the pole-axe is thus emblematic of both this power to deliver a blow and of the key artistic precept advanced by the tradition of political 191

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

cinema we’re sketching: that cinematic affect abolishes the gap between image and action. In their affective immediacy, images should function not as representations that mean but as intensities that move bodies with an emotional-physical force. Slaughter appears to function as the raw image of this ideal simultaneity of image and action, cause and effect. But to associate this cinematic precept with the pole-axe, with slaughter, complicates how we understand the part of the spectator in Eisenstein’s work. On the one hand, the slaughter–strike sequence arguably constitutes a momentary resurgence of an earlier ‘cinema of attractions’ (1895–1906) theorised by Tom Gunning.19 In Gunning’s view, the cinema of attractions involved spectators who were neither naïve nor passive, but active and self-conscious subjects who avidly sought out impactful attractions.20 In other words, the cinema of attractions, and by extension Eisenstein’s montage of attractions, appears to give the spectator an intelligent and agential share in cinema’s distribution of sense. On the other hand, the language of the cine-fist and the strike suggests that the equality of the spectator is a more ambivalent matter in Eisenstein’s cinema, given that this idiom positions them on the receiving end of an attraction whose efficiency and force models slaughter. Even as Eisenstein abhorred the idea of a passive spectator subordinated to screen meanings, then, his techniques continued to presume an animal body that would receive and realise the calculated effects of a blow. This distribution of the species is not easily undone in the aesthetic order of cinema, despite celebrations of the inhumanity of cinema’s mechanical eye, its indifference to species distinctions, and its equality effects. Eisenstein’s techniques of montage evoke slaughter in other respects, as well: besides the image of the pole-axe, consider the resemblance between what Eisenstein calls his ‘cutting table’ and the killing floor, suggesting that the technique of editing and that of butchering an animal demand a space in which the skilled human hand wields an (ideally) absolute power over its material. Unlike the butcher, of course, the editor cuts and combines ‘contrapuntal’ images in the cause of making feel. Eisenstein describes the force of attraction that his leftist cinema has in common with an ‘agitational’ theatre: An attraction ... is any aggressive moment in theatre, i.e. any element of it that subjects the audience to emotional or psychological influence, verified by experience and mathematically calculated to produce specific emotional shocks in the spectator.21

In one sense, the director would appear to redistribute the sensible by cutting into the mimetic relationships of resemblance that for Rancière constitute the regime of representation. Yet Rancière locates the redistribution effected by cinema not in the active hand of the auteur but in the equality of the subjects shown by the passive eye of the camera. Eisenstein at his cutting table is, finally, an auteur sharpening a montage of attractions that will deploy not just disjunctive visual images to 192

Being Struck

stimulate feeling, but ‘conflict’ between the visual image and the aural (thanks to the emergence of sound technology in cinema in the years following Strike). The ‘contrapuntal conflict between the visual and aural overtones’ of images, as Eisenstein puts it, will generate a (mathematical) sum greater than its parts, which he describes as ‘the filmic fourth dimension’ of feeling: For the musical overtone (a throb) it is not strictly fitting to say ‘I hear.’ Nor for the visual overtone: ‘I see.’ For both, a new uniform formula must enter our vocabulary: ‘I feel.’ 22

With Eisenstein, we have a science of cinematic affect whose methods remain sovereign despite the ‘positive’ causes of feeling and social equality which they purport to serve. Other film theorists like Anat Pick suggest that a prohibition on the editor’s power to cut – a prohibition on montage – may be one condition of a ‘creaturely cinema’, a cinema that realises an equality beyond the distribution of species that we’ve been tracking in Eisenstein’s film practice.23 For Pick, a creaturely cinema makes visible the material necessity, finitude and contingency to which all creatures are subject, a category of vulnerable life in which species no longer holds as a meaningful or relevant category. Pick invokes André Bazin’s ‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’, in which Bazin’s argument for a realist cinema involves placing a ban on the powers of montage that have been of such a piece with the anti-naturalist aesthetics of modern cinema. ‘When the essence of a scene demands the simultaneous presence of two or more factors in the action,’ writes Bazin, ‘montage is ruled out.’24 Following Bazin, Pick favours a cinema that more impassively records ‘the precariousness inherent in the cohabitation of heterogeneous elements’ within a scene, a passive cinema in which the editorial power of the human artist to purposively direct the scene or try to determine its effects is suspended.25 Eisenstein believed that in the methods of montage there was a ‘formula for pathos’, a formula powerful enough to induce an ‘emotional seizure’.26 Yet while aiming to strike spectators to paroxysms of life, his methods paradoxically resembled slaughter’s incapacitating blows.

Being struck In this section, we turn our attention more closely to the part given the animal and the spectator in order to ask how being on the receiving end of the blow – how ‘being struck’ – relates to the cinematic distribution of activity and passivity, looking and labouring, humanity and animality. The etymology of ‘to strike’ is instructive when it comes to unpacking the distribution of species underpinning Eisenstein’s sense of the spectator as mouldable 193

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

‘material’.27 After all, this action word traces back to a processing of animal hides or skins; animal hides are ‘struck’, that is, smoothed, scraped and stretched out, in the tanning process (OED). ‘To strike’ also etymologically relates to the process of materially coining a piece of currency, ‘to stamp with a stroke’ or ‘to impress (a piece of metal, coin)’ (OED). These two senses are among half a dozen usages that denote the production of uniform, homogenised materials. For instance, just as sand, grain and joints are struck (made level), so candles, tiles and bricks are struck (moulded).28 This etymology supports our sense that a significant contradiction dogs Eisenstein’s pursuit of a cinema that stimulates spectators to life, given his conception of images as actions that are stamped or impressed upon a homogenous material that is evenly receptive. The history of industrial slaughter has been read as a progressive series of attempts to strike animal bodies with the same efficiency and regularity as coins and candles are struck.29 Although not neatly analogous, the spectator in the genealogy of cinema we’re tracing from Strike to The Cove is also assumed to be universally bared or amenable to ‘being struck’. Eisenstein conceived of the spectator as a trainable organism – a bundle of receptors that could, through the science of cinematic affect, be psycho-physiologically stimulated to become human (in the image of a socialist humanity). That a distribution of species underpins the place of the spectator in Eisenstein’s system is made clear by the debt his experimental techniques of montage owed to the experiments of his Russian contemporary, Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov’s scientific experiments sought to prove that predictable reflexes could be programmed in animals (think of the infamous dog salivating at the sound of a bell). Eisenstein effectively put human spectators in the place of Pavlov’s animal subjects and sought to craft a cinema that would likewise condition human behaviour; among other things, he biometrically timed shot sequences to the rhythm of a beating heart in order to viscerally communicate at the level of the organism. Noting the influence that Pavlov’s behaviourist reflexology had on Eisenstein’s techniques, Beller observes ‘the goal of reflexology was to understand the organism by bypassing subjectivity’.30 The goal of cinema, for Eisenstein, was similarly to trigger predictable, even automatic actions through a well-aimed bombardment of cinematic affect (targeting cardiac or cortical receptors). His work embodies a rational, formulaic deployment of moving fragments scientifically calculated to electrify a species body, unobstructed by the singularity of an individual human subjectivity. Again, Eisenstein’s methods betray a deep ambivalence when it comes to the humanity or animality of the being on the receiving end of his cinema; he objects to the reduced humanity of the capitalist subject yet his own techniques address the worker and spectator on the generic and biological level of a trainable species. In addressing the human as an organism with the universal ingredients necessary for manufacturing humanity (through the catalyst of cinema), Eisenstein’s techniques are clearly more than aesthetic; they are resolutely biopolitical. Beller glimpses this when he proposes that the films of Eisenstein inadvertently served to 194

Being Struck

turn workers into spectators whose training in ‘attentional biopower’ would support capitalism’s shift in the twentieth century to a cinematic mode of production. Indeed, Beller contends that a dramatic redistribution of activity and passivity, production and reception, is effected by Eisenstein’s cinema. The spectator, far from a passive consumer of moving images, is conscripted by Eisenstein’s Strike into a new attentional mode of production in which ‘to look is to labour’.31 ‘In spite of its intentions,’ writes Beller, ‘The Strike, like capital itself, participates in producing a new regime of the sensorium.’32 The pleasure of consuming images masks the work, in Beller’s view, of realising the value of images within a system of cinematic capital that vampirises the social, immaterial labour of human attention and affect. For Beller, Eisenstein’s vision of the spectator’s affective labour is in fact realised, but in the service of the very system of capitalism that Eisenstein hoped to overturn. However, what the biopolitics of ‘striking’ finally reveals is a cinema that aims to determine the human, to strike the human out of a material that does not yet fully qualify. Making feel through techniques of cinematic affect is ultimately a project of making humans, a humanity that is realised and authenticated when spectators react with the appropriate feeling and action to the force of images. As we turn to examine The Cove, we’ll see that to be a member of homo sapiens and not be moved by the force of cinematic affect is to have one’s humanity placed under question, to be at risk of inhabiting the place of the ‘dumb’ animal.

Being struck dumb We read The Cove in lineage with Strike even though we grant that Eisenstein would be appalled by the association: in many respects his experimental, nonnaturalistic techniques of montage could not be more at odds with the naturalistic, blow-by-blow techniques deployed in The Cove. Before elaborating on their connection, then, let us point out just one, economic, incommensurability. The Cove’s power to represent dolphin slaughter with extreme fidelity is contingent on the significant capital backing it; the film was funded by Netscape founder and billionaire Jim Clark, directed by a National Geographic photographer, and made in consultation with top-level industry experts such as Kerner Optical (formerly George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic). In contrast, Eisenstein’s laconic cinema is rooted, as Nadia Bozak points out, in a post-revolutionary economy of material scarcity in which not only film-making supplies (cameras, film stock) but also textual meaning were at a premium. The signature marks of frugality in Eisenstein’s films (shot repetition, found footage) must be read, in this light, as a means of both rationing material resources and maintaining editorial control.33 Despite their differences, however, the aggressive techniques of affect deployed in The Cove can be read as reshaping and extending the grasp of Eisenstein’s cinefist. Whereas the pole-axe stands as a literal emblem for the force of cinematic affect in Strike, the fishermen’s harpoons do so in The Cove. Yet rather than being 195

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

struck by a deadening/enlivening blow, the film’s animal subjects and human spectators are ensnared in a prolonged, multisensory exposure. As a killing tool, harpoons materially bind hunter and prey, often for extended durations. We discern congruent techniques of binding in, first, the way the film’s ‘heist’ narrative hooks the spectator and, second, in the way its visual and sound technologies capture the sensuous distress of dolphins to affectively impact spectators. The Cove typifies Burt’s definition of pro-animal films as unified by a quasireligious belief that ‘conversion automatically will follow simply from exposure to this film’; indeed, it expresses this belief in overtly self-reflexive terms, harnessing its own work of revelation as the driving force of its narrative.34 The film locates the ground zero of Japan’s interlocked trade in captive dolphins and dolphin meat in a hidden lagoon outside Taiji, a whaling town south of Osaka known for its annual dolphin drive. Each year in the lagoon, fishermen hammer on submerged metal poles flanged to their boats to create a terrifying wall of sound that herds hundreds of passing dolphins towards shore. Tellingly, the fishermen’s method is echoed by the film’s own sound techniques, inasmuch as it uses distressed dolphin cries to affectively drive agitated spectators toward the goal of protesting the slaughter. The corralled dolphins are sorted at the entrance of an inlet: trainers pick out a few young, female bottlenoses to take back to their marine parks, and the fishermen drive the remaining dolphins into a smaller concealed cove where they are slaughtered. The film is as much about its own daring quest to obtain and disseminate shocking cinematic footage of the moment in which these animals are made into spectacle and meat as it is about the dolphin’s plight. To narrativise this quest, The Cove appropriates the conventions and archetypical three-act plot of the classical heist genre. In the first act the director, Louie Psihoyos, places himself in front of

The Cove (2009) 196

Being Struck

the camera to lead what is, in his words, an ‘Oceans Eleven-style’ team of ‘rockstar’ experts (conservationists, film technicians and free divers). The team plans a covert installation of high-definition cameras and other state-of-the-art devices in the rockface around the lagoon. The second act executes this plan: in cover of night, the crew sneaks into the cove’s craggy shoreline and stashes hidden cameras and sound-recording devices that will capture, in the language of the heist, ‘the goods’: the sights and sounds of the slaughter slated to take place the following morning. Shot with infrared handicams, this sequence is not yet the culmination of the heist. The carrying-off of the goods happens in the third act, as a prolonged act of display: the spectator is directly exposed to the recorded sights and sounds of slaughter, but also indirectly watches others being exposed to the raw footage, including key players in the whaling industry and unsuspecting members of the public. This spectatorial structure of watching others react (or not) to the footage and judging their humanity on the basis of their affective responses is crucial, as we’ll see, to the other covert work the film does under cover of its animal cause: that of determining the human. The instigator of The Cove’s mission, famed dolphin-trainer-turned-activist Richard O’Barry, is entrusted with the final, climactic act of exposure. If Psihoyos is the film’s mastermind, then O’Barry is its heart. In fact, O’Barry personifies the ideal instantaneity of image, affect and action that ‘striking’ pronounces: the three are unified in his person. He also functions as the measure of humanity, certified by his affective and activist response to the dolphin slaughter. In the documentary’s concluding sequence, he strides into a meeting of the International Whaling Commission with a portable video screen strapped to his chest and battery packs looped to his belt. The camera follows him as he makes a slow, deliberate circuit of the conference room, pausing intermittently so that commission members and a growing queue of photojournalists and videographers can see the screen. From the palpable sense of discomfort in the room and the orangey-pink glow of the screen viewers understand that he is screening the same graphic images of slaughter captured in the film’s second act. The activist is next shown at a crowded intersection in a Japanese city. O’Barry now stands in the middle of the street, the screen still strapped to his chest. Crowds flood past him, their hurried disinterest heightened by the use of fast-motion cinematography. In the final shot, passers-by form a small group around O’Barry; they appear to be momentarily struck by the scene of slaughter on his chest, then the film cuts to black. The Cove’s activist gesture of taking film out of the theatre and into public space – of making a surprise attack on an unsuspecting (potentially unconsenting) public – is one way we read the film’s extension of the power to strike. And accompanying the right this scene exemplifies to affectively strike with impunity, there is the film’s implicit power to determine who is human on the basis of their feeling or unfeeling reactions to the footage, and to incriminate the inhumanity of those who fail to react ‘properly’. A distribution of the species can be glimpsed in the film’s interest in discriminating between the human (a category 197

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

The Cove (2009)

which is not reserved for homo sapiens but excludes some humans even as it includes some animals, such as feeling cetaceans) and nonhuman. Within the almost paramilitary scope of The Cove’s covert operations (its arsenal of infrared cameras that detect ‘anything with a heartbeat’, its cetaceous drone-blimp), O’Barry assumes the form and function of a mobile assault weapon, moving through the city and striking bystanders with the gruesome sight of animal slaughter; in this regard, his screening closely resembles the eruptive force of Eisenstein’s ballistic montage. Yet his monstration ups the biopolitical ante; he literally binds his body to the screen in a manner that suggests he is willing to put his own life on the line. On the one hand, O’Barry’s monstration functions as a moment of catharsis that lets spectators off the hook for any action beyond viewing the film. Up to this point, the spectator has been tightly tethered to the illicit collection of the evidence of slaughter. Yet the activist’s performance of fusing this evidence to his body, his life, has the possible effect of cleansing or purging the anger and apprehension that the spectator has accumulated in the duration. This cathartic moment seems to confirm Beller’s thesis that ‘to look is to labor’, in that looking becomes an end in itself. Watching The Cove – that is, bearing witness to and viscerally feeling the film’s index of slaughter – would appear to be response enough to the mass killing of dolphins. Yet the biopolitical image the film gives of a human exemplar who puts their life on the line for other animals could also be read in an opposite way, that is, as demanding the same of the spectator and subtly indicting those who are not willing to respond with equally extreme affect and action. While The Cove’s affective power to ensnare human spectators appears highly calculated from the outset, its relationship to its animal subjects initially appears less assured. Indeed, the film intimates possibilities for dissensus – for cinematic 198

Being Struck

forms that open new relationships between the visible/invisible and sayable/ unsayable – that would trouble the distribution of species. Principally, it locates sound as a potential site of sensual opening that would give voice to animals within the political community. In early moments of expository narration, the film sets out two roughly similar theses or aims. The first accrues to O’Barry’s assertion that ‘nobody has actually seen what takes place back there. And so the way to stop it is to expose it.’ The second accrues to Psyihoyos’s declaration: I wanted to have a three-dimensional experience of what’s going on in that lagoon. I wanted to hear everything that the dolphins were doing, everything that the whalers were saying … .You want to capture something that will make people change.

Whereas O’Barry uncritically expresses the faith in exposure-as-conversion that Burt links to the genre of pro-animal film, Psihoyos suggests that just showing is not sufficient; cinematic affect may be more effectively excited through sound exposure. In calculating that the sounds as well as sights of slaughter may be needed to move spectators to action, Psihoyos exercises cinema’s more total power to bare animals’ experience of pain and death and to strike human spectators. Yet in the moment Psihoyos articulates his plan, its outcome in the film is not yet given. This project’s potential for dissensus lies, in large part, in the film’s alignment of its interest in dolphin sound (language) with biologist Roger Payne’s 1967 discovery and dissemination of the singing of humpback whales. The film even includes archival footage of protesters in Trafalgar Square in 1971, listening to Payne’s recording of whales. Payne’s recordings recognised whales as ‘acoustic creatures’ and attempted to meet them on the grounds of their primary sensuous experience of the world – the aural. The Cove would seem to initiate a similar effort to make dolphin ‘speech’ hearable within the political community. However, it soon becomes clear that unlike Payne’s project, The Cove’s pursuit of an equality that extends beyond humans is undercut by methods that keep the sovereignty of the human in place. The director is particularly invested in high-fidelity sound technology aimed at reproducing ‘a three-dimensional experience of what’s going on in that lagoon’. To this end, the titular cove is configured as a submersion tank, with the film’s goal being to immerse the spectator in a dolphin sensorium where they will be pierced by sounds of distress (affectively harpooning the spectator). In a key scene, the film shows the crew sitting in a hotel room and listening to the sounds captured by their submerged recording devices. O’Barry listens to the sound of dolphins fearfully communicating with one another in the moments leading up to their slaughter; the spectator both hears these chilling sounds, and watches O’Barry’s affective response to them. This scene not only uses sound as a potent striking tool, it again deploys the spectatorial structure noted earlier whereby the viewer looks for signs of another’s humanity in their affectability. 199

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

The Cove (2009)

In troubling contrast to the figures of Western humanity that it features, the documentary presents numerous shots of Japanese fishermen and officials obstructing the crew’s efforts and ‘unfeelingly’ guarding their annual tradition. While we certainly don’t want to condone a right to slaughter animals that, as we’ve been arguing throughout, is paradoxically reiterated in cinema’s justified use of cinematic affect, it’s important to critique the way the film arouses racist stereotypes of the unfeeling Asian, and more specifically, how it establishes certain criteria of being human that exclude the Japanese. Again, in this distribution of the species it isn’t necessary to be a member of homo sapiens to qualify as human, but it is necessary that one demonstrate a capacity for feeling. While The Cove has the potential to interrupt a carno-phallogocentric distribution of sense by proposing that dolphin sounds politically count as ‘speech’, it undermines this potential by empowering a handful of certified humans to deem Japanese fishermen and officials unfeeling (effectively excluding them from the community of humans), while at the same time elevating a class of feeling cetaceans into the community of humans. Although some humans and animals switch hierarchical places in the affective economy of The Cove, an underlying partitioning of human and animal remains in place that codifies all those who can be provoked to feeling as ‘human’, and all those who can’t as ‘animal’.

Conclusion In seizing upon the image and idiom Eisenstein gives us of ‘striking’ to examine the way cinema perpetuates the sovereign power of slaughter in its forceful communication of cinematic affect, have we perhaps attributed to the techniques we’ve traced more force than they in fact possess? After all, neither Strike nor The Cove 200

Being Struck

excited the social change they aspired to through the force of their cinematic affect. Unlike the blow that unmistakably fells an animal, isn’t the affective strike far more uncertain in its results despite the scientific rationality with which Eisenstein sought to determine its effects? Strike and The Cove inadvertently show that the relay between image, affect and action is far from assured, and that shadowing political cinema’s ideal of their immediacy there is always the possibility of a disconnect, a failure. Rancière would say that it is precisely when cinema is not able to direct the relation between cause and effect, image and action, that the potential for dissensus – and politics – opens up. The cinema that finds a model for the force of its affect in slaughter is hopefully, in this sense, at once a sovereign and an incapacitated cinema.

Notes 1. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 10; Noëllie Vialles, Animal to Edible, trans. J. A. Underwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 53; Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 104; Dorothee Brantz, ‘Recollecting the Slaughterhouse’, Cabinet vol. 4 (2001), p. 123. 2. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 241. 3. Strike (Stachka), directed by Sergei Eisenstein (Goskino and Proletkult, 1925; Kino International 2011), DVD. 4. Jonathan Burt, ‘A Day in the Life of a Massachusetts Slaughterhouse’ (review), Society and Animals vol. 13 (2005), p. 347. 5. The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos (Diamond Docs, 2009; Lionsgate, 2009), DVD. 6. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 12. 7. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009), p. 12. 8. Ibid., p. 6. 9. Jean-Philippe Deranty (ed.), Jacques Rancière and the Contemporary Scene (New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 96. 10. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2009), pp. 14, 13; Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, pp. 10, 58. 11. Eisenstein indicates that he took the footage of the bull’s slaughter from a manufacturing newsreel. See Serge Eisenstein, ‘The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form’, Sergei Eisenstein, Selected Works Vol. 1: Writings, 1922–34, trans. Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1988), p. 62. 12. Serge Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’, in ibid., p. 39. 13. Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2006), pp. 91–2, 96. 14. Rancière, The Future of the Image, p. 17. 201

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

15. Eisenstein, ‘The Problem of the Materialist Approach to Form’, p. 64. 16. Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production, p. 103. 17. Ibid., p. 98. 18. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’, in Elizabeth Weber (ed.), Points: Interviews, 1974–1994, trans. Avital Ronell (Stanford, CT: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 280–1, 278. 19. First formulated in the mid-1980s in collaboration with André Gaudreault, Gunning’s cinema of attractions challenged the received view that early filmgoers were simply artless naïfs terrorised by a newfangled medium. This cinema emerges ‘at the climax of a period of intense development in visual entertainments’ (magic theatre, amusement park rides) and is met by spectators primed to partake in the ‘conscious delectation of shocks and thrills’. See Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator’, in Linda Williams (ed.), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), pp. 116, 120. 20. Ibid., pp. 114–33. 21. Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’, p. 34. 22. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘The Filmic Fourth Dimension’, Film Form and Film Sense: Essays in Film Theory, trans. and ed. Jay Leyda (Cleveland, OH and New York: Meridian Books, 1967), p. 71. 23. Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 117. 24. Andre Bazin, ‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’, What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (London: University of California Press, 2005), p. 50. 25. Ibid., p. 116. 26. Sergei Eisenstein, quoted in ‘Introduction’, Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert Marshall (New York: Cambridge University Press 1987), p. xiii. 27. Eisenstein, ‘The Montage of Attractions’, p. 34. 28. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ‘strike’, www.oed.com. 29. Vialles, Animal to Edible; Brantz, ‘Recollecting the Slaughterhouse’. 30. Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production, p. 119. 31. Ibid., p. 115. 32. Ibid., p. 89. 33. Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2011), p. 57. 34.Burt, ‘A Day in the Life of a Massachusetts Slaughterhouse’, p. 349.

202

Laura McMahon

12 Screening Pigs Visibility, Materiality and the Production of Species A 2010 promotional video for TOPIGS, a global company specialising in pig breeding, moves seamlessly from live piglets being stacked in crates to the laboratory analysis of pork cuts, passing via images of artificial insemination technologies and an animated DNA sequence.1 As the lives of pigs are elliptically reduced to a sterile series of statistical data, genetic models and slabs of pork, the TOPIGS video highlights the uses to which moving images can be put in order to negotiate a particular relation between biopolitics, representation and the economics of meat production.2 Such a relation requires careful ideological management, particularly in the case of pigs. While slaughtered for meat on a mass industrialised scale, pigs share a striking set of affinities with humans, foregrounded not only by physiological similarities but by levels of intelligence and sociability. As Brett Mizelle suggests, our relation to pigs thus embodies a specific, guilt-ridden tension between disavowed kinship and unremitting exploitation.3 The pig is, as Susan McHugh puts it, ‘the consummate “threshold creature”’.4 Hovering between identificatory lure and instrumentalised flesh, pigs are visually and conceptually ambiguous in ways that the commodifying logic of the TOPIGS video works to disavow. Yet what the video inadvertently reveals through its own representational suppressions is how the ambiguity of pigs – or, rather, our ambiguity about them – may act as a potentially unruly force within visual and biopolitical epistemologies. I wish to examine here the specific role of the moving image in its various modes of engagement with the lives and deaths of pigs. I argue that film – in its attentiveness to materiality and facticity, movement and duration – offers particular forms of temporal and spatial presentation that both register and shape the threshold status and fluctuating embodiments of porcine beings. As Jonathan Burt suggests, moving images of animals play a decisive role in the ‘biodynamics of human–animal relations’: ‘the animal image is never external, but is just as structuring and transformative as animals out there in the “world”’.5 Mapping this ‘structuring and transformative’ role entails close attention to material, durational entanglements of animal lives, biopolitics and the moving image. Historically, pig species have been shaped by human intervention, through domestication, breeding and, as signalled by the TOPIGS video, genetic modification. How do film practices both continue

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

and interrupt these historical, biopolitical, anthropocentric processes of species construction? How might moving images allow us to envisage – and relate to – the pig anew? Focusing on the pig as a particularly unstable embodiment of being, this chapter explores, against the background of the TOPIGS video, two documentaries that work to question the place of the pig within biopolitical economies of representation. Jean-Michel Barjol and Jean Eustache’s Le Cochon/The Pig (1970), an example of ‘Direct Cinema’, confronts the viewer with the brute facticity of pig slaughter – dismemberment, evisceration and conversion into meat – in order to mark a durational, affective engagement with the death of the animal. Jean-Louis Le Tacon’s Cochon qui s’en dédit (1978) – which translates idiomatically as ‘it’s a done deal’ and literally as ‘he who goes back on his word is a pig’ – worries at the border between the pig and the human, both through surreal images of crossspecies coupling and, in line with the tradition of militant cinema to which this film belongs, through a reflection on a mutual (though not equivalent) positioning of farmer and swine within regimes of capitalist production.6 Set in different contexts (pastoral; industrial), both documentaries consider the pig’s habitual role as meat animal, pointing to ways in which the pig – as singularity and as species – may be radically reframed by the moving image. My examination of filmic representations of the pig as a meat animal may seem politically limiting: as Burt suggests, we need to account for ways in which animals (in film) can be figured as more than a ‘passive partner or victim’.7 In line with a broader history of violent reification by the human, the place of the pig in cinema has so often been one of deathly subjugation: one thinks, for example, of the documentary deaths of pigs killed on screen in Weekend (1967), L’Albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs, 1978), Benny’s Video (1992), La Rabia (Anger, 2008) or off screen in Japón (2002). Cinematic expressions of porcine agency, in works as varied as Buta to gunkan (Pigs and Battleships, 1961), Babe (1995) and The Legend of the Tamworth Two (2004), are rare. Yet I want to suggest that attention to the visual and biopolitical economies of meat production allows for a tracing of counterhegemonic lines of nonhuman resistance precisely at the points at which any such possibility for resistance would appear to be denied.8 I am interested here in how on-screen manifestations of what McHugh calls ‘eruptions of nonhumanagency forms’ open up possibilities for reconsidering taxonomies of species being within the space of cinema, specifically – and paradoxically – in connection with the lives and deaths of pigs.9 Central to my consideration of the biopolitical and visual management of pigs are the historical and carnal connections between cinema and animal slaughter. In Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009), Nicole Shukin analyses a material genealogy of animal traces that link what she calls ‘three early time-motion economies: animal disassembly, automotive assembly and moving picture production’.10 Observing that slaughterhouse technologies of animal disassembly were replicated in the first assembly-line production of cars in 1913, 204

Screening Pigs

marking the birth of Fordism, Shukin also suggests that the animal disassembly line – and the recreational tours that took place in slaughterhouses at the end of the nineteenth century – anticipated structures of cinematic movement and film spectatorship. As Shukin contends: ‘Both in the visual consumption of the rapid sequential logic of the moving line that they encouraged and in their stimulation of affect, slaughterhouse tours arguably … helped to lay the perceptual tracks for cinema.’11 But Shukin mines a further connection here between cinema and the slaughterhouse, pointing to the use of gelatin – ‘a protein extracted from the skin, bones, and connective tissues of cattle, sheep, and pigs’ – in the production of celluloid film stock.12 Film thus carries the material traces of animal slaughter, through a form of rendering that enacts ‘a transfer of life from animal body to technological media’.13 In a death-dealing exchange, animal slaughter gives life to film’s images. As cinema moves into the digital age, it distances itself to some extent from this literal relation to the facticity of animal bodies. But traces of this deathly relation inevitably remain, haunting the history of film. What I draw from Shukin’s analysis in particular is her excavation of what she calls ‘a network of ideological and material exchanges’ that entangle the meat industrial complex and cinema as biopolitically encrypted sites of ‘animal capital’.14 However, Shukin does not compare filmic representations of any one particular species of animal, nor does she elaborate on the moving image’s potential for articulating nonhuman agency: indeed, her critique of capitalism’s rendering of animals as ‘simultaneously sign and substance of market life’ tends to limit the possibilities for a consideration of animal life beyond a passive positioning within biopolitical networks of exchange.15 Building on Shukin’s thesis, I seek to address the pig as a specifically ambiguous site of representation and as an animal occupying fluctuating positions of agency across diverse examples of moving image practice. In what follows, I ask: how does the pig emerge not only as ‘sign and substance’ but also as agent within cinema’s (varied, distinct) biopolitical economies of animal rendering?

Rendering (in)visible The TOPIGS video foregrounds the circulation of global animal capital. Though the video states that the company is based in the Netherlands, it is narrated in English and shot mostly in unidentifiable locations, in a bid to transcend national specificity. Informing the viewer that the company is ‘a global leader in pig breeding and artificial insemination’, the opening sequence shows the TOPIGS logo floating through outer space to converge with a rotating image of the globe. The background is partitioned by images, showing an aeroplane, a litter of piglets, a business meeting. The overlaying of images in this opening sequence signals the carnal, semiotic and genetic trafficking of pigs across national boundaries, in consolidation of transnational animal capital. In the video’s representational economy, as in the process of pig breeding itself, pigs are reduced to signs – to data, diagrams and genetic models – and are, above all, converted into capital. The visual grammar 205

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

at work here speaks to Shukin’s concept of ‘double rendering’, through which the animal is instrumentalised as both sign and substance, foregrounding what Shukin calls the ‘complicity of representational and material economies in the reproduction of (animal) capital’.16 As the video makes clear, the meat industrial complex functions not only through the biopolitical management of animal life but also through a rigid control of regimes of visibility. For the clinical ease of movement between images of pigs both living and dead in this video relies on a key structuring absence – the scenes of slaughter that remain off screen. (Indeed, this representational elision speaks more broadly to the sequestering of modern industrialised slaughter from public view.)17 While images of live pigs, meat, technologies and DNA models operate as talismanic signs of global capital, the messy, material violence of slaughter is contained and displaced. The video’s smooth flow of carnal and virtual exchanges relies on what Shukin calls the ‘invisibility’ of modern rendering.18 The video is structured further through connections between biopower – ‘the right to make live and let die’, as Michel Foucault puts it – and efficiency, compounded by images of technologies and technologies of images.19 Over a scene of newborn piglets suckling a sow, the voiceover states: ‘Fast genetic progress means improved technical and financial results for the pig producer.’ The sequence cuts to a lab worker looking through a microscope and then to a view through the microscope, before cutting to a rotating image of a model of DNA. The sequence plays out what Jackie Stacey describes as the three structuring desires of the ‘genetic imaginary’: ‘to imitate life in both science and the cinema; to secure identity as legible through screening technologies; and to anchor embodied difference by making it stable, predictable, and visible’.20 The sequence functions as a display of biopower: porcine life is rendered intelligible, reproducible, endlessly malleable and perfectible. Asserting bureaucratic and biopolitical control through a staging of technologies of vision and knowledge, the sequence ‘anchor[s] embodied difference’, as Stacey puts it, and safeguards the border between the human and the pig. At the same time, however, this explicit investment in genetic malleability inadvertently invokes the instability of species identity; in this sense, the video undermines its implicit project of maintaining a distinct boundary between the human and the pig. Yet, the ideological stakes of the video remain clear, as its fast-paced representational linkages between genetics, technologies and profit enact a form of ‘double rendering’ in line with the ineluctable present of animal capital, disconnecting the cuts of pork featured here from any notion of material history or porcine agency. By contrast, Barjol and Eustache’s Le Cochon lays bare the materiality of cinema’s rendering of animal life. As such, it refuses the representational elisions of the TOPIGS video, as well as the illusions of early trick films such as Louis Lumière’s La Charcuterie mécanique/The Mechanical Butcher (1895), in which a pig is instantaneously converted into sausages. Fifty minutes long and shot in black and white, Le Cochon dwells, without voiceover commentary, on the slaughter of 206

Screening Pigs

a sow by a small group of farmers.21 Following the pig’s dismemberment, evisceration and conversion into meat, the film shows the farmers and their families feasting and singing in celebration. Made in Auzon, where Barjol (who initiated the project) had grown up, Le Cochon functions in a nostalgic mode; though released just two years after the political unrest of May 1968, it is embedded in national and rural tradition. Its careful documentation of the transformation of every part of the animal into food speaks to a specific celebration of the pig in French culinary culture (as indicated by the proverb: ‘Dans le cochon, tout est bon’ [‘Everything in the pig is good to eat’]).22 Rather like John Berger’s romanticisation of a premodern relation between the peasant and his pig, the film shores up an ideal of pastoral community, in ode to a disappearing rural culture.23 Rémi Fontanel describes the film as a ‘patrimonial document’; he points to ‘the fully choreographic dimension of the ritual’; the murmured, often unintelligible exchanges between the farmers lend ‘a musicality that brings a sensitive, even poetic, dimension to this highly regulated ceremony’.24 Fontanel’s emphasis on the patrimonial and ceremonial dimensions of the film is suggestive of the links between national identity, ‘imagined community’ and animal capital explored by Shukin, whereby the image of the animal functions fetishistically as both life-form and ‘iconic symbol’ to connote ‘organic national unity’.25 In Le Cochon, the integrity of familial and patrimonial ties is articulated fetishistically via animal dismemberment, through the ceremonial rendering of the pig as both substance and symbol. However, the form of the film itself works both with and against this privileging of the human. While the film dwells upon the ritualistic gestures of the farmers, it allows for an attention to materiality, to the fragile facticity of a nonhuman life, to exceed the ceremonial impetus identified by Fontanel. Recalling Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949), which documents the practices of two slaughterhouses in Paris, Le Cochon confronts the viewer with images of animal death in affective, visceral terms. Death comes early in this film, in the first five minutes. We see the sow cornered by a group of male farmers; she tries to wriggle from their collective grasp. Her resistances and refusals are corporealised through stubborn gestures, snorts and squeals. But these flickerings of porcine agency are shortlived: the pig is held down, her throat slit. Blood spills, steam rises. The scene speaks to what Akira Mizuta Lippit, in his discussion of animal death in film, calls an anti-metaphor or animetaphor – ‘a metaphor made flesh’, that ‘marks a limit of figurability’, mobilising an excess of affect.26 At the same time, the visceral charge of the scene recalls Shukin’s description of the violent sensorium of protocinematic spectatorship in the slaughterhouse.27 Here cinema revisits its carnal, affective animal origins. In place of the ahistorical present of animal capital, Le Cochon privileges a chronological unfolding of events. Following the scene of death, we see the pig slowly, manually, turned into cuts of meat, sausages and offal. We see the body decapitated and the head hung on the wall, limbs severed and placed in buckets, 207

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

the heart removed and strung up, blood collected in bowls, bones hammered down, the bladder washed and emptied, intestines removed and laid out on the kitchen table, the filling and casing for sausages prepared. The ‘material unconscious’ of cinema surfaces uncannily in these images.28 The pig is rendered as an array of material products, not only by and for the farmers but also by and for the film.29 The visual economies of cinema and biopolitics intersect here: Le Cochon stages carnal control of the ‘hidden structure’ of the animal – the ‘buried organs’ and ‘invisible functions’ – exhibiting what Foucault sees as the penetrative workings of biopower.30 Yet, in contrast to the TOPIGS video, Le Cochon refuses the invisibility of modern rendering, slowing deconstructing the carnal and symbolic contours of the pig. A privileging of the long take signals an investment in durational attentiveness. Close-ups of glistening entrails invite a mode of spectatorial engagement that is material, visceral, affective. Here cinema registers the time of becoming-offal, and images of animal disassembly bring into focus celluloid’s disavowed material traces. In this sense, Le Cochon reflects on cinema’s consumption of animal life and death, and on the facticity of animal disassembly that haunts film’s matter and its history. Yet it is perhaps the moments between death and dismemberment that foreground the pig as a particularly troubling, ambiguous site of embodiment. Before dismemberment, the sow is washed, scrubbed, scalded and scraped. In its durational attentiveness, the film allows for a dwelling on the interplay and contrast between the inanimate subject-turned-object at its centre and the liveliness of human activity around it. There is something deeply affecting about this still body, this obdurate materiality, amid a flurry of human action. (Striking too are the images of dogs looking on; these canine spectators remind us of the nonhuman hierarchies also at stake here.) The activities of washing, scrubbing and lifting temporarily reanimate the body of the pig, intimating a potential resurrection of the animal, an uncanny hesitation between life and death that threatens momentarily to reverse the ‘elusive passage from one state to the other’ described by André Bazin in his discussion of animal death in film.31 The possibility of human–animal identification also hovers here (an identificatory relation carefully managed – that is, repressed – by the biopolitics of slaughter, as Shukin suggests).32 As the dead sow is positioned on her back, four limbs in the air, and scrubbed across her belly and between her legs, morphological resonances – between the human and the animal – come into play, potentially inducing anxieties about the human becoming meat.33 As Gilles Deleuze suggests in his reflections on the fleshy, tactile figures of Francis Bacon’s paintings, ‘[m]eat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility’.34 Le Cochon offers a glimmer of cross-species identification in this liminal zone between death and dismemberment, when the pig is on the threshold of becoming pork. Yet, ultimately, if the pig is only affecting in her death, as obdurate materiality or as identificatory lure, the film leaves little room for a consideration of porcine agency, and of the pig as a political being.35 Given the speed with which the pig’s 208

Screening Pigs

life is despatched (so early on in the film), the ethical and political risk of Barjol and Eustache’s documentary is that it ends up privileging the labourer over the pig: as we have seen, this ‘patrimonial document’ dwells on a ritualistic celebration of human work and community. Though women are present in the film – as spectators to the dismemberment of the pig, and as participants in the preparation of food – this ‘patrimonial document’ is one that privileges masculinity above all. Consolidating the ‘patriarchal control of animals’ diagnosed by Carol J. Adams, Le Cochon stages the bloodsoaked communion of a masculine community around the flayed body of a sow.36 Here meat ideologically encrypts, as Shukin suggests, the ‘masculinist virility’ of the ‘national body’.37 In his discussion of the film’s ceremonial dimensions, Fontanel compares Le Cochon to Eustache’s La Rosière de Pessac (The Virgin of Pessac, 1968/1979), two films documenting an annual festival in which a girl elected by the town as the ‘most virtuous’ remains silent throughout the ceremony. Fontanel does not acknowledge the gender politics of this intertextual connection. But in The Virgin of Pessac, community is staged through the simultaneous silencing and celebration of a female body, much as it is through the slaughter of the sow in Le Cochon. In the latter, asymmetrical gendered power relations intersect with species-based hierarchies: the hypostatisation of masculine community stands more broadly for a ceremonialisation of the human. The film thus remains largely anthropocentric, in spite of its refusal of the invisibility of animal rendering and its brief documentation of porcine resistance. Despite the focus of the film’s title, the real subject of Le Cochon is the farmer rather than the pig.

Capital/waste Cochon qui s’en dédit, by contrast, complicates its anthropocentric investments. An experimental ethnography, shot on Super 8 and running for thirty-seven minutes, the film charts the daily labour of Maxime, who owns a pig farm in Brittany. We see Maxime engaged in calculations, planning, statistics and reports, in biopolitical regulation of the pigs he breeds. As he recounts in a quiet, soft voice the challenges of his work, including a set of insurmountable financial difficulties, the film gradually deconstructs the market logics idiomatically signalled by its title (which can be translated as ‘it’s a done deal’, as noted above). In the tradition of le cinéma militant, and the Medvekine group in particular, which brought together young workers and film-makers in France in the aftermath of May 1968, Cochon qui s’en dédit documents the alienating conditions of Maxime’s labour and seeks to allow the farmer, as Le Tacon puts it, to ‘write’ the film himself.38 A former student of Jean Rouch, to whom the film is dedicated, Le Tacon draws on Rouch’s concept of ‘shared anthropology’, describing the film as ‘in complicity with the farmer’ – a complicity underscored by the intimacy enabled by the use of the handheld Super 8 camera.39 Before shooting the film, Le Tacon worked with Maxime on the farm – an experience that further informs the film’s intimate recording of 209

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

labour. As Maxime is shown routinely feeding, monitoring and cleaning the pigs, the film allows patterns of repetition to emphasise the seriality of his work and, increasingly, to problematise the agency of the human. Cochon qui s’en dédit asserts that both human and pig are brutally instrumentalised by the biopolitical workings of capitalism, or by what one review of the film calls the ‘machine of death’.40 The closing sequence cuts between an interview, in which Maxime and his wife recount the financial difficulties leading to their abandonment of the farm, and images of a headless pig, a dog eating the pig’s head and the mangled flesh of the head (in close-up). Particularly striking here is the cut from Maxime – as he explains that another young couple are interested in taking on the farm – to the image of disintegrating flesh. This cut speaks to the horror of repetition, and to the mangling of further lives – of both future workers and pigs on the farm. While this closing sequence signposts its debt to le cinéma militant, it gestures more broadly to a history of political cinema’s formal investments – not only through a dialectics of (Eisensteinian) montage but also through a Surrealist aesthetic of juxtaposition that aligns the film with Franju’s Blood of the Beasts.41 Cochon qui s’en dédit echoes moves made by Blood of the Beasts between horror and the everyday, as well as Franju’s focus on the rationalised violence of industrial modernity.42 Like Blood of the Beasts, Le Tacon’s documentary poses questions dialectically about the exploitation of both the human and the animal, articulated emphatically here in the closing sequence. Yet this sequence also reminds us of a brutal hierarchy of species: pigs are not only consumed by humans but also by dogs (recalling the nonhuman hierarchy at stake in Le Cochon). Thus while Cochon qui s’en dédit draws connections between human and porcine suffering, it claims no parity between these experiences. The film perpetually draws our attention to the intolerable circumstances in which these pigs live, breed and die, setting up a space of complicity not only with the farmer but also with the pig. As such, the film displaces the implicitly anthropocentric focus of the tradition of le cinéma militant and opens Le Tacon’s ‘shared anthropology’ to the place of the animal. As the film attacks the violent conversion of pigs into capital, we see the animals in cramped conditions, piglets castrated (and their teeth clipped and tails docked), piles of diseased and dead pigs, and flesh ravaged by maggots. (One particular image recalls the close-up of maggot-infested meat in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin [1925] – a referential gesture that simultaneously extends beyond the anthropocentrism of its cinephilic debt.) In one sequence, Maxime describes the brutalising conditions imposed upon sows in order to maximise the production of piglets: each sow is separated from her young as early as possible and deprived of food and water – conditions designed to cause stress and to induce the sow more quickly into season again; after five or six cycles of reproduction, the sow is sent to the abattoir or the knacker’s yard. This last detail is recounted over footage of a sow barely able to walk (her legs have collapsed). Maxime hits her on the back to force her to move. The film’s own response to the violence of this unremitting cycle of (re)production finds itself articulated in one hallucinatory, 210

Screening Pigs

Cochon qui s’en dédit (1978)

slow-motion sequence, in which Maxime throws dead piglets over a fence and they return (from off-screen space) towards him. Locked in a nightmarish loop of repetition, the piglet corpses fly back and forth, as the film evokes the deathly surplus of animal capital. This ungovernable surplus is evoked further through the film’s focus on waste. As Maxime narrates his daily struggle to clear the never-ending barrage of faeces produced by the pigs, the film tips momentarily into the realm of horror, cutting abruptly to an accelerated, red-tinted sequence accompanied by droning synths. Handheld images usher us down a walkway in the pighouse and then behind the stalls to reveal gathering piles of faeces. Cutting back to the more habitual colour tone of the film, the sequence visually mimes Maxime’s obsession (‘You become a maniac … . If you let it get out of control, you’re really in the shit’) by including close-ups of faeces overflowing, in a sequence influenced by Salò (1976).43 Image and sound function here to figure a horrifying, unruly, bodily surplus that exceeds the biopolitical management of life. As waste erupts within the visual field, Cochon qui sans dédit destabilises any logic of ‘double rendering’, staging an unravelling of what Shukin sees as the ‘complicity of representational and material economies in the reproduction of (animal) capital’.44 While these scenes of excess stand in direct contrast to the clinical aesthetic of the TOPIGS video, they also countermand Le Cochon’s consolidation of human/masculine/communal identity around the use value of the pig. If in Le Cochon porcine capital underwrites national identity through an appeal to agricultural and gastronomical tradition (in which nothing goes to waste), Cochon qui s’en dédit posits a form of material animal excess that ruptures (with) that tradition and throws human agency – and a particular idea of patrimonial sovereignty – radically into question. Against this backdrop of the contested agency of the human within the field of the biopolitical, Cochon qui s’en dédit draws uncertain kinships between the human and the pig that further destabilise the anthropocentric. Over images of Maxime patting sows and sitting astride one of them, he explains his role in assisting breeding (‘you jump on top to see if she remains immobile …’). The film cuts 211

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

abruptly to an image of Maxime, naked, standing behind a sow, as though about to mount her; the status of this image as hallucinatory is marked out by its sudden intrusion, punctuated by the squeal of a saxophone, and the dark lighting (in comparison to the rest of the film). The film immediately cuts back to two pigs having sex, with Maxime now standing behind, monitoring them (the lighting here reverts to that of the majority of the film’s images). In voiceover, Maxime reflects on his role in the breeding process: ‘you ask yourself who is fucking who, if it’s the breeder who fucks the sow or what …’. He explains how he manually assists in the process by guiding the boar. From this, the film cuts to another hallucinatory sequence, accompanied by electronic sounds, of disjunctively edited images zooming in on Maxime, naked, lying in bed with a pig. Disjointed, rotating camera movement around the bed shows us the limbs of human and pig entwined, in a scene of tender coupling. Following a cut to an image in which one sow nuzzles another from behind, Maxime’s voiceover continues: ‘From my point of view, it’s more when two sows seek out one another that I feel something. I’ve never liked the phallic side of things [laughs softly]; I’d identify more with a sow at that moment.’ This sequence works first to foreground the human regulation of sexual intimacy between pigs, making manifest a set of speciesist technologies of power. In Foucault’s terms, the sequence stages nonhuman sexuality at the intersection of ‘anatomo-politics’ (the disciplining of individual bodies) and biopolitics (the regularisation of species).45 Yet it also articulates an intriguing set of identificatory slippages and queer kinships across species lines. Maxime identifies first with a boar mounting a sow – an identification that the film articulates both verbally and visually – and then with a sow ‘[seeking] out’ another sow – an identification verbalised but not visualised. By refusing visualisation, the film preserves a space of the unseen for this hesitant, exploratory queering of human–porcine relations. Articulated by Maxime in the conditional tense (‘I’d identify …’), this space of identification and intimacy remains nonappropriated by the scopic regime that reigns elsewhere in the film. As this sequence metonymically suggests, the lives of these pigs are subjected to a regime of anatomo-political surveillance

Cochon qui s’en dédit (1978) 212

Screening Pigs

and biopolitical regularisation that the film mimes by unflinchingly showing everything – birth, illness, mating, faeces, corpses. Yet in resistance to this generalised logic of the visible, the film allows for Maxime’s tentative self-positioning as a sow to remain off screen and to reside in the space between image and sound, between the scene of two sows together and Maxime’s libidinal investments in voiceover. Indeed, despite Maxime’s own framing of these investments in identificatory terms, the logic of inbetweenness ushered in by this particular conjunction of image and sound articulates cross-species feeling as something more akin to ‘becominganimal’ – that is, ‘a zone of proximity and indiscernibility’, a non-identificatory, ‘nonlocalizable’ resonance between intensities.46 Here the interval between image and sound allows for a deterritorialisation of cross-species contact. By drawing attention to an image of sexual intimacy between two sows, the film also creates space for a consideration of nonhuman, nonheteronormative agency. The image is not easily legible – the nuzzling action borders on the aggressive, yet the dynamic between the sows resists categorisation in terms of active/ passive. This suggests ways in which the moving image can bear witness – without appropriation – to the complex interplay of nonhuman agencies or what Burt calls the ‘livingness of bodies’ in coexistence.47 As Burt suggests elsewhere, we cannot necessarily make any assumptions about animal subjectivity or interiority from such images; agency registers here as ‘a play between the surface of bodies’, made visible and tangible by film’s capacity to focus on what McHugh describes as ‘embodiment, surfaces, and exteriority’.48 Yet this image of nonhuman, nonheteronormative exchange works against the logic of industrialised farming, a biopolitical process that relies upon the strict imposition of norms on the (sexual) behaviour of animals as part of a broader system of extreme objectification that seeks to deny any animal agency.49 In placing emphasis on an instance of same-sex intimacy between pigs, the film momentarily subverts the industrial meat complex’s reification of life and regulation of intraspecies sex, and allows for recognition of the queer agency of pigs. This space of non(re)productive intimacy (between pigs, between human and pig), enunciated upon the threshold of the visible, challenges the otherwise relentless movement of animal capital enacted by the industrialised farming process, causing this movement to stutter in a moment of queer excess that connects with the film’s foregrounding of questions of surplus and waste. As Maxime explicitly frames his erotic attachments as non-phallic, the film implicitly reframes his affective connection to the pigs in terms of a potential subversion of what Jacques Derrida calls ‘carno-phallogocentrism’, or a dominant logic of ‘carnivorous virility’.50 Though remaining unseen, this queer flickering of noncarno-phallogocentric intimacy across species lines momentarily offers a glimpse of a mode of ‘being-with’, as Derrida puts it, beyond the (re)productive norms of agribusiness’s investment in animal capital.51 And all this is mediated by the hallucinatory images of Maxime and the pig in bed. Maxime’s nakedness, the interlocking of limbs and the disjunctive editing allow for a degree of visual ambiguity that renders human– 213

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

animal divisions indistinct. It is not clear if the pig in bed is male or female. By permitting such ambiguities to reside around the gender of Maxime’s porcine partner, the scene enacts a further queering of human–pig relations, opening another space of porcine agency and cross-species intimacy that takes place outside the heteronormative, carno-phallogocentric regime of pig production. At the same time, it is not clear if the pig is alive or dead. The possibility that the pig may be dead limits the claims that can be made here for the animal as agent within this cross-species exchange.52 Yet, though the status of the pig is unstable, this oneiric sequence offers a poetic reimagining of cross-species relationality, animating something radically other to the generalised system of reification at stake in the film. In suggesting forms of cross-species affinities and intimacies, Le Tacon’s film renews ways of seeing and reinvigorates forms of attunement to the ‘livingness’ of coexisting, co-constitutive beings in contact.53 While Le Cochon represses the identificatory lure of the pig, Cochon qui s’en dédit positively invites it. These moments of cross-species intimacy and identification are figured in surreal terms, as hallucinatory surplus to the capitalist instrumentalisation of both human and pig. While Le Cochon affirms a masculine community that coalesces around the flayed body of a sow, masculinity is problematised in Cochon qui s’en dédit, as the film figures a zone of ‘becoming-animal’ and a queer crossing of gender and species borderlines. As we have seen, Le Tacon’s film also creates space for a consideration of nonhuman, nonheteronormative agency. Here the carno-phallogocentric identities of both human and pig are radically destabilised and opened up to another. In line with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the anthropological machine as an optical device that produces the human through a dynamic of recognition and difference, Le Cochon qui s’en dédit reminds us of the ways in which the moving image constructs and destabilises species identities, both animal and human.54 In each of these examples, pigs are cinematically figured as threshold beings around which speciesist boundaries are both articulated and redrawn. While the TOPIGS video functions via a double logic of animal rendering, instrumentalising the pig as both ‘a carnal and a symbolic currency’, the two documentaries examined here re-envisage the pig within biopolitical regimes of representation, either through a refusal of the invisibility of death – as in Le Cochon – or through a resistance to the reification of life – as in Cochon qui s’en dédit.55 Yet the TOPIGS video more readily represents our genetically modified present and the relentless contemporary movement of transnational animal capital; indeed, the ‘intensification and globalization of the pork industry’ has contributed to the disappearance of the small-scale practices documented by Le Cochon and even Cochon qui s’en dédit.56 In the context of the global trafficking of porcine life, the asymmetrical power relations of slaughter and the biopolitics of agribusiness, the destabilising force of the documentaries explored here may seem minimal. However, through a durational attentiveness that gestures to the entwined material histories of animal and film in Le Cochon, and through a reimagining of cross-species relationality and an opening to porcine agency in Cochon qui s’en dédit, these documentaries 214

Screening Pigs

allow for counterhegemonic lines of porcine resistance to be traced within cinema’s relation to animal capital. Such examples suggest a transformative focus on the place of the pig both on screen and off, inviting broader reflection on the role played by moving images in the (re)framing of species being.57

Notes 1. See http://www.thepigsite.com/video/single/128/. 2. Following Michel Foucault, biopolitics is understood here as the biological regularisation of life as species or population, in contrast to the disciplining of individual bodies associated with ‘anatomo-politics’. See Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey, eds Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 243. 3. Brett Mizelle, Pig (London: Reaktion, 2011), pp. 120–2. 4. Susan McHugh, ‘Clever Pigs, Failing Piggeries’, Antennae vol. 12 (Spring 2010), p. 19. 5. Jonathan Burt, ‘Morbidity and Vitalism: Derrida, Bergson, Deleuze and Animal Film Imagery’, Configurations vol. 14, nos 1–2 (2006), p. 167. 6. Florence Maillard briefly compares and contrasts Le Cochon (‘beautiful’; ‘simple’) and Cochon qui s’en dédit (‘nauseous’; ‘a living nightmare’). See Maillard, ‘Porcherie’, Cahiers du cinéma vol. 664 (2011), p. 64. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. 7. Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion, 2002), p. 31. 8. On considering meat animals in particular as (social) agents, see Susan McHugh, ‘The Fictions and Futures of Farm Animals: Semi-living to “Animalacra” Pig Tales’, in Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), pp. 163–209. McHugh emphasises ‘a sense of social power as irreducible to the human subject form’, underlining the importance of decoupling ‘the concept of agency (the social movement or impact attributed to an agent of social power) from identity (the humanist form of subjectivity through which an agent is understood to have a history, in the broadest sense)’ (p. 13). 9. Ibid., p. 14. 10. Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p. 90. 11. Ibid., p. 100. 12. Ibid., p. 104. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., p. 45. 15. Ibid., p. 12. Shukin gestures productively to the question of animal agency, yet this question remains relatively underdeveloped: I can only point to the importance of also developing histories of animal agency. For the rendering of animal capital is surely first contested by animals themselves, who neither ‘live unhistorically’ nor live with the historical passivity regularly attributed to them. (ibid., p. 130) 215

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

16. Ibid., pp. 103, 51. 17. As Shukin points out, this sequestering extends to the containment (and neutralisation) of the smells and sounds of slaughter too (ibid., p. 63). 18. Ibid. 19. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 241. 20. Jackie Stacey, The Cinematic Life of the Gene (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 11. 21. Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs includes a similar scene, meticulously documenting the slaughter of a pig held down by a group of farmers. 22. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, ‘A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in Nineteenth-century France’, in Lawrence R. Schehr and Allen S. Weiss (eds), French Food: On the Table, On the Page and in French Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 40. 23. John Berger, ‘Why Look at Animals?’, in About Looking (London, Berlin and New York: Bloomsbury, 1980), p. 7. 24. Rémi Fontanel, ‘Cochon (Le)’, in Antoine de Baecque (ed.), Le Dictionnaire Eustache (Paris: Léo Scheer, 2011), p. 67. 25. Shukin, Animal Capital, p. 227. Shukin borrows the term ‘imagined community’ from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 26. Akira Mizuta Lippit, ‘The Death of an Animal’, Film Quarterly vol. 56 no.1 (2002), p. 10; Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 165, 163. 27. Shukin, Animal Capital, p. 95. 28. Ibid., pp. 89–92. 29. Fontanel compares the careful gestures of the farmers – measuring the length of the intestines, folding and cutting – to those of a film editor. As such, ‘[t]he flesh of the film and the flesh of the pig end up resembling one another …’ (Fontanel, ‘Cochon (Le)’, p. 67). 30. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 277, cited in Shukin, Animal Capital, p. 8. 31. André Bazin, ‘Death Every Afternoon’, trans. Mark A. Cohen, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), p. 30. 32. Shukin, Animal Capital, p. 96. 33. I am grateful to Jackie Stacey for this suggestion. For a fascinating reading of meat as a radically unstable signifier, see Rosemary Deller, ‘Dead Meat: Feeding at the Anatomy Table of Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds’, Feminist Theory vol. 12 no. 3 (2011), pp. 241–61. 34. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2003), p. 23. 35. Burt, for example, critiques a tendency in philosophical thought (by Jacques Derrida among others) to configure the animal in deathly, melancholy terms. See ‘Morbidity and Vitalism’. 216

Screening Pigs

36. Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory, 20th edn (New York: Continuum), p. 29. 37. Shukin, Animal Capital, p. 227. 38. Patrick Leboutte and Jean-Louis Le Tacon, ‘De l’art et du cochon’ (filmed discussion) (2010), Cochon qui s’en dédit DVD extras, Editions Montparnasse (Le geste cinématographique). 39. Ibid. 40. Vincent Jourdan, ‘Cochon qui s’en dédit de Jean-Louis Le Tacon’ (date unknown), http://www.kinok.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=502:critique-dvd-cochon-qui-sen-dedit-de-jean-louis-le-tacon&catid=34:chroniques-dvd. 41. Adam Lowenstein, ‘Films without a Face: Shock Horror in the Cinema of Georges Franju’, Cinema Journal vol. 37 no. 4 (1998), pp. 37–58. 42. See Anat Pick, ‘Scientific Surrealism in the Films of Georges Franju and Frederic Wiseman’, in Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 131–50. 43. Jean-Louis Le Tacon in Leboutte and Le Tacon, ‘De l’art et du cochon’. Though not mentioned by Le Tacon during this discussion, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile/Pigsty (1969) also seems a possible influence. 44. Shukin, Animal Capital, p. 51. 45. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, pp. 251–2. 46. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), p. 323. 47. Burt, ‘Morbidity and Vitalism’. p. 169. 48. Burt, Animals in Film, p. 31; McHugh, Animal Stories, p. 12. 49. This is complicated, though, by the possibility that this is a scene of tail-biting – an example of (pathological) behaviour that can occur among intensively farmed pigs. Read in these terms, the scene of contact between the two sows, framed erotically by the voiceover, functions as a fantasy image through which the film disavows the suffering of the pigs. I would suggest, however, that the possibility of reading this scene in terms of queer porcine agency remains, and that these readings coexist in tension. (My thanks to Brian Brock for prompting me to think further about the role of fantasy in this film.) 50. Jacques Derrida, ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject’, trans. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, in Derrida, Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 280. 51. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 10. 52. Such questions also arise, for example, in Kira O’Reilly’s performance piece, inthewrongplaceness (2005–9), in which she enacts a slow dance with a dead pig. 53. On the ‘co-constitution’ of ‘embodied cross-species sociality’, see Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 4.

217

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

54. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 26–7. 55. Shukin, Animal Capital, p. 88. 56. Mizelle, Pig, p. 80. 57. I am grateful to the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland for a grant that enabled research for this chapter to be carried out.

218

Anat Pick

13 Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt From the beginning, we have no doubt that an enclosing world is present, out of which each animal cuts its dwelling-world. As superficial appearance teaches us, each animal encounters in its dwelling-world certain objects with which it has a closer or more distant relationship. Jakob von Uexküll1 A system does not regulate everything. It is a bait for something. Robert Bresson2

This essay explores the idea of cinematic dwelling-worlds in which human and nonhuman animal lives unfold. Linking Bazinian realism to the biological theory of Jakob von Uexküll, in particular his concept of Umwelt, I argue that cinema’s framing of different lives can be profoundly zoomorphic. Bazin was struck by life’s sheer diversity and formal inventiveness. Both at the level of form and at the level of perspective, Bazinian realism is non-anthropocentric. I call this ‘zoomorphic realism’, by which I mean cinema’s aptitude for showing the creaturely universes, or ‘life-worlds’3 of human and nonhuman beings. The most direct expression of Bazin’s creaturely imagination is, as a number of commentators have shown, his interest in (and love of) animals.4 But films with no animals are still zoomorphic if they treat the human world as part of nature: embedded in materiality, subject to the forces that govern and modify human life. Italian neorealism, for Bazin, achieved this particularly well since neorealist films pertained to both the material and historical/social forces that engulf human existence. Another Bazinian favourite, early scientific cinema, pioneered new cinematographic technologies and allowed viewers to glimpse creatures and worlds unavailable to the naked human eye. The 1903 Cheese Mites, for instance, was more than a microcinematographic sensation; it made possible a new understanding of the concept of ‘life’. Both neorealism and scientific cinema, then, are examples of a zoomorphic, creaturely cinema. If elsewhere I approached creatureliness and cinematic realism as universalising principles that acknowledge the vulnerability and perishablity of all living bodies, whether human or not, my purpose here

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

is different.5 I am interested in films that engage with interior animal worlds, rendered, as far as possible, from the perspective of the creature itself. Zoomorphic realism, then, asserts the multiplicity and situatedness of worlds. It does not, by definition, aspire to some otherworldly objectivity that subsumes particular worlds under the single entity of Nature. It aims to explore the meaning of the perceptual, behavioural and ontological specificities of life by observing animals’ subjective experience, and reflecting on the ethical stakes of such radical biodiversity. To move from one definition of realism to the other, from realism as external law to the ‘inner real’6 of the individual animal, I explore two different cinematic dwelling-worlds: Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956), and Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s insect documentary Microcosmos (1996). Under the rubric of zoomorphic realism, each bio-cinematic enclosure raises questions about what it means for a being to have a world. As Uexküll’s philosophical biology suggests, there is no living being without a world, and no world that does not correspond to the being that inhabits it. Uexküll named the relationship between an animal and its environment Umwelt, a concept that speaks not only to film theory, especially realism, but also to our thinking about animal, by which I also mean human, life on screen.

Zoomorphic realism In one of the most beautiful passages in ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ André Bazin provides what some would regard as a credulous reading of the image: The aesthetic qualities of photography are to be sought in its power to lay bare the realities. It is not for me to separate off, in the complex fabric of the objective world, here a reflection on a damp sidewalk, there a gesture of a child. Only the impassive lens, stripping its object of all those ways of seeing it, those piled-up preconceptions, that spiritual dust and grime with which my eyes have covered it, is able to present it in all its virginal purity to my attention and consequently to my love.7

Three key concerns of cinematic realism emerge in the passage: the supposed objectivity of the external world, the ‘scrupulous indifference’,8 as Bresson described it, of the camera’s ‘impassive lens’ that can ‘lay bare the realities’, and the filmmaker’s (and subsequently the viewer’s) subjective investment in images, the mystifications of something like ideology – habits, belief systems, personal histories and so on – that orient one’s ways of seeing. Realism, I want to suggest, purports to find in cinema (perhaps in art more generally) the formal interweaving of these perspectives. It asserts the reality of the world as a more-than-subjective projection while insisting on the situatedness of the real: reality as the relation between the world, the observer and the observing apparatus. 222

Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt

Bazin’s faith in images reflects his faith in reality, and in the notion that the image, by virtue of its ontology – its link with the world – can deepen our encounter with reality by wiping clean the ‘spiritual dust and grime’ of ideology. If ideology reduces the ‘complex fabric of the objective world’ in the service of one vested interest or another, Bazin’s view of cinema, despite its idealism, pays life’s complexity its dues. His realism avoids both a simply noumenal view of cinema’s ability to show things ‘as they are’, and a thoroughly subjectivist one that submits cinema to the whims of industry, technology or the auteur. As a number of recent reappraisals of Bazin have argued, a nuanced view of cinematic realism eschews strict indexicality.9 Realism emerges instead as a three-point (Trinitarian?) relation between the ‘photographer’s mind’, the ‘scene before the camera’ and the ‘photographic negative inside the camera’.10 As Raymond Durgnat explains in ‘The Negative Vision of Robert Bresson’, for Bazin, ‘the essence of photography is not some coldly objective camera-eye scrutinizing its subject from a distance, in a mechanistic or voyeuristic way. But neither is the artist’s subjectivity projected unto the world, in an anthropomorphic, fantasizing way’.11 The camera is not distant, detached, or objective; it is reactive, that is, in a continuum with the world it captures. Moreover, the subjective dimension of the triangular structure of film-maker–camera–world makes the encounter a passionate one: ‘Photography – or, more exactly, the “photorealism” that concerned Bazin – is a loving interaction, an amorous anxiety, about Creation’.12 Christianity infuses Bazin’s realism as a form of loving attention. Durgnat, in fact, designates Bazin’s theory ‘Christian realism’.13 Creation is observed amorously and anxiously – amorously, because, as the opening lines of Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1992) boldly declare, ‘Everything in the world began with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born’,14 anxiously, because the persistence of injustice and suffering reflect Creation’s fallenness and, to a Christian, the ‘ravages of God’s “Absences”’.15 ‘Bazin’s transcendentalism’, Durgnat claims, ‘is affirmative, but not optimistic’,16 which is one way of thinking about realism’s general orientation: sticking with the founding ‘yes’ of Creation without ignoring the tragedies and failures of material, social and political life. Christian realism speaks of a world empty of God where every object, no matter how small or insignificant, reverberates with God’s absence and becomes – or rather, the act of observing becomes – sacramental, a testament of love for the world, an assertion of that primordial yes. Yet, how many worlds are there? When Bazin writes that cinema ‘lays bare the realities’, in the plural, we can take this to mean slices, or parts, of reality captured in time. But ‘realities’ may alternatively suggest the copresence of different spatiotemporal worlds, and their corresponding film-worlds. In life, as in film, there is not one but a proliferation of worlds, since what a world is can be thought as a relationship between the perceiving being and the world it perceives. There is, then, the world (space-time) of the dog, of the beetle or of the human being, which cinema can attune to and attempt to convey.

223

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Realism, like reality, is a construction and a point of view that denote a mode of involvement. As Francesco Casetti puts it: ‘for Bazin cinema’s realistic basis derives from the possibility of participation’.17 Bazin never said photorealism was the only way to understand the world. … Its relative ‘transparency’ was not ‘failure to edit,’ not ‘naïve realism,’ but an exploration, a showing-forth. It refrains, not from ‘artifice’ generally, but from certain habits of artifice.18

The world is not ‘out there’ to be captured by mechanical means. Reality is always artificial, or virtual, insofar as it is crafted between subject and object, not an entity but a procedure: the creative process of ‘showing-forth’ coauthored by subject and object. Understood in this way, realism designates an overcoming of the subject/object divide by alluding to it instead as a seamless continuum.

Umwelt and animal life A conception of worlds as the unfolding correspondences between subjects and their respective perceptual environments is at the heart of two, interrelated, scientific fields: the Umwelt theory of Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–1944), and biosemiotics.19 The German word Umwelt is thought to have been coined by the nineteenth-century Danish poet Jens Immanuel Baggesen and means ‘surrounding environment’. In Uexküll’s use, the term indicates the totality or network of relations between an animal and its environment. The Umwelt is not the objective world an animal inhabits; it is made up of those elements within the animal’s perceptual field that are intelligible to it and constitute what Uexküll refers to as the animal’s ‘functional cycle’.20 Most of Uexküll’s work was devoted to the problem of how living beings subjectively perceive their environment and how this perception determines their behavior. In the book Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Environment and Inner World of Animals, 1909) he introduced the term ‘Umwelt’ to denote the subjective (subjectivized, meaningful) world of an organism.21

As Brett Buchanan explains in Onto-Ethologies (2008), Uexküll wanted to distinguish biology from physics and chemistry by moving from invariable, general laws to the individual organism. In so doing, he positioned himself against Darwin’s mechanistic view of life that sees nature as operating causally on chance mutations. Through natural selection, successful mutations survive by passing on their genes, while others die out. This view reveals nature as essentially planless. Uexküll was troubled by what he saw as the implicit nihilism of the Darwinian position, and argued instead for a teleological view of nature. Instead of focusing solely on the accidental evolutionary mechanism of natural selection, Uexküll 224

Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt

turned his attention to particular animals as subjects whose behaviour, he claimed, is not strictly mechanistic. By exploring an organism’s subjective interplay with its environment Uexküll was able to argue a number of points: nature, perceived as a single object that functions according to physical law, does not exist, since, as Kant’s second Copernican revolution suggested, there is no world outside of the subject who perceived it.22 Next, Uexküll insists that not only humans but animals too are active perceivers of their world. An animal’s perceptual world is hermetically sealed – Uexküll likens it to a soap bubble23 – but some Umwelten touch and overlap. Umwelten can be simple or complex, but the organism in each case both receives and acts upon environmental signs – this is the semiotic principle which Uexküll believes sustains living systems – endowing the Umwelt with meaning. ‘Each environment’, Uexküll writes in A Theory of Meaning, ‘forms a self-enclosed unit, which is governed in all its parts by its meaning for the subject’.24 Uexküll’s most famous example is the female tick, whose Umwelt is minimalist (she is deaf and blind and her world consists of the senses of smell of butyric acid from a mammal’s sweat, of temperature, which allows the tick to recognise the mammal’s warm body, and touch, with which she feels her way to a convenient spot where she can burrow and drink the mammal’s blood).25 The tick’s Umwelt does not exist outside of this exclusive relationship. Though simple, in her Umwelt the tick must engage in the exchanging of meaningful signs with the surrounding environment; the tick and her surroundings together create meaning (or function) and so are mutually conversant in a kind of ‘duet’. Uexküll makes even the unpopular tick’s world seem worthy. In The Open: Man and Animal (2004), Agamben calls Uexküll’s writing on the tick ‘a highpoint of modern antihumanism’.26 In her imperviousness to elements in her immediate area that mean something to other animal species (including the taste of blood, which the tick does not notice), the tick’s world may seem, as Heidegger would have it, deprived. And yet, ‘[T]he example of the tick clearly shows the general structure of the environment proper to all animals’.27 In his 1929–30 lectures The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, Heidegger defined animals as ontologically ‘poor in world’.28 Poverty in world (Weltarmut) consists for Heidegger in the animal’s ‘captivation’ (Benommenheit) by those meaningful perceptual cues that furnish its Umwelt.29 The animal is caught up in its environmental relations, which in turn remain concealed from its grasp. By contrast, humans are free to access their world and be ‘world-forming’ (weltbildend). The animal is absorbed in its environment, while Dasein stands apart, taking in the world and actively shaping it. Thus, the world qua world is never given to animals as it is to man; it is as if animals melt into their surroundings, whose discrete beings are never disclosed. To a lizard sunning itself on a rock, the rock is given as a ‘lizard-thing’, but ‘is not accessible to it as a rock’.30 The animal is in the world without this world ever being revealed to it. This is the animal’s essential poverty. Heidegger takes his cue from Uexküll, who insists on the internal wholeness of 225

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

animal worlds.31 For Heidegger and Uexküll alike, worlds are not hierarchically organised, some richer than others, but are intrinsically complete (which, incidentally, supports new ways of thinking about disabilities, not as diminished states, but as environmental relationships in their own right). But in finding the lizard deprived of the relation to the rock as a rock, all Heidegger shows is that the lizard does not participate in the human Umwelt. Heidegger may reject humanism, but he remains anthropocentric. In the tick’s case, worldly confinement is even harsher. What is most heartrending in Uexküll’s description of the tick’s Umwelt is how unshareable and cut off it is from other animal worlds.32 As Buchanan puts it, The moon, weather, birds, noises, leaves, shadows, and so forth do not matter to the tick. They may belong to the Umwelt of other organisms that live in the midst of the tick, but they do not carry any meaning for the tick itself. The external world (Welt) is as good as nonexistent, as are the general surroundings (Umgebung) of the organism. Both are theoretical references to contrast with the meaningful world of the Umwelt. What does matter to the tick, however, is the sensory perception of heat and sweat from a warm-blooded animal, on which the female tick feeds, lays its eggs, and dies.33

‘The Umwelt might be considered akin to a microcosm’,34 and since each unit is ‘meant for’ a particular animal, there is not just one but multiple animal worlds. Together these Umwelten form a weblike edifice Uexküll compares to a symphonic orchestration. Although self-contained, the Umwelten of organisms are therefore not simply closed spheres, as if locking the organism within a self-concealed and isolated container. The animal is not an object or entity, but a symphony underscored by rhythms and melodious reaching outward for greater accompaniment. Individual Umwelten are necessarily enmeshed with one another through a variety of relationships that create a harmonious whole.35

Uexküll’s biological theory of meaning and his musical analogy resist the clichés about nature’s indifference because animal worlds are internally and externally linked through biosemiotic processes, the exchanging of meaningful signs, that are mutually non-indifferent and harmonious. Every element in a living system is described by Uexküll as a ‘carrier of meaning’.36 Both the organism and its surrounding objects assume their identities in their formative relations to one another. Outside of the relationship an object has no meaning, and neither does the organism. ‘When framed in this way’, writes Buchanan, ‘an organism is never just one’,37 since it depends on its environmental counterparts for its identity. The Umwelt is thus radically intersubjective. Indeed, Buchanan suggests that Uexküll’s is ‘an intersubjective theory of nature’,38 making 226

Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt

him, perhaps, biology’s Levinas. While essentially meaning-carrying (so nonindifferent), worlds are also separate and, in this sense, lonely. And loneliness, too, is not indifferent. Uexküll’s insistence on the melodious arrangement of worlds and his efforts to render visible for us the variety of animal Umwelten – in Georg Kriszat’s charming illustrations in Foray – convey the urge to overcome solitude as neither just human or animal, but as if inherent in nature itself. Uexküll removes the ‘dust and grime’, as Bazin put it, of anthropocentrism that sees the world solely through human eyes. As will become clear in the following section, Umwelt works well to encapsulate the various discrete environments that films depict, from prison’s carceral space in Bresson’s A Man Escaped to the populous undergrowth in Nuridsany and Pérennou’s Microcosmos. But Umwelt does much more than this. Cinematic Umwelten open our eyes and minds to the variety and expressiveness of animal lives. Living systems, then, are inherently cultural. They give rise to variations in behaviour, new forms of expression, new relational trajectories. We think of animals as belonging to nature, and of people as cultural beings. But life as a biosemiotic process links the ‘natural’ existence of animals to the ‘cultural’ life of humans and makes difficult, even untenable, the distinction between nature and culture. One way of approaching the Umwelt cinematically is, as I have briefly sketched out, in the context of zoomorphic realism. Another is through the notion of framing, since the Umwelt is a demarcation within which each animal lives. Umwelten, then, tell the framed life stories of creatures, and, like films (documentary or fiction), raise questions about the possibility of really entering and understanding other lives. Just like film, Uexküll’s Umwelt seeks to ‘unlock the gates into previously forbidden worlds, all the while retaining the closed bubble intact’.39

A show of hands: A Man Escaped and Microcosmos Whoever wants to hold on to the conviction that all living things are only machines should abandon all hope of glimpsing their environments.40

Uexküll’s biology ‘seeks to transform our understanding of the animal away from its traditional interpretation as a soulless machine, vacuous object, or dispassionate brute’,41 and no part of the animal kingdom is considered more mechanical, more brutish and dispassionate than the feared (and admired) class of insects.42 Microcosmos, whose very title references the Umwelt, explores the desire to enter and find meaning in the worlds of these bewildering arthropods. I turn to the lives of insects in Microcosmos by way of juxtaposition with an altogether different cinematic Umwelt: the enclosed, cellular world of A Man Escaped. As a locus of meaning, I focus on the dexterous use of limbs – hands and legs – by the films’ human and insect protagonists. Each film, I want to suggest, revolves around the semiotic processes particular to its animal subject, and each 227

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

presents the viewer with a different interpretive challenge. Fontaine’s (François Leterrier) actions in A Man Escaped unfold in an ostensibly mechanistic, flattened world, devoid of deep psychology and the conventions used to express it (narrative suspense, dialogue, facial expressions, character acting). In Microcosmos the situation is reversed: insects are depicted as characters in a multidimensional world with all the adornments of a Hollywood drama. The tension between mechanistic and nonmechanistic conceptions of life, between physiology and phenomenology, underpins both films whose respective interiors are similarly constricted. What exactly do Microcosmos and A Man Escaped have in common? In what sense can they be said to share a worldview, and where, in Bazin’s terms, lies their common realism? A Man Escaped is the first (and most successful) of Bresson’s ‘prison cycle’ films (followed by Pickpocket [1959], and The Trial of Joan of Arc [1962]). The plot of A Man Escaped is rudimentary: captured, imprisoned and condemned to death by the occupying German forces, Fontaine, a member of the French Resistance, plans his escape. The film follows his daily preparations in his cell and ends with Fontaine and his cellmate Jost (Charles Le Clainche) escaping to freedom. Significantly, the film’s title foretells the outcome: we know Fontaine will escape. The French title is even more deterministic: Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le Vent souffle où il veut (A Man Condemned to Death Escapes: The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth).43 With sparse dialogue, the film focuses on Fontaine’s concrete tasks: filing away at the wooden planks of his cell door, fashioning a rope out of ripped clothing, making metal hooks out of pieces of wire and a metal frame and so on. Like the rest of Bresson’s oeuvre, A Man Escaped is most often interpreted as an allegory of human salvation and divine grace. Given the deterministic contours of its film-world, A Man Escaped rehearses the theological conundrum of grace and freedom central to the tradition of Jansenist and Pascalian readings of Bresson. Bresson famously rejected psychological realism – he did not aspire to show people as they really act and interact but sought to reveal the mechanism behind any personal quirks. From his actors, whom he called ‘models’, Bresson demanded not expression but automation. ‘Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought.’ 44 Bresson spoke of the need to render acting as mechanical as possible: ‘It is not a matter of acting “simple” or of acting “inward”, he wrote, ‘but of not acting at all.’ 45 Susan Sontag thought, ‘Bresson is interested in the forms of spiritual action – in the physics, as it were, rather than the psychology of souls. Why persons behave as they do is, ultimately, not to be understood.’ 46 The reality Bresson, a Catholic with Jansenist leanings, wants to acknowledge is a spiritual one. To represent it cinematically he needs to get rid of psychological trimmings and the idea that individuals are the proper authors of their fate. Liberation in A Man Escaped, Sontag suggests, is not the achievement of a strong personal will, but, on the contrary, of 228

Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt

A Man Escaped (Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le Vent souffle où il veut, 1956): a series of manual tasks on the way to freedom

Fontaine’s abdication of personality in favour of the series of menial tasks that make up the narrative. Free will is even more harshly repudiated in Bresson’s later work, from Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967) onward. Will seems to play itself out in the lives of individual beings on behalf of an impersonal mechanism. A Man Escaped may therefore be nothing more or less than the dramatic unfolding, the fulfilment, of a mechanism whose outcome is fixed. All of Bresson’s protagonists, for better or worse, adhere to this formula. They act out the permutations of a mechanism to which they willingly or otherwise give themselves up but which they do not control. This accounts for the psychological vacuum in Bresson, the sense that the people we watch are marionettes rather than autonomous agents. Time and again, Bresson forgoes personality for objectivity, placing people and objects on an equal plain, on the surface of reality, subjecting them to chance and the laws of matter. And yet by remaining at the material surface of things, Bresson, in a negative move, intimates the spiritual. Brian Price challenges this theological orthodoxy of Bresson criticism. In Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics (2011), Price pursues a politicised reading that links Bresson to the Surrealist movement, left politics and anti-clericalism to recover the revolutionary undercurrents in Bresson’s work. This rereading is particularly provocative in the prison films that feature criminals and criminality as modes of resistance: 229

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

If we take seriously the criminal dimension of A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, we can see that crime is not a prelude to religious conversion. Rather, it is the beginning of a revolutionary conception of crime presented in the most incendiary of all forms.47

Price is interested in the traces in Bresson’s work of Surrealism’s ‘antisocial’ impulses and its refashioning of the world through ‘radical juxtaposition’.48 Ordinary objects, like a spoon, a sheet or a pencil are perceived anew by Fontaine and become, not the instruments of spiritual salvation, but tools of escape. Through the use of radical juxtaposition, Bresson instructs viewers in techniques of flight. ‘A Man Escaped’, says Price, ‘is best understood … as a long and virtuosic display of how objects in prison can be transformed – how matter can be altered – and thus how one’s fortune can be altered.’49 The alteration of matter and reinvention of objects through radical juxtaposition is part of Surrealism’s interest in perceptual possibilities and the creation of alternative worlds. This is equally true of Uexküll’s Umwelt. According to Uexküll, the organism and its surroundings must enter into a ‘contrapuntal’ relationship as if engaged in a ‘two-part duet’.50 Uexküll’s formulations even assume a surrealist flavor: ‘It is this idea of contrapuntal harmony that lets Uexküll call the flower beelike and the bee flowerlike, or the spider flylike, and the tick mammalike.51 When, in one sequence, Fontaine remakes the spoon into a chisel with which he files away at his cell door, Fontaine encounters the spoon contrapuntally: the spoon is no longer an eating utensil for scooping up food; its primary quality is its ‘chiselness’. The cell itself becomes an Umwelt: Fontaine’s biosemiotic enclosure. In it, objects are carriers of meaning for the organism and so do not exist outside of their relationship with it. ‘Every subject’, writes Uexküll, ‘spins out, like the spider’s threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence’.52 The prison cell, therefore, is an Umwelt, but only if one takes it to mean something more than a confining, captive space. The Umwelt, writes Jean-Christophe Bailly in The Animal Side (2011), designates the open network of possibilities around every body of behavior, the skein that every animal forms for itself by winding itself into the world according to its means, with its nervous system, its senses, its shape, its tools, its mobility.53

Fontaine’s cell is, paradoxically, a space of creative abundance. Bresson’s austere, minimalist style and use of montage (fragmentation of bodies and spaces, close-ups of objects and hands) form the system of vital relations within which things are highlighted according to their functional compatibility with the perceiving organism. In Fontaine’s world, a spoon is illuminated while a Bible fades into the background. The spoon, not the Holy Book, is what Fontaine needs to carry out his plan. Bresson’s cropped frames, elimination of spatial context, and use of high contrast shadows and light disclose objects in their luminous specificity and continuity 230

Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt

with the subject. What looks like determinism, in the title’s foregone conclusion, is, in the Uexküllian sense, a purposeful and functional structure. Knowing Fontaine will succeed provides the film-world with directionality, and colours (or, in Uexküll’s musical language, ‘tones’) objects in just the right way so that in encountering one another, Fontaine and his objects achieve contrapuntal harmony.54 After Orsini’s (Jacques Ertaud) failed escape, he cautions Fontaine: ‘my rope broke at the second wall. You’ll need hooks.’ Fontaine replies: ‘What hooks? How? What with?’ Orisni whispers back: ‘The frame of your lamp.’ At this, Bresson cuts to Fontaine’s face in profile as he looks up, then to a point-of-view shot of the light on the wall above. The lamp no longer has a lighting ‘tone’ but a ‘metalwork’ tone. With his new perception of the lamp, Fontaine will disassemble its frame and make hooks for his rope. On receiving a parcel from home with clothes, blankets and jam, Fontaine exclaims: ‘What resources!’ But rather than eat or change out of his bloodstained shirt, Fontaine tears the clothes into strips and says in voiceover: ‘Tant pis! Il fallait’ (Too bad. I had to). Read in light of Fontaine’s successful escape, filmic objects take on meaning as instruments of flight. Knowing Fontaine as ‘the being who flees’, we enter into his Umwelt and see through his eyes. Could we not say, moreover, that in his relation to objects, Fontaine (like Uexküll’s flowers and bees) becomes spoonlike, hooklike, or ropelike? I am not suggesting that Bresson has made an overtly Uexküllian film. As a critical framework, however, Umwelt theory strives to resolve questions of both physical (mechanistic) and metaphysical (transcendental) determinism that are at the heart of Bresson’s film. The Umwelt helps identify Fontaine’s constructive relation to objects as world-forming. Most significantly, the Umwelt sheds a different light on Fontaine’s creatureliness and Bresson’s antihumanism, not least when compared to the cinematic Umwelt of Microcosmos. Subtitled The People of the Grass, Microcosmos is structured as day-in-a-life of insects living in the underbrush of a French meadow. Instead of showing extraordinary or unusual insects in high-thrill situations of predation and mating typical of nature films, Microcosmos features extraordinary footage of everyday creatures doing everyday things. Unlike the growing body of spectacular nature documentaries (such as the BBC productions narrated by David Attenborough), Microcosmos contains no voiceover narration (save for two short excerpts that frame the film at both ends, reminiscent of storytellers in traditional fairytales). The film opens, not unlike David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), with aerial shots of clouds and the meadow. This is the world as we know it. As the camera glides down into the undergrowth, the dimensions of the world shift and adjust to the detail and size of insect life. Uexküll notes the ‘possibility of making visible processes that are too quick for our human time-speed, such as the beating of bird’s or an insect’s wings’, using slow-motion cinematography. ‘Just as slow motion slows down the processes of motion, so does time-lapse photography accelerate them’.55 For their own foray into the world of insects, Nuridsany and Pérennou relied on advanced cinematography.56 In a series of set pieces shot outdoors and in the studio 231

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

we see bees, wasps, spiders, caterpillars, beetles, mosquitoes, ants (as well as a pair of snails) whose behaviour belies the conventional view of insects as alien and efficient machines. Splendid displays of colours and shapes accompany actions that seem skilful, tender or playful. The similarities between Microcosmos and A Man Escaped are not merely cosmetic, not simply a case of the former being a miniature of the latter. Nor is it the fact that Nuridsany and Pérennou cite Bresson as one of their main inspirations.57 Compare Fontaine’s exploits to a key scene in Microcosmos, in which a dung beetle (also known as the sacred scarab or Scarabaeus sacer) struggles to free a dung ball impaled on a thorn. In what way does the beetle resemble Fontaine? The protagonists in both films – a beetle and a man – undertake a physical task, solving a problem that requires dexterity, attention and effort, whose final objective concerns the question of freedom. In both films, liberty and bondage are not only concrete but broadly philosophical predicaments. Microcosmos raises questions about the possibility of insect agency: is the beetle free to determine its actions? To what extent does ‘it’ exercise judgment? Are the scarab’s actions conscious or merely reflexive? What do we know of the beetle’s interior world? These questions pertain just as well to Fontaine. The beetle is subject to the physical laws of matter. Yet while we know, or think we know, that this creature is too simple to experience its struggle in existential terms, still we see it try out different angles, persisting in its mission. However strong the urge to explain what we see as strictly mechanistic, there remains ‘visible’ an interior zone of the animal perceiving, acting and reacting, from the inside out, as it were, taking heed and responding, ‘thinking’ the environment it functionally inhabits. ‘It’s really moving’, Nuridsany explains on the DVD interview, watching this animal proving intelligence isn’t just linked to the number of neurons. He considers all sorts of possible solutions, tries them out and fails, until he finds the one that solves his problem. To see such an insignificant little animal, maybe not thinking, but trying all these different solutions is something really moving.58

Uexküll insisted that organisms, including beetles and ticks and down to individual cells, are not machines but ‘machine operators’, since their actions cannot be explained solely as reflexes: Everywhere, it is the case of machine operators and not of machines, for all the individual cells of the reflex arc act by transfer of stimuli, not by a transfer movement. But a stimulus has to be noticed [gemerkt] by the subject and does not appear at all in objects.59

Microcosmos turns insects, whom Nuridsany describes as those ‘little figurines with impassive masks’, into affecting characters. Nuridsany and Pérennou stress 232

Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt

Microcosmos: Le Peuple de l’herbe (1996): the scarab beetle in a series of physical tasks freeing the dung ball

that actions are filmed ‘practically in real time’, without special effects, and that charges of anthropomorphism are misguided: those who consider anthropomorphism to be such a crime are seriously wrong. To talk about animals saying they have nothing to do with us is a huge mistake. Anthropomorphism – attributing human characteristics to animals based on excessive comparison – is often confused with the parallels you can draw between two different animals.60

At times Microcosmos plays like a comedy of worlds (as when, in one studio scene, ants gather around a drop of water like sheep around a pond). In the scarab sequence, dramatic and emotional tension issues from the unravelling of beetle being, so different yet also similar to ours. The scarab’s Sisyphean battle is not the product of false or excessive humanising. Unlike the heavily edited animal films Bazin disliked, in which editing fabricates behaviour, Microcosmos reveals actions that take place in the continuity of space and time.61 A Man Escaped and Microcosmos are examples of zoomorphic realism. What strikes us as dehumanisation in Bresson has the reverse, humanising, effect in Microcosmos. The cinematic gesture is opposed – invoking mechanicity in Bresson, allaying it in Microcosmos – but the result is the same. In both films, the contours of an Umwelt, its coming into being as a subjective engagement between the living being and the objects around it, challenge anthropocentric conceits rooted in reductive human and nonhuman ontologies. 233

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Two orders of dehumanisation are at work in A Man Escaped. The colloquial dehumanisation of prisoners by the Vichy authorities is conventionally negative, but it does not interest Bresson very much. The film’s own dehumanising procedures are positive: they strip Fontaine of empty humanist tropes (the ‘triumph of the human spirit’ or the ‘human condition’) and place him in a unique, worldly relation with objects. Fontaine’s powers are exercised within the coordinates of his world whether determined by God or by Nature or, in Spinoza’s parallelism, Godor-Nature.62 Either way, Fontaine – like every living being on earth – exists between law and freedom, between the system and variations of the system, in what Bailly calls ‘the undecidability between code and improvisation’: ‘if there is indeed a program, as has been claimed over and over, there is also interpretation’.63 This is what I take Bresson to mean when he says, in the epigraph to this essay, that a ‘system does not regulate everything’ but ‘is a bait for something’. Humanisation in Microcosmos neither makes the beetle more like us, nor subsumes his world under our gaze. Instead, the film asks what ‘like us’ might mean, when in evolutionary terms, it is we who are like the beetle rather than the other way around. Why is the scarab’s adventure less Sisyphean, than, say, Laurel and Hardy’s in The Music Box (1932)? Meaning is creature-specific, but meaning as such – the biosemiotic striving of organisms – is universal in nature. Microcosmos rejects the Heideggerian idea of animals’ poverty in world. It further asks that we loosen our grip over notions like joy, struggle or love as unique properties of the human Umwelt. My comparative reading of A Man Escaped and Microcosmos reveals that Bresson, and Nuridsany and Pérrenou share a single broad problematic: the unresolved tension between determinism and freedom, whether in relation to human or nonhuman animal life. As we glimpse the film-worlds before us, what appears, in art’s alchemical triumph, as open, only partly regulated systems, may yet be (as is evident in Bresson’s later work) the unwavering playing out of natural law.

Notes 1. Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. O’Neill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 139; hereafter Foray. 2. Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Copenhagen: Green Integer Books, 1997), p. 21. 3. Wendy Wheeler, The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2006), p. 110. The term ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt) comes from Husserl. 4. See Serge Daney, ‘The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and Animals)’, trans. Mark A. Cohen, in Ivone Margulies (ed.), Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 32–42; Jennifer Fay, ‘Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin’s Posthumanism’, Journal of Visual Culture vol. 7 (April 2008), 234

Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt

pp. 41–64; Seung-hoon Jeong, ‘Animals: An Adventure in Bazin’s Ontology’, in Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin (eds), Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 177–85; and my chapter ‘Cine-Zoos’, in Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 103–30. 5. Pick, Creaturely Poetics. 6. Dorion Sagan, ‘Introduction: Umwelt after Uexküll’, in Uexküll, Foray, pp. 1–34, 8. 7. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005 [1967]), pp. 9–16, 15. 8. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, p. 36. 9. See Tom Gunning, ‘Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality’, in Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöler (eds), Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Vienna: SYNEMA, 2012), pp. 42–60; Francesco Casetti, ‘Sutured Reality: Film, from Photographic to Digital’, trans. Daniel Leisawitz, October vol. 138 (Fall 2011), pp. 95–106; and Daniel Morgan, ‘Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics’, Critical Inquiry vol. 32 (Spring 2006), pp. 443–81. 10. Raymond Durgnat, ‘The Negative Vision of Robert Bresson’, in James Quandt (ed.), Robert Bresson (Toronto: Toronto International Film Festival Group, 1998), pp. 149, 411–51. 11. Ibid., p. 420. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., p. 421. 14. Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992 [1977]), p. 11. 15. Durgnat, ‘The Negative Vision of Robert Bresson’, p. 420. 16. Ibid., pp. 421–2. 17. Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema 1945–1995, trans. Francesca Chiosri and Elizabeth Gard Bartolini-Salimbeni, with Thomas Kelso (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 39. 18. Durgnat, ‘The Negative Vision of Robert Bresson’, p. 423, emphasis added. 19. Brett Buchanan writes lucidly on Uexküll’s biology and its significance for subsequent theorisations of life in continental philosophy in Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (New York: SUNY Press, 2008). On biosemiotics, see Jesper Hoffmeyer’s Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, trans. Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favareau (London: University of Scranton Press, 2008); and Wendy Wheeler (ed.), Biosemiotics: Nature/Culture/Science/Semiosis (Open Humanities Press, 2011), http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org/books/Biosemiotics. 20. Uexküll, Foray, p. 49. 21. Kalevi Kull, ‘Jakob von Uexküll: An Introduction’, in Wheeler, Biosemiotics, http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/kulljvu.pdf, p. 7. 235

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

22. On Kant’s ‘Copernican turn’ that shifts philosophical inquiry from objective reality to the conditions of subjective perception (which for Kant are transcendental or a priori), see, for example, Claire Colebrook’s Philosophy and Post-structuralist Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). See also Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, pp. 13–14. 23. Uexküll, Foray, p. 144. 24. Ibid., p. 144 25. Ibid., pp. 44–6. 26. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 45. 27. Ibid., p. 46. 28. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). See especially Part II, Chapter 3, pp. 185–200. 29. Ibid., pp. 246–53. 30. Ibid., p. 198. 31. Uexküll, Foray, p. 50 32. Ibid., pp. 44–5. 33. Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, p. 24. 34. Ibid., p. 23. 35. Uexküll, Foray, p. 144. 36. Ibid., p. 28. 37. Buchanan, Onto-Ethologies, p. 28. 38. Ibid., p. 29. 39. Ibid., p. 2. 40. Uexküll, Foray, p. 41. 41. Ibid., p. 2. 42. On insects as robotic or cybernetic systems, see Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 43. John 3: 8: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit.’ 44. Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, p. 32. 45. Ibid., p. 99. 46. Susan Sontag, ‘Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson’, in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell Publishing, 1969), pp. 181–98, 192. 47. Brian Price, Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 16. 48. Ibid., p. 25. 49. Ibid., p. 26. 50. Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics, p. 172. 51. Ibid., p. 172. See also Uexküll, Foray, p. 190. 236

Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt

52. Uexküll, Foray, p. 52. 53. Jean-Christophe Bailly, The Animal Side, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), p. 48. 54. On the tonality of things and the musicality of nature, see Uexküll, Foray, pp. 148, 185–9. 55. Uexküll, Foray, p. 71. 56. The technology took two years to develop. To capture the fluidity of movement from the insects’ perspective, the film-makers used a purpose-built robotic camera. Enhanced lights were needed for the studio shoots. The intense heat generated by the customised theatre lights required special filters to protect the tiny ‘actors’. Images were filmed at up to 500 frames per second then slowed down twenty times, enabling striking close-ups and detailed motion. Time-lapse sequences served to show the movement of plants. 57. Scott MacDonald, ‘Interview with Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’, in Adventures of Perception. Cinema as Exploration: Essays/Interviews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 184–98, 186–7. 58. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos: Entretien avec les réalisateurs, in Microcosmos: Le Peuple de l’herbe DVD (Arcades Video, 2003). 59. Uexküll, Foray, p. 46. 60. ‘Le Monde de Microcosmos’. 61. Bazin was especially critical of the films of Jean Tourane, whose animal protagonists had to keep still, their actions created by editing (and humanising props like hats or bow ties). In ‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’, Bazin writes that ‘the apparent action and the meaning we attribute to it do not exist … prior to the assembling of the film’ (44). Montage becomes ‘that abstract creator of meaning, which preserves the state of unreality demanded by the spectacle’ (45). For Bazin this faulty use of editing marks the difference between appropriate and inappropriate anthropomorphism. See Bazin, What Is Cinema?, vol. 1, pp. 41–52. 62. Along Spinozistic lines, the two realities are indistinguishable. Price’s countercultural reading of Bresson as political shifts emphasis from the dominant, supernatural preoccupations of Bresson criticism toward immanently social ones. Granted, rehashing religious interpretations of Bresson after reading Price feels a little complacent, but whether one reads Bresson as a transcendental or as a political filmmaker, his interest in systems and mechanisms, and their implications for freedom, remains key. 63. Bailly, The Animal Side, p. 54.

237

Cecilia Novero

14 Bear Images Human Performativity and Animal Touch in Grizzly Man Film within a film In Grizzly Man (2005) Werner Herzog edits and presents footage shot by Timothy Dexter while in the company of grizzly bears.1 In 2003, a grizzly killed Dexter – or ‘Treadwell’, a name he gave to himself – and his girlfriend Amy Hueguenard. Prior to his death Treadwell detailed in diaries the thireeen summers he spent in Alaska’s Katmai National Park from 1990. In the last five years (1998–2003) he also videotaped himself and his experiences. Grizzly Man uses Treadwell’s videotapes to bring him back to life. Herzog’s film frames this footage within a polyphony of other people’s voices: those of friends and family, bear experts, the two pilots – one a friend of Treadwell who found his and Hueguenard’s remains – a coroner and, of course, Herzog’s own voice (mostly in the form of voiceover). As the film states, Grizzly Man centres on the human story that unfolds in Treadwell’s videos, especially in the context of the fact that he was killed by one of his beloved animals. The bears are of interest to Herzog only insofar as they symbolise an inscrutable and indifferent nature – i.e. those aspects of nature that in Herzog’s view Treadwell misconstrued finally leading to his demise. Against this explicit framing of the bears by Herzog, this essay argues that Grizzly Man opens up a visual space for these animals in which they come to touch not only Treadwell, but also this film’s spectators. Faced with the excessive performances Treadwell enacts for his own cameras, the spectator of Grizzly Man is left wondering about the authenticity or ‘naturalness’ of the human, and is compelled to ask about the gaze humans cast on animals in general, and most specifically on the bears that share the cinematic frame with Treadwell. The following reading of Grizzly Man thus takes a path that slightly differs from the majority of the critical engagements with Herzog’s film, which are either focused on auteurist interpretations, or more strictly the question of spectrality in this film.2 The latter interpretations foreground Treadwell’s death. For example, Seung-Hoon Jeong and Dudley Andrew argue that only by dying can Treadwell’s all-too-human behaviour become visible as the ‘authentic cinematic kernel, the uncontrollable outside, lodged inside the film, a trace of the Real which Herzog tries vainly to envelop in his well-formed language’.3 According to the two critics, by virtue of Grizzly Man’s haunting temporality – i.e.,

Bear Images

the traumatic temporality of deferred action – a kind of becoming-bear also takes place in the film. Due to the temporal relays informing the film, the moment when Treadwell touches – in exuberance – a pile of warm bear excrement announces to the viewers Treadwell’s future as bear food. My main objective here, however, is less about the traumatic temporality informing the film and Treadwell’s becoming-animal than, perhaps, his becomingwith the bears. My analysis emphasises Treadwell’s performativity that it reads as the performance of the human.4 In other words, I underscore the fact that Treadwell’s mannerisms are a means for self-destructuration – also linked to the technicity of the cinema in Grizzly Man. Technicity, in turn, functions as a sort of prerequisite for encountering the bears less as the Other of humans than as agents in the co-constitution of a human yet to be established. Rather than becoming-bear, the performative act that the human ‘is’ opens up the possibility of a becomingwith that, importantly, rests on the technicity of existence as always already coexistence.5 Perhaps inadvertently, through its own pursuit of the technicity of cinema, Grizzly Man underscores that there is more to Treadwell and the bears in his footage than a reduction of their lives to the state of matter, to an unapproachable Real. It is not in spite of Treadwell’s humanism, but rather because humanism is the effect of an overemphatic performance in Grizzly Man that Treadwell’s and, more broadly, human self-identity dissolves, making room for an encounter between unknowing species. Grizzly Man’s focus on Treadwell the film-maker binds up the technicity of cinema with the techne of human and animal existence.6 Treadwell’s multiple positioning in front and behind the camera only helps to exhibit this. Grizzly Man’s focus on Treadwell the cameraman filming – and becoming-with – the bears frees the images of the bears from any given interpretation, whether that of the experts, Herzog or Treadwell himself. Interestingly a clip now available on the Animal Planet website, and alas not included in Grizzly Man, shows Treadwell reading a passage from his authored book to a bear. Therein, he had published mistaken information about this bear’s sex, which he corrects at this time on camera. Treadwell thus implicitly indicates that there is no definitive human knowledge ‘of’ the bears: it is not that humans are independent subjects of knowledge or that the bears are passive objects; rather, the scene shows that Treadwell’s filmic autobiography is co-written with the bears in provisional and mutual acts of growth. The performance enacted and displayed by Treadwell spreads through the screen, undermining any authoritative discourse or definitive narrative. Herzog performs his role as director, dialectical interlocutor and agent provocateur, most evidently when he speaks of the bears as unfeeling machines. Towards the end of the film he proclaims: What haunts me is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming 239

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

indifference of nature … and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food.

While this statement could express a personal viewpoint, within the constructed dialectics of the film it actually sounds skilfully rehearsed, even more strikingly so than the tone of Herzog’s voiceover does throughout.7 Another example of how the performative destabilises authoritative and authorial – human – positions in Grizzly Man is the interview with Dr Sven Haakanson, the director of the Alutiiq Museum in Alaska, who speaks of the indigenous population’s 7,000-year tradition, according to which humans don’t cross the boundary that separates them from bears. If, on the one hand, this statement is presented as authoritative, Herzog films the scene with Dr Haakanson standing near a taxidermied bear, the paw of which had just been cut and stolen by some passing visitor. The framing suggests a more intricate relation between humans and bears than that which the museum director seems to imply with his appeal to tradition. Questions about time and space, of socioeconomic nature, of history and human–animal geography all interfere with the atemporal authority of the utterance, as it is heard in the film. The profusion of ambivalences, the obviously staged scenes, the selection of clips from Treadwell’s footage that exhibit his exhibitionist behaviour, i.e. his performance in Grizzly Man, all this points up that (Treadwell’s) autobiography and (Herzog’s) biography always necessitate the display of the constructedness that goes into narrating human existence, and death. Destructuration of identity, as it ensues from the performance of the human, allows for subversive reconfigurations of the (human) subject and its boundaries. This precarious agent, a human impersonator, encounters the bears in a non-subject state of liminality.8 The outcome of the encounter is not a fusion or confusion with a natural bear, some merging with a fully Otherised creature. In contrast, as I shall demonstrate, the bears emerge as agents/actors on and off the screen. They figure as players and initiators rather than just victims of an engagement with the camera and the man, indeed with the cameraman. The bears share the filmic frame with this a-human displaced subject, hindering the distorted projection of the human onto the animal, as Giorgio Agamben explained in The Open: Man and Animal (2004).9 I take agency to mean a ‘play of agency’, following Donna Haraway’s definition and then Jonathan Burt’s rendition of the same for the screen. Informed by Bruno Latour’s ‘actor-network theory’, Haraway argues for an expanded notion of agency that includes heterogeneous entities.10 This breaks away from more general notions of agency, action and subjectivity, which, as she says, ‘are all about language’.11 However, because, as she notes, humans know in language, ‘one has to look for a system of figures [metaphors] to describe an encounter in knowledge that refuses the active/passive binary which is overwhelmingly the discursive tradition that Western folks have inherited’. Haraway locates the possibility of finding new players, i.e. agents in knowledge, through the adoption of a metaphorical 240

Bear Images

language that pushes itself to its limit and forms ‘webs of connections’, as she puts it.12 For Burt, writing specifically on animals in film, the term agency seeks ‘to outline the impact animals have on humans rather than always seeing animals as the passive partner, or victim’.13 This concept of agency finds its efficacy in cinema because ‘human–animal relations are possible [in film] through the play of agency regardless of the nature of animal interiority, subjectivity or communication’.14 In Grizzly Man’s presentation of Treadwell’s footage, the play of agency manifests itself in contact, a fleeting touch that intimates communicability rather than communication. Communicability is communication only insofar as the latter communicates communicability itself; thereby communicability is a gesture akin to the act of sharing bread, cum-panis or, again to draw on Haraway, a companionship that involves – like eating – a becoming with others. Obviously this involves inequality, violence, in short power, all that which the opening towards others as constitutive of being as also always a being-with calls forth. Haraway puts it metaphorically thus: ‘turtles all the way down’.15 By this she means that partners come to know each other in open zones of contact or, more dynamically, through ‘contact approaches’.16 Haraway uses ‘turtles all the way down’ to critique ‘foundationalist’ thinking, thus raising the question of how one inherits history and pointing to responsibility in the touch that shapes the contact zones. As she writes: ‘touch ramifies and shapes accountability. … Touch and regard have consequences.’17 In Grizzly Man, communicability translates into dense and opaque exchanges of looks between the animals and the human, and of both with the camera, in Treadwell’s footage. (The looks are thickened by the animals’ intense olfactory and auditory senses that contribute to such exchanges, indeed to contact.) Communicability through a haptic look and actual contact as projected onto the screen are the topics of the concluding section of this essay. In that section I show that synaesthetic looks touch the screen and each other thereby generating images of looking that interrupt – from within as it were – immediacy, self-presence and anthropomorphic projections. To adumbrate, the essay aims to bring to visibility the images of bears in Grizzly Man, moving from (i) Treadwell’s performance of the human to (ii) the fleeting establishment of interspecies contact, by way of a touch always happening in separation. The two points overlap in Grizzly Man’s display of the underlying technicity of existence that the film accomplishes through its focus on Treadwell as cameraman and actor in the company of camerabears.

Performing the human Most times I am a kind warrior out here, most times I am gentle, I am like a flower, I am like a fly on the wall, observing, noncommittal, non-invasive in any way. Occasionally, I am challenged and in that case the kind warrior must must 241

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

must become a samurai, must become so formidable, so fearless of death, so strong that he will win. Even the bears will believe that you are more powerful.

Treadwell steps in front of the camera and then to the righthand side of the frame, against a backdrop of brown bears not far behind, while using the words above to instruct his viewers on the multiple acts of becoming that one must perform in order to survive and live with the bears. In this natural, wild world, a human must make oneself invisible yet, if challenged, one must stand one’s ground, i.e. one must display the strength of an equal or even a master. Occasionally in the film this language of mastery translates even more emphatically into the language of conquest and heroism, for instance, in a scene Treadwell shot only hours before his death. Through this language of mastery and conquest Treadwell momentarily voices phallogocentric and anthropocentric views.18 Yet, at the same time, the invocation of the samurai in the quotation above defamiliarises the cliché of the American male conqueror, pioneer, cowboy, etc. through the sudden insertion of a foreign term, as in a clumsy – hence noticeable – act of cultural translation. The figure of the samurai can appear trite, perhaps in part because of its appropriation by popular American cinema (e.g. Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino, to mention just two directors, but think also of children’s animation). It can also challenge the very same images that language of mastery just invoked, e.g. American myths of origin.19 Through this use of language, Treadwell is at once spoken by a language that precedes him and identifies him as the human master, situating him in his time and place – the Wild West, the frontier, etc.; yet he is also the field/site where that very language is deterritorialised through the intercession, in this utterance, of the foreign, and its cinematic remakes. In sum, the metaphorical language thus spoken by Treadwell and Herzog, as well as ‘speaking’ in both of them, situates both, and especially Treadwell, in a linguistic/visual imbroglio that both reveals and obfuscates technicity in human being. In Grizzly Man Treadwell’s camera becomes the medium that facilitates the undoing of interiority, of self and identity, by presenting Treadwell on both sides of the camera. The camera allows Treadwell to perform the function of a director (an institution, a discourse, a discipline, an author), and an actor (as impersonator, empty slate and also alienated body-machine). Perhaps most interestingly,

Grizzly Man (2005) 242

Bear Images

he performs as spectator, for he looks at his footage, namely the multiple takes of his scenes, where he is also present. The scenes, as Herzog found them, were not edited into a singular narrative, whether focused on bears, or on Treadwell’s experience with the animals. In Herzog’s film, the several takes – as well as the different scenes, when compared – emphasise a range of roles Treadwell performs that seem incompatible: he impersonates a wildlife hero and survivor, a conqueror, a bear expert, a marginalised and lonely human, a troubled heterosexual lover and a child. Herzog notes that Treadwell is always careful to act each and every one of these roles with the ‘professionalism’ of a true film-maker, sometimes retaking a scene fifteen times. In striving to strike the perfect pose for a virtual or future audience (Treadwell speaks of the legacy of his ‘studies’), he replicates film genres as well as canonical styles of exposition which he re-enacts and unintentionally parodies at the same time: nature films and adventure films, but also spoofs of both, for example, when he takes up quite overtly the role of a new Steve Irwin (The Crocodile Hunter, 1996). In action movie mode, Treadwell also shoots several takes of himself wearing bandanas of various colours. One could invoke an additional kind of professionalism here to the one noted by Herzog. Indeed it is the ideological professionalism demanded by the right aesthetics, namely the perfect alignment of the actor’s look, in all senses, with the camera’s normative gaze. As the repeated imitation of the role models discloses, aiming at the ideal is an impossible yet always wished-for task: Herzog insists on showing the viewers of Grizzly Man that Treadwell takes multiple shots for several of his scenes. This insistence reveals Treadwell’s professionalism as more than just a director’s aesthetic compulsion; rather as the difficult striving for (human) recognition within and by the norms that identify one as human. Treadwell, as Herzog shows us, either used retakes for his more personal shots, as is the case of a rant against the park authorities, or – in associative mode – he digressed and shifted from a focus on the bears, to his own confessions.20 At one point in Grizzly Man, he veers off from the description of a fight between two bears over a female into an autobiographical confession, as Herzog put it, of his own heterosexuality. The bears seem to reassure him that heterosexuality is natural. Not insignificantly, he frames the bears’ fight within the cinema, projecting the appeal of film star and sex symbol Michelle Pfeiffer onto the female bear. While Treadwell, relying on his anthropomorphic projection onto the bears, insists on his ‘natural’ heterosexuality, at the same time, first he has recourse to a cinematic example and, second, he admits difficulties about fitting squarely within the heterosexual fiction. This scene, added to his impersonations off screen, including his changed name, fake accent and reinvented origins; his stylisation for the camera, the tone of voice he chose for the delivery of his message on screen, usually described by reviewers as childish or immature, the pathos in his bouts of anger, or his sympathy for dead animals (bees, foxes and bears) or in the obsessive declarations of love towards wild animals; all of the above points to the instability of sexual, generational and, broadly speaking, human identity. 243

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Grizzly Man (2005)

Treadwell offers a hyperbolic dramatisation of the human for the camera, a stand-in for the normative gaze against which his representations are exposed as in/adequate. In their respective works, Judith Butler and Kaja Silverman study how subjects first come to be within scenes of constraint, e.g. normative discourses about gender and race, and second how they may come to contest the very same. Butler explores questions of subversion and resistance in the realms of everyday life; Silverman focuses specifically on cinema and representation. Butler suggests that a gendered identity – one could substitute here the human species as a whole – is produced through the reiteration over time of regulatory norms established by dominant discourses (heterosexuality, in her approach to gender).21 The possibility of agency arises when there is a variation on that repetition that unveils the original/nature as itself an act. In this regard, Treadwell’s hyperbolic dramatisations may be viewed as acts of cross-dressing of the human, brought about by a need to ‘be’ recognised as a human among the bears. The effect is precisely the unearthing of the ‘human’ as non-essence. Silverman – who, unlike Butler, accepts the parameters of Lacanian psychoanalysis – seeks alternative agencies of the look in cinema, where ideality, the Symbolic gaze, and the Screen appear to be the determining factors in the constitution of subjectivity. Analysing photography and film, she explains that the de-realisation of the ideal is a subversion of the norm, through the exposure, hence display, of the gap between the norm (the Symbolic, the Screen) and the subject of the look.22 The gap becomes most evident if one takes the cinematic look as the non-punctual act of looking. Silverman then endows (human) looking with the power of resignification that the temporality of deferred action bestows on it. In her words, no look ever takes place once and for all. Rather, each act of spectation is subject to a complex series of conscious and unconscious ‘vicissitudes,’ which can completely transform the value of what is originally seen, and which cannot be easily predicted in advance. Subsequently, the eye may invest libidinally in the given-to-be-seen [norm], or pursue a radically other itinerary, one which works to derealize rather than to affirm the visual standard.23 244

Bear Images

In Treadwell’s performances before and behind the camera, a failing and thus reiterated libidinal investment in the normative image of the human occurs through the multiple roles of cameraman, image and spectator he takes upon himself. The investment – i.e. for example, the reiteration of heterosexuality – happens at once with the de-realisation of the visual standard. Treadwell literally retakes the shots of himself with and without the bears. Treadwell’s look as spectator at his framed image solicits him to look again in the attempt to align the image, his own performance, with the visual standard: thus the multiple takes, the striking of the pose. Ideality is established through insistent imitation and thereby de-realised at once. Grizzly Man’s explicit cinematic framework alerts the viewer to the fabrication that goes into the making of the human, thus eliciting questions about the gaze that produces the human as ideality and the bears as less than ideal and/or natural. One thus wonders: what bears can this cinematic man see that a self-assured human would not notice? How do bears, man and camera in concert produce different naturecultural engagements?

Bears touch Phenomenological approaches to the cinema have recently staged a comeback in studies of spectatorship. The relations between the gaze and other sensorial experience occupy a major role in these works, most of which pivot around touch – and various forms of contact more broadly construed. It is within this context that notions such as that of a tactile eye or a haptic gaze have emerged.24 The central questions these studies ask, to put it simplistically, are of this sort: How does cinema activate the senses, when and why? How does cinema touch its audience and through which strategies? What are the effects of this non/visual touch on cinema interpreted as shared mediated experience, and, conversely, on the viewing subject? In sum, what sort of subject does cinema constitute? Such questions provide the context for interpreting how vision synaesthetically appropriates other senses in order to convey the experience of an encounter with the world, thus displacing vision’s own distance. In this essay, however, I argue that touch appears in Grizzly Man less as affirmation of presence than a possibility of interspecies contact through which distance – or difference in Haraway’s terms – is maintained.25 Hence, I must turn to other theoretical readings of touch. Grizzly Man, through Treadwell’s footage, suggests that contact is interruptive, a contact-in-separation, occurring between diffusely defined figures. Contact is an act conducive to the remaking of the term species itself rather than the contact between a human and a bear. Indeed, as Haraway writes, and Treadwell’s camera encounters with the bears show, ‘it would be a mistake to assume much about species in advance of encounter’.26 Laura McMahon demonstrates how Jean-Luc Nancy conceives of touch as the only – and, in this sense, originary – way in which existence can be articulated, that 245

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

existing means to be exposed, to live relationally, ‘to be with’.27 For Nancy, touch is always a touch of outsides that takes place among heterogeneous surfaces.28 It is not that a self or a preformed subject encounters another through touching; rather, in touch existence is revealed as an act of co-constitution in co-exposure of material outsides or surfaces. This is to say that singular beings are always in the plural, always mutually doing and undoing their existence in contact-approaches. Humans and animals are open to learning and living while putting their ‘situations’ at risk. Here different power-knowledge systems are generated on the margins of long-standing disciplines (discourses).29 This suggests that when Treadwell and the bears briefly touch, in his footage, these shots provide the site where each time a new image of both human and animal bodies or living forms emerges. McMahon’s reading suggests that the medium of cinema translates Nancy’s notion of the outside nature of touch because the body on the screen appears as skin and the skin is a screen through which the body – in contact with itself, others and the outside world – makes itself. The body then comes to be ‘materially’, as it were, in the sometimes violent, sometimes caring acts of touching to which it is exposed, to which it responds, etc. As one can witness in Treadwell’s footage, such acts of undoing and redoing demand a revision of the image of the human as much as that of the bear, that is, a revision of the ‘taxonomic conveniences’ (human/animal) we use to navigate the world.30 For what Treadwell’s footage and Grizzly Man suggest, respectively and together (through their contact), is that human and bear have met in history and meet in the present as technologies for each other: ‘they are each other’s machine tools for making other selves’.31 Along these lines, in his discussion of Grizzly Man, Dominic Pettman draws on cultural history to conclude: Bears … have a special relationship not only to humans but to the highly spectacular and mediated relationship humans have with themselves. These creatures form part of the intricate circuitry that the anthropological machine requires to function properly during any given historical epoch. … Entertainment involving bears was at once scopophilic, narcissistic, and erotic: the pillars of the twentieth-century Spectacle.32

No essential bodies, pure images and certainly no pure images of essential bodies are offered in Treadwell’s footage of human–bear touch. Rather, the human and animal bodies that Grizzly Man presents, or perhaps the body of the human– animal image that surfaces here, would not be ‘whole before cinema comes to treat it, frame it, cut it up and view it’.33 The body does not figure as interiority and substance, which it would be cinema’s constitutive fantasy or failure to penetrate. … It is not that the tactility of the image mourns the plenitude of an actual immediate touch but rather that the image foregrounds an interval, a withdrawal within contact and an interruption to immediacy which is always already there, embedded in the very ontology of co-existence.34 246

Bear Images

As McMahon adds, touch denotes an irreducible spacing between singularities. This spacing returns in Grizzly Man because of Treadwell’s omnipresent camera, which exhibits the technicity of being and the dispersal of the human, foregrounding exteriority as the only truth of bodies, bodies that are always in touch. Three moments in Treadwell’s footage may help explain more concretely the workings of touch in the film. These are: (i) the opening of the film, (ii) when a bear that is curious approaches Treadwell’s camera and (iii) when Treadwell swims with a bear and touches it. In turn, two factors emerging from the elaborations on touch above point to an understanding of touch as a potent withdrawal of immediacy with important consequences for the bears on screen: (i) both the mise en abyme of Grizzly Man as a film containing film’s fragments and Treadwell’s own footage highlight technicity, this over and against Grizzly Man’s commercial use, if not perhaps intent, and (ii) proximity between the bears and Treadwell is shot through with distance or an obstruction of view, whereby the tangible occurs only in its retreat. Here contact appears as syncopated, as interrupted, it presents the possibility of experience, i.e. the communication of communicability, rather than successful or failed acts of communication or experiments. Grizzly Man is clearly not an art film in the tradition of, for example, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda or Claire Denis. As critics have demonstrated, all these art films manage to produce a visual space in which the spectator and the profilmic objects fold into each other without fusion. Graininess, or pixilation, close-ups of human body parts, moments of touch on screens within screens are recurrent images in art films that in underscoring texture convey tactility through vision.35 Grizzly Man does not display any such strategies. It also shuns other cinematic techniques, such as magnification, which have also been associated with touch, especially in experimental science films. A case in point is Eva S. Hayward’s analysis of Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon’s The Love Life of the Octopus (1965). Hayward demonstrates that magnification and aquatic refraction are means through which this film engenders a kind of ‘visceral seeing’ and establishes a relation with the spectator based on ‘intra-acting’ ‘empathic non-understanding’.36 If these modalities of haptic gaze however do not quite square with Grizzly Man’s cinematic self-reflexivity, or Treadwell’s shots of his encounters with the bears, the latter – situated within Grizzly Man’s emphasis on the performance of the human (Treadwell’s) – acquire the ambivalent status of occurring both within and outside such aesthetic dimensions. Within because of their unfinished, fragmentary and contingent cinematic quality (as noted by Herzog); and outside because the actual touch between Treadwell and the bears confounds the straight views of/on bears most typical of human/grizzly encounters.37 Herzog’s film opens with a long shot taken from Treadwell’s static camera of two bears each grazing on all fours. Treadwell then steps into the frame from behind the camera, interfering with the image of the bears. ‘The footage is remarkable’, Thomas Austin writes, 247

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

for its close and sustained visual access to the bears, perhaps 40–50 yards from Treadwell. … On the other hand, the images are constrained by reliance on a single, static camera, with none of the multiple angles, editing patterns, or use of slow-motion to be expected from professional ‘wildlife’ coverage on film or television. In addition to these technical limitations, Treadwell is evidently working alone.38

The limitations or amateurishness of Treadwell’s filming in this shot play a fundamental function in exhibiting ‘the spacing of touching’, in McMahon’s words.39 Put differently, such technical constraints carve a visual space for distance and proximity to coexist in a singular (cinematic) frame: for the bears’ and Treadwell’s bodies come-to-presence together and yet as separate, one as dependent on the other. Indeed, as Austin remarks, ‘his [Treadwell’s] location on screen right obscures one of the bears’.40 Instead of seeing this as constituting a flaw, I take such obfuscation of the gaze to be telling. In effect it returns in yet another scene. In this later scene, Treadwell and the bears concretely touch, with one camera in plain sight. Commenting on this moment in the film, Austin underscores the fact that Herzog’s skilled voiceover intends to synchronise the footage with his narrative. Accordingly, as Herzog would have it, in this moment of touch Treadwell is seeking a primordial encounter that crosses an invisible borderline. The shot in question shows Treadwell, ‘moving his hand carefully from behind the camera towards the snout of an inquisitive bear’.41 In both these scenes, one witnesses an interaction between the bears and Treadwell that disturbs a transparent (also ideal) view of and on the bears, of the detached if not invisible viewing subject, and of seeing tout court. The human body interferes with the image of the bears, and the bears come too close to the camera. All this proximity muddles up the images of the bears – and humans – we are accustomed to see through wildlife documentaries, whether these shots are ‘unpeopled’ or function to celebrate the film-maker as an ‘explorer or master of mediating visual technologies’.42 Within the space of Treadwell’s footage, within each frame, the figures of the human and the bears overlap or touch. At the same time this proximity is immediately inscribed – on screen – as technical, with its ‘technical limitations’ emphasised. The coming-topresence of the human and the bears as sharing the same space, in the opening scene, is occasioned by the camera that instantiates that proximity, immediately exhibiting its operation and effecting a distance, a separation or mediation. Obfuscation constitutes both the limit and the possibility of contact, the limit that contact is – contact as limit – and that the cinematic image reveals. As Nancy would have it, and McMahon explains, the image ‘is not given to the vision of the spectator, but exposed “right at [à même] my eyes (my body)”, right at denoting at once a limit, a surface and a point of contact’.43 Indeed, this obfuscated image of human–bear encounter on screen respects the opacity of the other creature as it comes-to-presence.44 248

Bear Images

In the second shot, where the inquisitive bear comes face to face with the camera, Treadwell stands both behind and in front of the camera: a part of his body, a hesitant hand, approaches the approaching bear while his soft voice admonishes: ‘you are awfully close … you are awfully close’. When the bear snaps at the camera, the hand retreats, and his voice demands distance more assertively, but with a tremor caused by both fear and excitement. The bear then turns around and leaves to follow the call of another bear. The encounter between the bears and Treadwell is occasioned by the physical presence of one camera, here a medium of contact beyond vision. Indeed, one camera is located between Treadwell and the bear that smells it and hears it, even before seeing it through its eyes. This camera appears as an intruding object, one that however ultimately provides the opportunity to meet. The film’s dynamics of interspecies touch as an offer of contact always on the verge of happening yet always already gone on the screen doubles-up Treadwell’s image in Herzog’s film as itself present and gone. This is best exemplified when Treadwell swims with a bear. In this shot, as the two come out of the water, Treadwell caresses the bear that shudders in response, thus prompting Treadwell to interrupt his gesture, to withdraw his hand. The bear does not bite and does not run. Both human and bear are in the image, touching at a distance, distant in touch yet connected through this space of contiguity which does not make the bear into a revived Baloo and Treadwell into a Mowgli of any sort. Rather, the human and the bear are here co-figured through interruption within contact (i.e. the shudder). In Treadwell’s footage the promise of/in touch is not that touch and communication between the grizzlies and humans is a fact or explicable. The promise rather lies in the fact that through the footage of Treadwell’s encounters, namely from the distance and proximity, i.e. the contact, that the medium of film is also able to afford between its images and its audience, Grizzly Man advances a reticent tactile view of bears and humans, taken both separately and in the company of each other. Such a view then undoes speciesism, as well as the expert/consumer-oriented discourses animating wildlife governmentality, which are predicated on clear and stable boundaries and divisions among species, spaces and times. In conclusion, Treadwell’s bears in Herzog’s Grizzly Man emerge neither as Other nor as the Real, they are not anthropomorphic Disneyfied cartoons; they

Grizzly Man (2005) 249

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

come-to-presence on the screen as image-agents of an undoing and redoing of the human as possibility, a real material possibility that becomes tangible – available – only through its tentativeness, its fading in the distance. Through focusing on Treadwell the cameraman I have attempted to show that Herzog’s Grizzly Man opens the door for a viewing of the human as performativity. In turn, the human thus exteriorised and de-faced, caught in the ‘packs’ of his doing as undoing, produces a space – within the footage by Treadwell and of Treadwell in contact with the bears – where the animals appear as freed from distorted and distorting projections. Yet this Open in which the bears move on screen in the company of Treadwell is not a space for Being, where the bears are; rather it is a space of interaction where both humans and bears reimagine and co-constitute themselves, through the separation in contact afforded by touch as the opaque vision in the medium of film. This interaction is neither real nor imaginary, neither possible nor impossible. It is available, i.e. it comes-to-presence as an alternative modality of existing. As Butler would have it, this reconfiguration of humans and animals in contact, while already available, is also in constant need of resignification. Performativity and touch thus, without necessitating each other as constitutive acts, each and in tandem contribute to shape agents that co-shape each other and are mutually exposed to one another. Through its editing of Treadwell’s footage, Grizzly Man emphasises the vulnerability of, and in, coexistence. By having recourse to the cinematic aspects of performance and contact, however, the film also conceives of vulnerability outside the framework of either bio or zoe, granting instead a space of interaction on screen from where to account for each life’s value and difference in their technical coexistence.45

Notes 1. The grizzly bear – also known as Ursus Arctor Horribilis – constitutes a subspecies of brown bear. The word ‘grizzly’ comes from grizzled, for the bears’ fur reveals shades of silver. 2. For an exhaustive summary of various reviews, see Eric Deweberry, ‘Conceiving Grizzly Man through the “Powers of the Fals”’, scope vol. 11 (June 2008), available at http://www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=11&id=1023). See also the scathing analysis of Grizzly Man’s reception in Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 168–9. 3. See Seung-Hoon Jeong and Dudley Andrew, ‘Grizzly Ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the Cinematic Animal’, Screen vol. 49 no. 1 (2008), pp. 5, 8. 4. Undine Sellbach concludes her essay on Grizzly Man with an explicit reference to the human as performative animal, on which she, however, does not dwell. See ‘The Traumatic Effort to Understand in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man’, in Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane and Yvette Watts (eds), Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human–Animal Relations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 41–52. 250

Bear Images

5. The phrase ‘becoming with’ comes from Haraway, who writes: ‘I am who I become with companion species, who and which make a mess out of categories in the making of kin and kind. Queer messmates in mortal play, indeed.’ In When Species Meet (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 19. 6. See on techne and coming-to-presence, Christopher Watkin, Phenomenology or Deconstruction? The Question of Ontology in Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur and JeanLuc Nancy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 145. 7. Different parts of Treadwell’s footage are now available on the Animal Planet website, and they are linked with his written journals. In what specific ways the footage on Animal Planet plays into and breaks with questions of wildlife governmentality (as illustrated by Rutherford) would be well worth exploring. See Stephanie Rutherford, Governing the Wild: Ecotours of Power (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 196. See also http://animal.discovery.com/tv/grizzly-mandiaries/about/episode.html. 8. Agency here may be located in the possibility to respond to others in one’s own vulnerability, in a sharing and openness or exposure towards the mutual conditions of living. This view of agency involves deflating autonomy and will as intrinsic to it. 9. See Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 33–43. 10. See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 63–86. 11. Donna Haraway insists that the metaphors one selects are not random or innocent, for as much as we perform, we are situated in history, in language, in bodies. Metaphors, too, require scrutiny. Interestingly, Treadwell seems to be aware of this when he remarks, ‘I run wild, so free, like a child. It is cool, and it is serious.’ For Haraway on metaphors, see Constance Penley, Andrew Ross and Donna Haraway, ‘Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway’, Social Text nos 25/26 (1990), pp. 8–23, 9, 10. 12. See Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies vol. 14 no. 3 (1988), p. 584. In later reprints of the essay the phrase changes to ‘webbed connections’. See Haraway, Symians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 183–202. In Grizzly Man metaphors abound. Their functions in this film would be worth pursuing in depth. 13. Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), p. 31. 14. Ibid. (emphasis added). 15. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 32. 16. Ibid., p. 217. 17. Ibid., p. 36. 18. Elizabeth Henry carries out a feminist ecological critique of Treadwell’s phallogocentrism wherein she identifies Treadwell with his statements. See ‘The Screaming Silence: Constructions of Nature in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man’, in Paula Willoquet-Maricondi (ed.), Framing the World: Explorations in Ecocriticism and Film (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2010), pp. 170–86. 251

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

19. Herzog reinscribes the cowboy in the narrative, by filming the pilot and friend of Treadwell singing Don Edward’s ‘Coyotes’, in a version that substitutes Treadwell for the cowboy, towards the song’s end. 20. On confession and how it may work in this film, see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, [1978], 1990), p. 62. 21. I refer to Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’, in Carole R. McCann and Seung-kyung Kim (eds), Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 415–27; and Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). 22. Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 181–5. 23. Ibid., p. 223. 24.See, for example, Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009). 25. Haraway writes: ‘Species reeks of race and sex; and where and when species meet, that heritage must be untied and better knots of companion species attempted within and across differences. … companion species must … learn to live intersectionally.’ In When Species Meet, p. 18. She also writes about ‘touch across difference’ on p. 14. 26. Ibid., p. 19. 27. Laura McMahon, Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (London: Legenda, 2011), p. 14. 28. Ibid., pp. 14–15, 17. 29. Although Treadwell’s footage in Grizzly Man does not explicitly point to new knowledge about the grizzlies, the fact that he lived in close quarters with them for thirteen summers was per se something unusual, as noted by his pilot friend in the film. In addition, as the more bear-focused footage on the Animal Planet site reveals, his approach to the bears was not Disneyfied, but multifaceted. In one clip Treadwell shows himself as open to learning from the bears (about a berry bush, for example), thus including in his studies of the bears, non-orthodox, un/disciplined methods that involve studying or rethinking the human in relation to the animals in question. 30. Haraway, quoted in Dominic Pettman, Human Error: Species Being and Media Mechanics (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 89. 31. Haraway, When Species Meet, p. 64. 32. Pettman, Human Error, p. 47. 33. McMahon, Cinema and Contact, p. 17. 34. Ibid., pp. 17, 20. 35. Eva S. Hayward wrote elsewhere of ‘fingeryeyes’, a trope then appropriated by Haraway. See Hayward, ‘Fingeryeyes: Impressions of Cup Corals’, Cultural Anthropology vol. 25 no. 4 (2010), p. 580.

252

Bear Images

36. Hayward contributes an insightful dissection of this film in ‘Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus’, Octopus: A Visual Studies Journal no. 1 (2005), pp. 1–29. 37. One example of this would be the views – and shots – of animals one finds in typical nature documentary films. See, for example, the discussion of PBS’s Nature series by Cynthia Chris in Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 70–1. 38. Thomas Austin, ‘“To Leave the Confinements of His Humanness”: Authorial Voice, Death and the Constructions of Nature in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man’, in Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong (eds), Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2008), p. 52. 39. McMahon, Cinema and Contact, pp. 15, 20, 25, 28. 40. Austin, ‘“To Leave the Confinements of His Humanness,”’ p. 52 (emphasis added). 41. Ibid., p. 53. 42. Chris, Watching Wildlife, p. 71. 43. McMahon, Cinema and Contact, p. 24. 44. On opacity of the other creature, see Laura Marks as quoted by Hayward, ‘Enfolded Vision’, p. 28n39. 45. I thank anthropologist Gautam Ghosh for his insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

253

Jonathan Burt

15 The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky The Movement of Birds and Film’s Ornithology De l’arrêt mental à l’arrêt réel il n’y a, il n’y aura eu qu’un pas. (From the psychological stop to the real stop, there is, there will have been but one step.) Raymond Bellour1 I am unable to find a good reason for those who have chosen to call these birds boobies. Authors, it is true, generally represent them as extremely stupid; but to me the word is utterly inapplicable to any bird with which I am acquainted. The Woodcock, too, is said to be stupid, as are many other birds; but my opinion, founded on pretty extensive observation, is that it is only when birds of any species are unacquainted with man, that they manifest that kind of ignorance or innocence which he calls stupidity, and by which they suffer themselves to be imposed upon. John James Audubon2

Jeremy Mynott, in his book Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience (2009), describes the ornithological pastime of spotting the errors of birdsong dubbed onto films and television programmes. From my armchair I have heard tawny owls hooting in Ireland (there aren’t any there), swifts screaming in February (June is more like it) ... and in America, CBS Sports had to apologise for dubbing white-throated sparrow and hermit thrush into the ‘wrong’ live broadcasts of golf tournaments in states where these species do not occur ... . They then had to apologise again for printing a picture of house sparrows to go with the apology about the white-throated sparrows.3

And the question that arises here is not so much does this really matter? In a way it generally doesn’t. One expects nothing from film but artifice and fakery, and it is more appropriate to the spirit of things to get it wrong. The question is, rather, what happens once one specifies the creature in question? What then shifts in the thought and perception of the image, and its sound, when the term animal (or bird

The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky

or fish) becomes redundant, and in its place one is confronted with, say, a sable antelope (Hippotragus niger), a wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) or an Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua). This act of naming then identifies, or even creates, a certain ecology, bodily conformation and postures of interaction; presents very specific types of sensory apparatus and behaviour; as well as announcing the resonances of the cultural history of an individual species. And, as the Latin naming sequence in Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) reminds us, when Mr Fox runs through the species names of his compatriots, this need not always be a serious matter. To take a very recent example, what sort of difference does it make to identify the bird in Yves Caumon’s recent film, The Bird (2011)? In this film, the interactions between Anne, the main character, and a bird trapped in her Bordeaux apartment, enable her to come to terms with her son’s death. She eventually finds the bird dead on the pavement, possibly killed by a cat. The cremation of the bird and the scattering of its ashes in a river leads to the woman finally being able to take steps into a new life. The symbolism is heavy-handed in its utilisation of the bird as a transitional object, though no less touching for that. If memory serves, the bird is a ring-collared dove, which potentially opens up a number of paradoxical resonances from cultural and urban history given the complex status of pigeons/doves, which have a long tradition of being seen both as revered figures of the sacred, as healers, but also as vermin that need to be exterminated.4 This often falls along terminological lines of dove = good/pigeon = bad, even though these are the same species of bird.5 Such an ambiguous status makes the bird the perfect sacrificial object, a creature loaded with significance offered for a new life, as both scapegoat and beloved pet. So, does this naming lead merely to an enriched appreciation of the possibilities of the figure of the animal on screen and enable a fuller reading? Or does it point towards a qualitatively different kind of thinking about animal images? To answer this initially, there are a number of consequences to the act of naming, of taking the name seriously, which are themselves developments in the structure of and, as we shall see, postures of attention. Primarily, it makes the figure of the creature in question less easily substitutable in a generic sense, The consequences of the failure to do this can be seen in Werner Herzog’s clumsy slippage from bears to a generalised idea of ‘nature’ and indifference in Grizzly Man (2005). His thesis is that nature is indifferent and violent and that any sort of coexistence between humans and the grizzly bear, the exemplars of this version of nature, is impossible. These parameters have no space for considering the bear as a very particular kind of complex object (or subject or image) both culturally and behaviourally. (Nor, incidentally, does he allow room for reflection on the place of his own film in the long history of a bear iconography that both denigrates bears as vicious, and at the same time celebrates them as anthropomorphic figures, compelling, and even cuddly.)6 The case for or against coexistence, in the loosest sense of the term, is emphasised by the terms of what a highly particular visual image reveals (can only reveal 255

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

in fact). This is summed up by Herzog’s much-quoted remark, accompanying a close-up of the face of the bear that was presumed to have killed Timothy Treadwell: ‘to me there is no such thing as a secret world of bears, and this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food’. Some critics have followed Herzog, or perhaps the bear, into this particular void. Blank stares become infectious it seems. As Seung-hoon Jeong and Dudley Andrew write, inside such a film [i.e. Grizzly Man] we sense the Real as an empty zone described by a triangle whose three points have tantalised us ... cinema, animal, ghost. Staring blankly into that zone let us conclude: man is a cinematic animal.7

But a naming of the animal as uniquely a bear, rather than ghost – geometric point or otherwise – renders the terms of Herzog’s thesis, and indeed the kindred theoretical project of becoming-animal beloved of so many theorists of the animal, deeply problematic. As Bernd Brunner writes in his book on the history of bears: bears are among the least expressive of land animals. The bear’s largely immobile face remains a mask to human observers, revealing little about the animal’s mental states. Only movements of the bear’s ears, eyes and highly flexible nose offer clues to its mood – attentiveness, interest or fear ... . This relative lack of facial animation could be a reason why bears are often considered sly and devious – no matter what they are up to, their faces look composed.8

Of course, one can take this much further. Bears also communicate by scent and there is even some evidence that they have developed complex systems for marking the environment in relation to sources of food. Clearly they have a secret world. It could be argued at this point that the act of naming is a reductive move to organise the idea of animal behaviour around the principles of species classifications, and that the latter is a systematising activity sometimes lacking in critical reflexivity. Such a position could perhaps be understood to rule out certain creative possibilities in speculations on the animal image by rooting or limiting ideas within the shadow of what is assumed to be ‘natural history’. Tom Tyler confronts this problem in his recent book Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (2012), where, in his analysis of animal exemplars in philosophy, he draws a distinction between the ciferae and the indexical animal. The ciferae is the animal figure whose specific nature is irrelevant: an empty figure which can be substituted for any other kind of animal without such a change making any difference to the discussion in question. A rat, say, could be unproblematically exchanged for an otter. On the other hand, the being of an indexical animal matters and is non-substitutable. In this latter instance, a pig could not be exchanged for an eagle. And to avoid the dangers of the stereotyping of indices, where animals are reduced to exemplars of their species characteristics, Tyler suggests that we highlight the idea of the indexical 256

The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky

animal’s wildness, uniqueness, iterability and even its name. ‘Clever Hans was not just any old horse. In contrast to the cipherous nags who appear in Austin, Freud, and Xenophanes, it was as a particular, extraordinary individual that he became the talk of Berlin’.9 This is something of a call to arms, a redirection of address to animals as they are. To date, for Tyler, ‘animal’ and ‘animality’ have been flattened by philosophy ‘into a more manageable form’.10 If we wish to understand what an animal is, if we want to kill off the Animal, we must refrain from seeking a definition of ‘the animal’ or of ‘animality’ and look instead to the animals ... to bring about the death of the Animal and to reanimate the lifeless ciphers.11

However, the dissolution of the generic ‘Animal’, and its replacement by ‘animals’, cannot be undertaken without taking into consideration their cultural histories. Animals usually have ambivalent, even paradoxical, layers of meaning and imagery built up over time, which constitute indexical animals as themselves difficult and divided objects and subjects; as we saw above with the pigeon and the bear. (Incidentally, the histories of animal science and observation of particular species are just as integral to these cultural traditions.) This is what gets us away from the idea that the act of naming is in any sense reductive, or speciesbound in a restrictive sense. Furthermore, as film-making involving animals of any description needs to be analysed as a form of cross-species contact in the production of images, with transformational consequences for all involved (at many levels), then it is the elisions, integrations and relations through movement that bring us to attend to the animal, and not simply a named animal as a static thought.12 In fact, even in the most exorbitant and abstract elision of all, that of the generic Animal with cinema itself – ‘une pensée de l’animal comme pensée du cinéma’ (‘a thought of the animal as thought of cinema’) – we can ground such an elision if the patterns of motion and arrest are understood as particular, bounded by what the body at hand can do or not do.13 A blank stare is always a movement and is only possible as a relation between certain kinds of faces. It is never just a look. The problem is that we cannot quite do away with the generic Animal because, in relation to film imagery, it seems to circumscribe a field of affect which, although little understood, seems to engage a commonly agreed on area of subject matter and attention. How might one get around this problem? One answer is not to conceive of the generic Animal either as an abstract category, or a kind of unspecified animal, but as something like a set of effects in motion, which is conceptually separate from the named animal. So, the question then becomes, in relation to the cinematic image: how do we think together in the same conceptual space what I shall call the ‘any-animal-whatever’ (as the generic Animal) and our named animals (say the striated frogfish [Antennarius striatus] or the dunnock [Prunella modularis])? 257

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

The most important and detailed theoretical analysis published to date on animals and film, and by far the most interesting, is Raymond Bellour’s Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (2009), which in many ways provides a framework for resolving some of the above problems, especially around ideas of movement and bodies, though less so around ideas of named, particular, animals. To begin with, however, I take inspiration for the any-animal-whatever from Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘any-space-whatever’ in his Cinema 1: The Movement–Image (1997), a work that is also very important in the construction of Bellour’s thesis. I am not thinking so much of Deleuze’s idea of the any-space-whatever as a prior condition of actualisation, the ‘space of virtual conjunction, grasped as pure locus of the possible’.14 This parallel would make the any-animal-whatever the condition of all possible animals, which makes no sense, in that there is no ur-animal, only ‘life-forms’, a concept too general to be of any use. Indeed, animals are the prior condition of the any-animal-whatever and not the other way round. However, the parallel is well served by his discussion of the construction of the any-space-whatever, and its extraction, through shadow and the play of darkness and light in Expressionism, by what he calls lyrical abstraction. For Deleuze, unlike the oppositional polarised conflict of light and dark in Expressionism, lyrical abstraction deals with alternating patterns, ‘a fundamental “Either ... or”’.15 Shadow ... will, rather, express an alternative between the state of things itself and the possibility, the virtuality, which goes beyond it. Thus Jacques Tourneur breaks with the Gothic tradition of the horror film; his pale and luminous spaces, his nights against a light background, make him a representative of lyrical abstraction. In the swimming pool of Cat People, the attack is only seen on the shadows of the white wall: is it the woman who has become a leopard (virtual conjunction) or merely the leopard which has escaped (real connection)? ... What in fact seems to us essential in lyrical abstraction is that the spirit is not caught in combat but is prey to an alternative.16

This discussion of the shadow figure (made, incidentally, by Tourneur passing his hand in front of a spotlight) is developed in Bellour’s remarks on the same film which he uses to exemplify the elision of animality and cinema: ‘une conscience suraiguë de l’animalité comme condition propre au cinéma’(‘An intense consciousness of animality as the true condition of cinema’).17 And we can think of the Animal as a kind of non-symbol, transformational in its shapes and movements, when Bellour writes of the ‘désymbolisation du symbole, à la mesure de l’exacerbation qu’il en produit, jusqu’à l’égarement’ (‘desymbolisation of the symbol, in proportion to the exacerbation that it produces from it, to the extent of aberration’). These are the alternations of shadow and light in Cat People (1942): le devenir-animal d’Irena, réfracté dans les regards qu’elle suscite et lui-même enveloppé dans la précipitation d’ombres frappant le film entier, se développe 258

The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky

comme la matière propre de l’image, dont il est à la fois la raison et l’effet ... la logique du cinéma aura vu se propager sur les murs, en vibrations accentuées d’ombres et lumières, un de ses possibles devenir-animal, dont la valeur de l’émotion, au-delà de la peur, tient à son effet prononcé de captation hypnotique. (the becoming-animal of Irena, refracted in the looks she arouses and herself enveloped in the precipitation of shadows striking the whole film, develops itself as the true matter of the image, of which it is simultaneously the cause and effect ... the logic of cinema will see itself propagated on the walls, in exaggerated vibrations of shadows and light, one of its possible becomings animal, whose emotional value, beyond fear, keeps to its pronounced effect of hypnotic catchment.)18

The nonhuman extends beyond the oscillations of light and dark to the connections between what are termed the nonhuman components – ‘des affets de la vitalité, avec leurs niveaux des émotions propres’ (‘affects of vitality, with their levels of true emotions’) – that tie the characters (and by implication the spectators) to the mutations of the matter-image, subject as these mutations are to the arbitrariness of the narrative and the given overall structure, rather than the characters expressing or ‘having’ emotions, say, as a motive force. There is no clear or necessary connection between the degrees of intensity of life (the micro-movements of response that the body experiences), identifiable emotions (anger, fear, jealousy, say) and their expression. Yet, these surfaces of oscillation invoke finely differentiated tonalities and moods that connect up the material image with the body of the spectator. The connection between the any-animal-whatever, and the bodily and emotional responses of the spectator, and therefore the relations created by animal images between bodies, returns us to the roots of the discussion of the any-spacewhatever in Deleuze’s remarks at the beginning of his chapter on the affection image. Here we find the possibility of the disconnection of expression from situation, and, to make matters even more complicated, the breaking down of the face into separate qualities – ‘hard and tender, shadowy and illuminated, dull and shiny’ – which among themselves can connect or divide.19 This refers us back to the problems in Herzog’s overly simplistic reading of the face of a bear. And, as to the relations created by images of faces, Deleuze describes how Carl Dreyer, in the Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), isolates each face ‘in a close-up which is only partly filled, so that the position to the right or to the left directly induces a virtual conjunction which no longer needs to pass through the real connection between people’.20 Bellour echoes this passage in his analysis of the in-between state of the hypnotised spectator whose body, ‘plongé dans l’ombre’ (‘plunged into shadow’), undermines the division between the social aspect of emotion and the private dimension of sentiment, and is ‘absorbée et transformée’ (‘absorbed and transformed’) by that which comes to it from film. (Note the spiritual dimension of the language; another 259

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

thing that echoes these passages of Deleuze.) The origin of tears is hard to locate. Their sudden taking hold can be as much due to a culmination of sentiment as to the actual impact of an emotion. Thus, on the one hand, we have the in-between states that break down the borders of interior and exterior, social and private, and, on the other hand, an emergence within those states of a series of mobile entities. Bellour describes Maria Falconetti’s crying face in the Dreyer film as a ‘[s]ymbiose de gros plans adverses et comme confondus, montrant à l’évidence que le récit d’un destin et l’empathie qu’il suscite tiennent à la mise en formes, en forces et en intensités, en espaces, en rhythmes, en tons, qui les construit’ (‘symbiosis of adverse close-ups, as though dumbfounded, making obvious that the narrative of a destiny and the empathy that it arouses belongs to the shaping into forms, forces and intensities, into spaces, rhythms, tones, which constructs them’).21 The realisation of the Animal within, or even as, this conjunction of movement and intensities (of varying versions and powers of connectedness) depends on a series of in-between states which link hypnosis to animality, but in a particular way. This connection with hypnosis is the cornerstone of Bellour’s theory of the roots of cinema and its links with the animal. To some extent he continues a worrying but rather familiar trope in which, whenever the any-animal-whatever is associated with the ontology of the cinematic image, it is to a state of less in some form or other. But, to continue with Bellour, the filmic state is not quite like the hypnotic state but is rather a particular version of it, which reflects an overlap between the induction of the subject into hypnosis and the state of being hypnotised. The film spectator is carried towards a certain kind of sleep without ever falling asleep. In this intermediate state between waking and sleeping the spectator finds himself in a passive posture of exacerbated attention and intensified perception (sur-perception).22 And within that, animality is specifically linked to that part of hypnosis interior to the body of emotion: ‘l’hypnose animale, d’une influence exercée de corps à corps, comme par des moyens de machines décuplant chez la créature humaine ses affects les plus somatiques’ (‘[t]he animal hypnosis, an influence exercised from body to body, by means of machines multiplying in the human creature its most somatic effects’).23 We can repeat Deleuze’s phrase at this point about the virtual conjunction which no longer passes through the ‘real connection between people’. The any-animal-whatever is provoking something slightly similar in operating across these in-between states. What we have here is not so much a suspension of attention in hypnosis allowing the imagination to wander unfettered, or allowing a release of the repressed, but something more like its opposite: a physically passive body in the grip, or spell, of constant movement, and hence in a hyper-state rather than a truly passive state. (Is this really hypnosis?) So, in this hyperactive figure, what value are we going to attribute to stillness, care, patience and silence, qualities that are often required of animals themselves for their survival, and certainly required of humans (and film-makers) both in the most important kinds of observation of wildlife and in the training of animals for fiction films. This might be the most important point, ‘l’arrêt’ as it were, at 260

The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky

which the any-animal-whatever needs to be abandoned for animals. I will return to this point of the stop, or the hesitation, shortly, when we turn to the subject of ornithology, but there is another dimension to it which also relates to what cannot be achieved with the any-animal-whatever. In Bellour’s framework the any-animal-whatever is not an abstract idea or object ‘out there’, but something integral to an invocation of co-presences, that necessitates an idea of relation, response or affect. And in this sense it can be an enriched rather than an impoverished Animal. In other words, it is spilling over with surplus affects rather than being merely part of a less (less than human, less than conscious, less than aware). However, does the passage from the any-animalwhatever to, say, the owl, the bear or the panther require a complete change of register? Because the idea of movement, the piling up of liminal and in-between categories, the alternations of connection and deconnection, the constant and labile dappling of sensation, could leave us little space for a moment of ordinary address to an ordinary body that is, after all, the basis of any image. Furthermore, would such a focus on an animal mean that we lose something of the conceptual vitality of the any-animal-whatever? The relationship between movement and stillness, indeed the still itself, seems key here. Bellour contrasts the movement of animals with the still frame, which is at the heart of film’s illusory reproduction of movement. The motion of life that the animal incarnates is a recurrent theme, expressed by an extreme kinetic liberty and an innocence of instincts.24 This triumph of life is epitomised in Bringing Up Baby (1938) by the contrast between the reconstructed brontosaurus and the vitality of all the other animals in the film, culminating in the final collapse of the dinosaur. Thus, stillness is a threat because the cessation of movement carries connotations of the defeat of vitality, ossification (the brontosaurus skeleton), paralysis or death. The fear of the still also threatens the idea of the any-animal-whatever as a particular mode of moving the body of the spectator. In Bellour’s discussion of bird flight, for me one of the most important passages in the ‘Animalités’ section of the book, the recognition of stillness provokes the most nameless of fears. Incidentally, by way of a caveat, I am aware that there is a difference between being physically still (the film still too) and a state of stillness, the latter being a more relative condition. Bodies are hardly ever completely still, but I intend stillness here to invoke something a little more than the total cessation of movement. It is a posture of attention, a state of awareness, watchfulness and often anticipation, but not the stillness of the hypnotised body. And as Bellour recognises, in the final scene of The Birds (1963) there is a form of relative stillness in the collective watchfulness and, as Hitchcock intended it, thinking of the birds, punctuated or expressed in ‘micro-mouvements et ondulations vagues’(‘micro-movements or vague undulations’).25 Bellour takes up Deleuze’s famous passage of the two kinds of time, ‘time as a whole, as great circle or spiral which draws together the set of movement in the universe’ and ‘time as interval, which indicates the smallest unit of movement or 261

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

action’. This is exemplified by two aspects of bird flight: the hovering bird ‘continually increasing its circle’ and the beat of a wing which is ‘the continually diminishing interval between two movements or two actions’.26 Later, Deleuze will describe the birds in their attacking flocks in Hitchcock’s film as symbols, but not as abstractions or metaphors. They are ‘real birds, literally, but which present the inverted image of men’s relationships with Nature, and the naturalised image of men’s relationships with themselves’.27 As is well known, Hitchcock is something of a limit case for Deleuze within the province of the action-image. He ‘introduces the mental image into cinema. That is he makes relation itself the object of an image ... . With Hitchcock, a new kind of “figures” appear which are figures of thought.’28 Bellour picks up on the elision that Deleuze makes between the variations of bird movement that constantly form and reform within the shot as the consciousness not of the spectator, nor the hero in the film, but of the camera itself. To quote Deleuze, this is part of ‘the single consciousness or the perception of the whole of birds, testifying to an entirely bird-centred nature’.29 Relation, the new object of the image in Hitchcock, Bellour defines as in the final instance that which ‘par la pensée lie le film à son spectateur’ (‘through thought links the film to its spectator’).30 The move Bellour then makes, to go further into this optic of relation as he puts it, is interesting because it epitomises the trauma of stillness as it is revealed in a state of oscillation. Hitchcock nous donne à voir et à sentir et donc à penser à travers les mouvements indissociablement naturels et truqués des oiseaux, les intervalles invisibles mais sensibles qui, d’un photogramme à l’autre, constituent le faux naturel de leur mouvement, leur faux mouvement si l’on veut. Hitchcock allows us to see and feel and thus to think, across the indissociably natural and faked movements of birds, the indivisible but perceptible intervals, which from one frame to another, constitute the false nature of their movement, their false movement as it were.31

The paradox that arises here is that the intensified acceleration of movement materialised by bird flight brings the mind’s eye constantly to imagine the intervals true to each phase of the beating of the wings. The spectator cannot help immobilising them in his mind, ‘pour supposer la plastique imaginaire par laquelle son propre corps se trouve alors modelé, transi d’une émotion sans nom, en deçà comme au-delà de la peur que le film invite à partager’ (‘to suppose “la plastique imaginaire” by which his own body finds itself thus modelled, paralysed by a nameless emotion, as much within as beyond the fear that the film asks us to share in’). This is both fear and its surplus, which is indeed a terrifying prospect. The response to stopping provokes something like a seizure, in both senses of the word, as being taken over and being struck with immobility. Bellour speaks, if 262

The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky

the film is good enough, of the possibility of perceiving the sublime in a stopped film, in proportion to ‘la folie particulière de surprise formelle que suggère le mouvement interrompu’ (‘the particular madness of superficial surprise that suggests interrupted movement’). In the case of The Birds this sublimity ‘est trés accentuée, tant penetrer le corps interne des vibrations d’ailes pour les revivre ensuite à leur vitesse réelle est une expérience toute de saisissements’ (‘is very exaggerated, so much is the internal body penetrated with the vibrations of wings that then to relive them in their real speed is an experience replete with seizures’).32 This is, as he mentions earlier, the consequence of the reality-effect of the emotion of cinema: ‘un saisissement d’idée à travers un saisissement du corps’ (‘a seizure of the idea across a seizure of the body’).33 But the inevitable caveat here is that there is no direct correlation between sensation and image, simply that there is movement of some kind that may or may not correspond to the film. This saisissement of body and idea, (saisissement is incidentally commonly used throughout Bellour’s text) brings us to consider the different types of stopping in the face of movement. If it is to have morbid and fearful connotations, as Bellour describes in relation to The Birds, then that narrows the possibilities of the idea of stopping as the very condition of thought and observation in the face of animals in motion. However, it need not imply a pacified yet dreadful saisissement as the experience of Bellour’s hypnotised spectator, but something much more active. This is another aspect of film’s ornithology: the elaboration of thought, understood in the broadest sense, and emotion (pleasure, satisfaction, the gratification of desires) in the tracking of birds on the wing as the product of a very different kind of saisissement. It is one which does not carry the connotation of death. In Tim Birkhead’s book, Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird (2012), he gives an account of climbing down a cliff on Skomer Island, where he has been observing birds off and on for nearly forty years, to attach a geolocator to a guillemot. The device measures the amount of daylight at ten-minute intervals (a suitably cinematic motif in some ways), which can be calibrated with the known variations in light at different points of longitude and latitude. A year later and there is another difficult descent down a cliff to see if any of the guillemots with geolocators have returned. One is found and the device, still attached to the bird’s leg, is plugged into a laptop. ‘Within minutes of capture, like magic the bird’s previous 370 days appear on the computer screen ... . A map of the world appears, pinpointing every ten-minute fix, until the bird’s entire year of travel emerges.’34 One of the most important features of ornithology is an extraordinary and multilayered sense of the time of looking which transforms Deleuze’s two types of time represented by birds into something much richer. This is not just the large amounts of time required to observe (or listen), but also the time of migration, the daily variations in behaviour and movement, the seasonal differences in physical appearance for some birds, as well as seasonal bird counts and censuses.35 In addition, there is a further question of discipline, bodily composure and even sometimes risk on the part of the observer. Most bird handbooks devote space to this kind of fieldcraft. 263

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Keep as still and quiet as you can. Spend time waiting and watching; while you need to actively search for birds in large spaces such as mountainsides, often it is better to wait for the birds to come to you ... . Keeping still and quiet also allows you to hear songs and calls more clearly ... . When you do have to move, do so slowly and smoothly with frequent pauses. Take care to avoid snapping twigs, etc. Talk to others only when necessary; loud whispers carry farther than low subdued speech.36

Patience and stillness are the foundation of this kind of observation. In the eighteenth century Gilbert White, who was one of the first to be interested in the ecology and behaviour of birds rather than simply their classification, called for ‘stationary men’ to pay attention to every aspect of their local environment.37 To ask what the thought of the bird might be for the stationary man or woman in the face of movement would be too general a question. It is certainly the case that a large part of the history of ornithology has been taken up with the classification of birds and the recording of appearances on lists. And, although it is a point that is probably too trivial to make, the enormous amount of time, energy and travel invested in by so many observers of birds obviously indicates a great deal beyond the mere collecting, listing and fixing of bodies in motion. The American poet Wallace Stevens helps us with this conundrum when he describes those moments when his thought is arrested or he hesitates in the face of the contemplation of birds. In the poem ‘The Hermitage at the Center’ (1952), for instance, they vanish into some form of mental confusion. But most important is the way that their movement from appearance to the dissolution of a thought pivots on a point of hesitation: thinking stops and is then redirected. And, true to the spirit of ornithology, this is as much a matter of the sound of birds as the vision of them. And the wind sways like a great thing tottering – Of birds called up by more than the sun, Birds of more wit, that substitute – Which suddenly is all dissolved and gone – Their intelligible twittering For unintelligible thought.38

There is an even more developed version of this in his poem ‘Looking across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly’ (1952), which inscribes an arc of thought that in some ways lies behind my whole reading of Bellour.39 In brief, the poem begins with a stripping away of the world beheld, and then looks beyond the grass, trees and clouds to an underlying principle. A pensive nature, a mechanical And slightly detestable operandum, free 264

The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky

From man’s ghost, larger and yet a little like, Without his literature and without his gods ... No doubt we live beyond ourselves in air. In an element that does not do for us, So well, that which we do for ourselves, too big, A thing not planned for imagery or belief.

As we saw with the first poem, it is at the point where, in this case, a swallow appears that a new sequence of ideas emerges and thought can become possible in the face of the emptiness of the air, or sky. A transparency through which the swallow weaves, Without any form or sense of form … .

From this weaving without form comes a renewed idea of what we are looking at, simply because something is beginning to make sense. This sense is made through a new integration with what is around us, which, in turn, is also a remaking of the poem itself. What we know in what we see, what we feel in what We hear, what we are, beyond mystic disputation, In the tumult of integrations out of the sky, And what we think, a breathing like the wind, A moving part of motion, a discovery ... .

And, although towards the end we come back to earth, and things become more qualified again, a new enquiry has arisen. A new scholar replacing an older one reflects A moment on this fantasia. He seeks For a human that can be accounted for.

And the final lines conclude, The spirit comes from the body of the world, Or so Mr. Homburg thought: the body of a world Whose blunt laws make an affectation of mind, The mannerism of nature caught in a glass And there become a spirit’s mannerism, A glass aswarm with things going as far as they can. 265

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

There are plenty of points in the poem where we ought to stop and take our time, but for the purposes of this essay we have something of an appropriate model here. We can perhaps pretend that in the thoughts that arc from the opening words of the title, ‘Looking ... and watching’, to the ‘glass aswarm’ at the end, caught in a lens say, via the weaving swallow that integrates sensing and being, we see something of how the motions of birds might be considered to stop thought and redirect it, or even create it in the first place in that place of hesitation and doubt. That nature’s movement ends up in this instance captured in the lens, aestheticised as the word mannerism implies, just as the swallow’s weaving is similarly the making of poetry. Because the thought of the swallow is also the thought of poetry (in the same way that Bellour’s animal is the thought of film), then we need to consider whether questions of movement and stillness are only an issue of aesthetics and ones bound to their respective media. However, in Stevens’s poem, the stop or hesitation in contemplation of the ‘transparency’ and the bird within it is as much a basis for conscious life (thought as breath) as it is of the terror of death. But, does it make sense to use a poem to illustrate a point about film? Is the arrest of thought and the remaking of thought a similar process in all experiences of the bird in flight? It is crucial that as far as birds, and animals more generally, are concerned, the posture of attention (the relative degrees of stillness over time, whether sitting or standing, seated in an auditorium or even concealed in a bird hide) is part and parcel of any consideration of the thought of birds, as well as of the creation and reception of bird imagery. This is an important contribution of Bellour’s, in which an integration of bodies, movement and non-movement, incarnates the relations between human and animal as a function of the image, and thus beyond. And this, of course, is paralleled in the interplay between stopping and taking form in Stevens. At the same time, there is a strong sense of the difficulty when holding on to these ideas. The interplay between forces and intensities does not necessarily imply a predictable connectedness, as I have mentioned already. At times the bare fact (which is almost the best that one can say) is that movement simply causes movement. Stevens’s marvellous phrase, ‘tumult of integrations out of the sky’, requires some sort of conclusive fixing (the ‘glass aswarm’), but does not lose sight of the absolute importance of the passage of time spent between the onset of thought and its control, of giving oneself up to the ‘moving part of a motion’, the ‘sharing of colour’ and so on. Ornithology has, as is well known, a particularly strong aesthetic component, as one can see from the long historical entanglement of description, illustration and classification; studies of plumage and display; and the arts of bird song.40 However, the aspect of ornithology that deals with systems of classification and nomenclature also requires a place in film’s ornithology. (Incidentally, I choose the phrase film’s ornithology to draw out the full ramifications of a particular stance of stillness on the part of the observer in the face of a fleeting object.) The consequences of the naming of the individual animal we have 266

The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky

already discussed to some extent. But, the implications of this naming do not necessarily mean a departure from abstract ideas of movement, or even forces and intensities, given that classification, especially of birds, is so image-dependent. Although not about birds, the documentary Sweetgrass: The Last Ride of the American Cowboy (2010), by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, exemplifies this, as indicated in the directors’ commentary on the DVD of the film. The initial remarks unpack, like a conceptual suitcase, the opening shots of an individual sheep staring at the camera, followed by the movement of a flock into a farmyard. The comments over this sequence of gazing and moving sheep, which lasts only a few minutes, cover the following topics: the last sheep drive and thus the end of a century of a particular form of pastoral practice; the appreciation of the individual sheep and then the idea of the sheep as a flock moving as a single body and the relation between the two; the gaze of the sheep at the camera and the aesthetics of looking at sheep generally; emotional responses to animal imagery; the layered history of migration and farming in Montana (eight nationalities are mentioned over these opening shots); finally, a discussion of the extraordinary transmission and survival of an obscure manner of calling animals that originated in Tudor and Stuart times in southern England, still practised by farmers in present-day Montana. It is perhaps too mundane to say that this particular proliferation of ideas – and one might add intensities and forces because migration of one form or another is such a prevalent theme – is a version of thought in the face of movement of the kinds we have been discussing in relation to Bellour and Deleuze. Though maybe too pedagogical in their terms, the film at least accepts the responsibility towards the animal that comes with naming. There are other versions of this. In Peter Greenaway’s grand comedy, The Falls (1980), the spirit of ornithological nomenclature and semiotics is exuberantly played on. The VUE (‘Violent Unexplained Event’), which involves some cataclysmic but unspecified encounter between birds and humans, has led to extraordinary effects on witnesses and survivors such as newly invented languages and even the ability to fly. This reverses the effect of Hitchcock’s attack by birds on humans (and the images of the film that seize the mind, as Bellour might say), from fear, morbidity, nameless dread, to the creation of names, etymologies, grammars and syntax. It is something else that birds give us to think, even when we have been struck by them in every sense of the term. Caught between the various degrees of abstraction of the animal image, from the shadows of light and dark, right through to the prosaic moment of the name, we do not need to decide between these various characterisations as alternatives, provided that our considerations take into account the postures of those attending to the image (whether makers or spectators), the relations they entail between living beings and above all, the time taken to observe.

267

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Notes 1. Raymond Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L., 2009), p. 504. 2. John James Audubon, The Audubon Reader, ed. Richard Rhodes (London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), p. 359. 3. Jeremy Mynott, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 156. 4. Barbara Allen, Pigeon (London: Reaktion, 2009). 5. Roger Peterson, Guy Mountford, P. A. D. Hollom, A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe (London: Collins, 1985), p. 130. 6. Bernd Brunner, Bears: A Brief History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Robert E. Bieder, Bear (London: Reaktion, 2005). 7. Seung-Hoon Jeong and Dudley Andrew, ‘Grizzly Ghost: Herzog, Bazin and the Cinematic Animal’, Screen vol. 49 no. 1 (2008), p. 11. 8. Brunner, Bears, p. 129. 9. Tom Tyler, Ciferae: A Bestiary in Five Fingers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), p. 68. 10. Ibid., p. 41. 11. Ibid., pp. 44–5. 12. I explore in more detail what I mean by cross-species contact and transformational consequences in Jonathan Burt, ‘Das Leben im Meer in Kunst und Wissenschaft: Jean Painlevé’s L’Hippocampe, ou “Cheval Marin”’, in Sabine Nessel, Winfried Pauleit, Christine Rüffert, Karl-Heinz Schmid and Alfred Tews (eds), Der Film und das Tier: Klassifizierungen, Cinephilien, Philosophien (Berlin: Bertz und Fischer, 2012), pp. 46–60. An English translation is included on a CD that accompanies the book, which also contains film excerpts. 13. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 433. Other explorations of this elision can be found, for example, in Akira Mizuta Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 195–6; Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 106, 110. Agamben writes that ‘man is the animal who goes to the cinema’, quoted in Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 415. 14. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 109. 15. Ibid., p. 112. 16. Ibid., pp. 112–13. Although not directly relevant to this context, this quotation on the alternative between virtual and real leopard leads to a discussion concerning choice and sacrifice which includes one of the few mentions of animals in Deleuze’s two Cinema volumes: ‘the beast or the ass in Balthazar possessing the innocence of one who does not have to choose’, (p. 116). 17. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 487. 18. Ibid., pp. 490–1. 19. Deleuze, Cinema 1, pp. 102–3. 268

The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky

20. Ibid., p. 107. 21. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, pp. 211–12. 22. Ibid., p. 63. 23. Ibid., p. 422. 24. See Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, pp. 469, 496. I will leave the question of how an instinct in itself may be innocent (or guilty for that matter). The animal est avant tout mouvement, comme on le voit chez Bergson; et, quant au cinéma, parce que son mouvement naturel semble par excellence contredire, tout en l’incarnant, le mouvement caché des intervalles définis par la machine-cinéma réinventant selon son mode propre un mouvement apparent de la vie (431) is above all movement as one sees in Bergson; and with regard to cinema, because its natural movement seems to contradict absolutely, by incarnating completely, the hidden movement of intervals defined by the cinema machine reinventing according to its specific mode an apparent movement of life. It is worth noting that the verb ‘incarner’ is used throughout this book and especially in relation to animals. 25. Ibid., p. 504. 26. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 32. 27. Ibid., p. 204. 28. Ibid., p. 203. 29. Ibid., p. 20. 30. Bellour, Le Corps du cinéma, p. 504. 31. Ibid., p. 504. 32. Ibid., p. 505. 33. Ibid., p. 139. 34. Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense: What It’s Like to Be a Bird (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 167. 35. See, for instance, Mark Barrow, A Passion for Birds: American Ornithology after Audubon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 167–9. 36. Jonathan Elphick, The Birdwatcher’s Handbook (London: BBC, 2001), p. 40. 37. Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selbourne, ed. Richard Mabey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 3. For a good summary account of the context of White in relation to the history of ornithology, see Peter Bircham, A History of Ornithology (London: Collins, 2007), especially pp. 100–11. For an analysis of the history of making oneself invisible in the environment and the development of bird photography see Matthew Brower, Developing Animals: Wildlife and Early American Photography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), especially pp. 97– 133. On the complex structures of interaction between birds and their observers, and the interesting problem of the observation of the observers, see Vincianer Despret, Naissance d’une théorie ethologique: la danse du Cratérope Écaillé (Le PlessisRobinson: Synthélabo, 1996). 269

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

38. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 505. 39. Ibid., pp. 517–19. 40. David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

270

Susan McHugh

16 Unknowing Animals Wild Bird Films and the Limits of Knowledge A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. Wallace Stevens, ‘Of Mere Being’

After my students watched director Judy Irvine’s The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2005), I expected some antipathy toward central figure Mark Bittner, whose story of taking a personal, then scientific and ultimately civic interest in his neighbourhood’s mixed-species flock of feral/ wild birds structures the film. Caring for these castaways and their feral progeny as urban wildlife, Bittner is presented as electively homeless and jobless for much of the film, squatting and otherwise scraping together a life focused on living with and learning from the birds, a life that would strike affluent college students as utterly alien. What I didn’t anticipate was how the film would rouse them to defend a different sense of foreignness, and one that Bittner’s narratives of the lives of individual conures bring into sharp relief. ‘He says he doesn’t own the flock, which is totally true’, one summarised, ‘but then he’s putting them into these romance stories like they’re little people, and they’re not!’ So what are they? Wild parrots to casual observers, parakeets to ornithologists, conures to birdkeepers and an invasive species to ecologists: the film’s uncertain terms reinforce the difficulty of what to make of these particular animals. Bittner defends his use of anthropomorphism to describe them, dismissing the extremist view that the birds have nothing like human feeling or thoughts as ‘cruel nonsense’. Yet his struggle to articulate his attempt to befriend an individual bird amid the experience of gaining the trust of a flock indicates a deeper conflict at the centre of the film. Punctuating the stories of individual birds that he tells throughout, the stunning scenes of Bittner surrounded by a happily feeding group that suddenly takes to the air – ‘wheel[ing] at a great speed, instantly, and without warning, as one bird’ – inscribe the flock as a foundational unit of collective life that resists translation to the terms of autonomous human selves.1 ‘Although the flock functions as

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

a single community’, Bittner elaborates elsewhere, ‘nobody makes decisions for the community as a whole.’2 From this perspective, my students’ discomfort with anthropomorphism is not contradictory to but rather makes plain the film’s central representational struggle with the limits of focusing on identity and difference regarding other species’ lifeways. Visually enabling the flock to emerge on its own, irreducibly multiple terms, Irvine’s film fleshes out a counternarrative trend through which wild bird films appear to have much more to say about what we do not and may never know about birds. From Winged Migration (2001) to The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos (2009) and above all the Academy-Award-winning March of the Penguins (2005), wildlife films featuring birds are proving phenomenally successful in the twenty-first century, just as they were in the earliest days of cinema. Like most nature films today, such texts are marketed as educational, primarily for their efforts to promote environmental awareness by virtue of the threatened and endangered status of their stars’ entire species. Yet, if this were the main source of their allure, then The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill would be an anomaly, not only for leaving viewers frustrated with a sense of not knowing its animal subjects but also for celebrating a motley crew of invasives, adapting through sometimes same-sex and cross-species couplings. Debates inspired by popular hits like March of the Penguins’ often ambiguous storylines and subjects make it all the more difficult to say exactly what ecological benefits they offer for the birds or any other species, even our own. By fetishising extinction, such films might be said to add an environmental dimension to Akira Lippit’s thesis that images of animals migrate to the very modern representational forms – above all, cinema – in which they are now perpetually caught in loops that ‘mourn’ their passing.3 However, the relations of social and aesthetic histories seem far more vexed in the case of birds on film. As Cynthia Chris explains, bird films in particular have served as forerunners of the wildlife film genre’s eventual focus not on death but on reproduction and sex.4 This particular swerve in their overarching narrative trajectory complicates the realities of dying species, what Thom van Dooren characterises as in each case a distinct and often ‘slow unraveling of intimately entangled ways of life’ that had evolved over millions of years and whose passings are unevenly experienced as tragedies.5 Focusing more narrowly on their central visual spectacle of flocking, I propose further that wild bird films enable us to mourn the passing of a totalising vision of species life as entirely knowable through a human individual’s perspective, and moreover allow us to use cinema as a means to visualise populations that range beyond the reach of anthropocentric thought – to re-view the medium as ‘without human meaning, without human feeling’, and therefore, like Wallace Stevens’s poetic bird, as conveying ‘a foreign song’.6 Threading together a more nebulous tradition across genres, this essay reads wildlife films alongside fake documentaries like Peter Greenaway’s The Falls (1980) as well as the dramas that inspire them, in his case, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and their afterlives in new media forms in order to explore how in general the focus on wild birds 272

Unknowing Animals

fosters a sense of animals on film as unknown and unknowable subjects, and how in particular the visual narration of wild bird flocks exceeds the storied form of a differentiated and otherwise disciplined human body. Part of my argument is that wild bird films contribute significantly to a broader formal shift away from stories that anchor zoomorphic ideologies of cinematic wildlife-watching, which Chris documents as becoming predominant in the twentieth century, and toward what Una Chaudhuri calls ‘zooëtic’ narrative forms that actualise a process in which questions are raised – possibly ‘put to us’ – by threatened and endangered wildlife and ‘with increasing urgency’ as these forms evolve into the twenty-first century.7 Animals are specially enabled to enact this transition in filmic forms because, as Jonathan Burt clarifies, they confront us with moving visual surfaces that operate according to a different logic from psychological interiority, a quality that renders them ‘richer’ for confronting the limits of forms of agency as well as normative ethical obligations.8 Pursuing Burt’s point that often in experimental animal films ‘one is being asked to look without necessarily understanding what one sees’, this essay pinpoints how attempts to engage the flock as a basic social unit enable Aves to become a particular class of animal that eventually allows development of this potential in mainstream cinema as well as extensions through other visual forms, perhaps most obviously today in the popular gaming app Angry Birds (2009) and its many fan fictions, but no less influentially in experimental art.9

Flocking ‘Birds are the only wild animals most people see every day’, proclaims popular animal writer Sy Montgomery, yet their ubiquity paradoxically becomes a barrier to appreciating ‘what otherworldly creatures they are’.10 Signalled so often in film titles, avian plurality seems to be what makes these wild animals at once so alluring and so difficult to grasp. In the isolating, built-over world intensively occupied by all things human, birds travelling together appeal to us with the visual spectacle of covering territories on their own collective terms, of occupying spaces with senses and reasons that we can only guess. Flocking is the feature that distinguishes the most successful attempts to capture wild birds on film. Whether flying, swimming or marching overland, they predominantly roam as migrant groups on screen. Box-office flops like The Legend of Pale Male (2009) and Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973) prove the rule that we want to see wild birds as anything but individuated subjects, perhaps even as manifesting a collective social sensibility that itself appears increasingly endangered. Amid the sometimes forced, often alienating mobility of human populations said to characterise the current age of globalisation, the spectacle of the flock gains poignancy for evoking the deep sense of time and cyclical approach to place that defines an ancient model of nomadic, subsistence and companionate living once shared across our species. And the appeal of filmic birds en masse appears to inspire as much as 273

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

it reflects changing valuations of groups otherwise dismissed as indeterminate ‘masses’. Traditionally revered and feared for nesting or dwelling in hives or colonies, birds along with bees (not to mention nomadic indigenous peoples) have inspired horror and loathing because they represent the obverse of the domestic subjects who anchor bourgeois households, that is, the kinds of individuals who are produced by ‘remov[ing]’ not only ‘the concept of group’ but more precisely associations like ‘swarm, plague, [and] scourge’ that make the diversity of ideas and experiences represented by collective life appear menacing.11 Conventionally shelved as horror, films like The Birds and The Swarm (1978) leap to mind as illustrative of how a nonhuman mass comes to be perceived as a chaotic, disfiguring menace, the very qualities that philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari praise as destabilising psychoanalytic reason with the figure and presence of ‘demonic multiplicities’.12 More recently, however, theorists warm to the swarm for different purposes. Political theorist Jane Bennett posits swarming as a more ‘lively’ and accurate baseline for the ‘agentic assemblages’ that constitute the vibrancy of social engagements.13 In an entirely different context, media theorist Jussi Parikka argues further that political potentials are being revitalised through the new, swarmlike modes of radical politics grounded in multitudes rather than individuals that are rendered perhaps most visible today in flash-mob-style actions orchestrated through social media.14 What may be more difficult to grasp is how the social movements grounded in these flockings are guided by ‘alternative logics of thought, organization, and sensation’, and this is where avian flocking on film may prove exceptionally helpful.15 By configuring the flock as a form of nonhuman agency, a number of otherwise disparate films guide a tentative shift toward more positive visions that visually and zoöetically inspire viewers not only to learn more about the birds and the bees, in every sense, but also to unlearn our sense and sensibilities of the social as restricted to a sum of the sexual, familial and other identity parts.

Marching Zeroing in on just one family of birds, penguins, it is soon apparent why they present a notoriously challenging filmic subject. Because their physical uniformity makes it difficult for the untrained eye to identify individuals amid the large colonies formed by many species of penguins, they are often used to ‘symbolize lack of individuality’, yet at the same time their upright posture, armlike flipperwings and other qualities make them ‘particularly readily anthropomorphized’.16 These contradictory aspects help to explain the shifting form and reception history of March of the Penguins, if not its special role in wildlife film history as the highest-grossing documentary of its year, and the second-highest ever, to date.17 The film’s original French version La Marche de L’empereur attempts to overcome the 274

Unknowing Animals

March of the Penguins (La Marche de l’empereur, 2005)

de/individual conundrum by projecting over shots of various birds an audiotrack that creates the illusion of a stable bird couple in conversation, via a pair of male and female voice actors posing as penguins ‘in love’.18 Thus, the story was built initially around a central contrast between the anthropomorphising narration of the reproductive couple and the visual scenes that overwhelmingly illustrate emperor penguins’ dependence on collective life, for instance, their need to huddle en masse for warmth while incubating eggs on the Antarctic winter ice. But the much more broadly distributed English-language version tells the story instead through an observational-style documentary narrative, presenting an arguably more accurate and alienating picture of the emperors’ lives. Because the framing voice remains human, however, it extends a tradition that enables viewers all too readily to displace the communal history of the flock – rather, the waddle – with anthropocentric stories. Along with popularity came some weird interpretations. Despite the translation to a more objectivising audio format, March of the Penguins inspired the misprisions of religious fundamentalists, who project onto the film a restrictive sense of ‘family values’, against its creators’ intentions. Director Luc Jacquet, who is also a trained biologist and field researcher, ‘condemn[s]’ their wilful distortions of animal life; noting the 80–90 per cent ‘divorce’ rate among the emperors, he insists, ‘You have to let penguins be penguins and humans be humans.’19 Suggesting as well a reason for the major audio shift in translation, Jacquet’s comments appeal to a respect for differences in order to allow the complexities of bird and human relationships to remain incommensurable, yet his comments pale against the restrictive desire for heteronormative reproductivity that swamps viewers’ commentary. Several scholars contend that the film provides a strange sort of refuge from gay marriage debates, amid which at the turn of the twenty-first century ‘flocks of people sought reassurances’ from naturalised filmic worlds that the couple form is more than just a patriarchal and discriminatory institution of state control.20 Given that a few highly publicised incidents of same-sex coupling among male zoo penguins – including Central Park Zoo’s Roy and Silo, whose successful adoption and incubation of an egg is celebrated in the children’s picture book And Tango Makes Three (2005) – had previously established their iconic value as 275

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

so-called gay animals, the religious fundamentalists’ ‘adoption of penguins as promoters of a moral majority’ is often dismissed as just ‘ironic’.21 From an ecological perspective, though, the human politics of the (un)naturalness of such couples are problematic not simply because this theme dominates the discussion, but more profoundly because such a restrictive focus freezes out any acknowledgment of the ways in which the fragile and complex structures of ecology require the sort of fluidity in sex, gender, family and other social relations that are foregrounded through filmic images of the penguin community. In lieu of grappling with the implications of the moving images themselves, old cinematic conventions regarding nesting birds can be felt through the focus on the heteronormative imperative, if not exactly film history itself. The fact that early wildlife film-makers, lumbered with heavy and otherwise stationary visual equipment, found an ideal subject in birds on the nest is oddly naturalised as the inevitable consequence of trying to represent charismatic fauna in many popular accounts of the early days of cinema. Yet a brief glance at the parallel careers of pioneering popular wildlife photographers and film-makers such as Oliver Pike and Cherry Kearton suggests how looking at birds complicates ethical, media and other engagements between individuals and assemblages. Fascination with birds not only bookends the career of Pike, author of In Birdland with Field Glass and Camera (1900) as well as director of In Birdland (1907), St. Kilda, Its People and Its Birds (1908), The Cuckoo’s Secret (1922), and A Family of Great Tits (1934). Birds are also writ big throughout the career of Kearton, author (with brother Richard) of British Bird Nests (1895) and director of the first acclaimed penguin-themed feature film Dassan (1930). Their attunement to this particular class of animals, which suffered horrible decimations in that period, informs a shared sense of strong conservationist views, unusual for wildlife film-makers of their generation. While old tropes associate birds with death across cultures, the evident damage of practices like egg collecting, bird hunting, fashioning hats with feathers and erecting glass-windowed skyscrapers along migration routes appears to have more directly motivated the central casting of species that were literally vanishing before these directors’ eyes. This is not to say that their or anyone’s visual interests or their outcomes are innocent. Birding, a practice rooted firmly in Victorian specimen collecting, nowadays looks like ‘a watch on the progress of extinction brought on in large part by the activities of the species watching’.22 So seeing these practices as extended through the optical innovations of the likes of Pike and Kearton casts a distinct pall over their later pro-bird activism. What is more, in their films live wild animals become cast in roles more familiar to modern human family life and consequently less recognisably avian. Although initially conceived as part of a strategy to make birds’ lives seem worth conserving, such films nonetheless set up the standard of a restrictively defined family of pair-bonded bioparents-plus-kids that is reflected in the audiotrack of La Marche de L’empereur and in the religious fundamentalists’ enthusiasm for March of the Penguins, along with more wide-ranging consequences for wildlife film. 276

Unknowing Animals

A transitional bird film from this early era of cinema, Julian Huxley’s The Private Life of the Gannets (1934) introduces the familiar formula whereby wildlife film moves distinctly away from any meaningful engagement with deep ecological values and toward a narrow appeal to human self-interest.23 Pointing to recent and otherwise ‘fine ornithological’ examples like Parrots: Look Who’s Talking (1995) and All Bird TV (1997–9), Derek Bousé identifies how the casual use of analogies to human life enables moral projection and other kinds of misstatements, with the result that wildlife films ‘intended as aids to understanding become impediments to it’.24 Chief among these are the associations of mated avian pairs with human ideals of sexual monogamy, which, of all the potential metaphorical couplings of birds and people, most egregiously defies scientific observations. While mating for life is common among certain species of geese, for instance, the vast majority of birds (and humans, for that matter) engage in flirtations with serial monogamy, settling in with sex partners for a clutch at best before going their separate ways. Polyamory is the biological norm, for them and for us, but the ongoing tendency in bird films is to disconnect the facts of life from reproductive fantasies of coupling, which brings me back to the problems of Jacquet’s film and its success. Just as ‘lesbian penguins’ are rendered ‘invisible’ in otherwise extensive media attention to the zoo stories of gay parents, intersections of the complex hetero-, homo- and non-reproductive relations that constitute penguin (as much as our own) society more generally are obscured by the power of the couple form to regulate via rhetorical admixtures of heterosexuality, reproduction and inequality.25 And, for species like emperor penguins whose ‘nest’ is the Antarctic sea ice predicted to disappear along with them in a matter of decades due to climate change, such distortions prove dangerous to ecological as well as socially inclusive politics.26 When affluent urban mommies and daddies take their babies to films whose intent is to (in the words of The Crimson Wing co-director Matthew Aeberhard) ‘encourage people to form an emotional connection to nature’ only always in narrative forms focused on pairs reproducing cute babies, it becomes hard to imagine how cinema could foster the kinds of self-reflection needed to slow the presently unsustainable rates of human population growth, let alone the industrial consumption patterns supporting the nuclear family model that pose the greatest threats to endangered populations.27 In this sense, the English-language version of March of the Penguins could be seen as more forward-thinking in translation, that is, in its attempt to direct attention away from the couple as the penguins’ basic reproductive unit and toward the vision of the flock. Dissolving the visual-narrative tension along with the couples and families in the end, the translation’s voiceover emphasises the key detail that the emperors mate only for a season, after which ‘the brand new family prepares to go their separate ways’, and ‘couples … part for the last time’, likely never to meet again once ‘the tribe returns to their [oceanic] home at last’. This leaves viewers free to ponder what remains of the bonds shared by the group that we have 277

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

been seeing throughout. Like the gay animal debates more generally, the Englishlanguage ending illustrates not so much the problems of identity as the ways in which we might begin to see how stories of animals as ‘like us’ might be placed in productive tension with other narratives of agency within the same text, ultimately to reveal the structures through which humans must both embrace animals’ similarities and respect differences in order to pursue a more responsive and responsible politics of collective life.28 For this reason, the elements of a more recent if less celebrated film are worth pondering further. Although paralleling March of the Penguins in so many other ways, The Crimson Wing more deliberately orients viewers to the politics of flocking as exceeding the nuclear-family pattern. Focusing on northeast Botswana’s Makgadikgadi salt pan, which is the least understood of all African flamingo breeding sites and believed to be the greater flamingos’ only remaining subSaharan nesting site, this sparsely narrated film follows the elaborately choreographed interactions of highly gregarious birds through mating, egg-hatching and rearing chicks. Co-parenting is implicit up to the point at which large groups of chicks become attended by small groups of adults, whom the film carefully terms ‘nurses’. This framing allows the inevitable deaths of youngsters to be viewed not simply as the fault of ‘bad’ parents (whatever that might mean) but rather as a failing of as well as for the group. Viewers are thus encouraged to rise to the demands of representing birdlife (if not human life) on its own terms. Allowed to operate as a central presence, the filmic flock is not so easily left alone – or let be, as Jacquet suggests – and for reasons that become even more visible in representations of birdlife across startlingly different contexts.

Falling Developments within the wildlife film genre provide only part of the story of how the flock takes cinematic shape on its own terms. Among countless nature films that keep birds mostly on the nest throughout film history, some texts announce other collective, agential potentials for avian multiplicities and media forms. The phenomenally successful and simple mobile-app video game Angry Birds stylises Aves as pure menace (at least, to green pigs) through the official channels of licensed merchandise, TV shorts and projected feature-length films. Although it is the single largest app-source of stealth data collection, players rally behind the birds in massive and surprisingly unpredictable ways, as evinced in the countless fan fictions inspired by the game. Most are typical YouTube videos – and, consequently, as one series title proclaims, ‘craptastic’ – but some like Greg Bishop’s short film The Birds of Anger (2011) fold back on the tradition, in this instance, as a blank parody of The Birds. Adding the Angry Birds’ motive of stolen eggs (which is after all a motivator of Pike and Kearton, too), such texts extend another filmic tradition that lumps all species of birds together in fictive collective actions. 278

Unknowing Animals

The Birds (1963)

Far from the reassuring scenes of domestic life that quickly became a wildlife film mainstay, avian life famously flashes up as a physical menace to human society in The Birds. Many recoil from Hitchcock’s weirdly multispecies flock’s attack on people not just from a visceral sense of horror but, more intriguingly, because this animal group represents a psychological threat, a manifestation of an active unknowing, an interpretation that inspires The Falls’ subsequent characterisation of a similar bird action known as ‘the Violent Unknown Event, or VUE’. Interestingly, most discussions of Hitchcock’s The Birds and Greenaway’s The Falls insist that the films are not about birds per se, but rather about people’s destructive obsessions, whether with mothering, flight, mortality, etc., which begs the question: what are birds doing in these films? Or, more to my point, what is it that bird flocks alone can do in these texts that makes their presence necessary for some kind of transformation? In his landmark essay on The Birds, Raymond Bellour makes the influential claim that it is ‘impossible to force film, which talks to life, to reveal directly nothing but structures of the mind’.29 Implicating viewers in the transformation of desire to a threat in a shot-by-shot analysis of the film’s first bird attack, Bellour’s point is that this scene reveals how the film calls attention to itself as a fiction, as a work of art. His interpretation hinges on the notion that the titular creatures are best seen as symbols of ‘the irrational anger of primitive forces’, and not understandable as a force unto themselves.30 Yet Bellour is identifying a particular way in which the film ‘talks to life’ that seems more true of the lone scene that pits an individual avian assailant against a particular person, namely, heroine Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren), than of The Birds as a whole. Later in the film, the people driven inside for their own safety deliberate the agential force of the multitude of birds that is doing violence to people, and together come to no clear conclusions. The film’s inconclusion thus opens another way of reading the seagull delivering a bloody head-wound to Melanie as sending the message that the birds are violent toward people but otherwise unknowable. Actively hostile to the human, the movement also transforms the one wild bird from an iconic point of contrast – whether to the human, or to the pair of lovebirds that Melanie delivers, or even (extrapolating from Bellour) the rational happiness of civilisation – to a link in an unfolding continuum populated by wild birds as commodities, captives, perpetrators and a 279

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

host of other potentials. No bird becomes named or otherwise perceivable as a distinct individual outside this chain of violence, and all are instead united anonymously in demonic multiplicity. From the perspective of the flock, then, The Birds’ central drama of human subject-formation and desire no longer unravels simply in symbolic reference to nor against a backdrop of nonhuman life, but instead via a more direct confrontation between human and bird lives that in the film is variously referred to as the ‘attack’, ‘war’ and ‘plague’, in other words, as an unknowable yet intentional, systematic and menacing engagement of nameless birds with hapless human individuals. Whether this is a force of nature or culture remains tantalisingly vague. Releasing the film the year after Rachael Carson’s publication of Silent Spring (1962), Hitchcock plausibly includes amateur-ornithologist character Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffiths) as the voice of environmental science, a woman who both underscores the unknowability of the avian cross-species formation – ‘for different birds to flock together, it’s unimaginable!’ – as well as attempts to explain it in terms of a sort of eco-revenge on ‘mankind[, who] makes it difficult for life to subsist on this planet’. That she speaks from no secure position of authority further sharpens this sense of human unknowing as folding back on the individual’s knowledge claims. For her interpretation faces immediate challenges from a mythologising seaman and a drunken religious zealot, who add their own competing accounts of what is happening, none of which convinces the increasingly anxious crowd of townsfolk that what they are witnessing can ever be accounted for. What they (and we as viewers) struggle to grasp is how the birds introduce a sense of tension within the very modern form of human subjectivity itself that collapses when the flock turns on us.31 If Bellour is correct that the site as well as the power of vision shifts from Melanie’s look that in ‘the very first shot … raises a flock of wild birds into the sky’ over San Francisco, and definitively so with her being observed while fending off the first aggressive seagull on Bodega Bay, then it seems plausible that, when Hitchcock later brings us alongside many more gulls to a bird’s-eye view over the town after the birds’ second mass assault, a visual way is paved against this narrative dissolution that is resolved by viewers’ inclusion alongside the birds’ final observation of the catatonic Melanie and company fleeing the scene of attack.32 This sense of the flock that exceeds, persists and in other ways pushes beyond human forms in The Birds also provides a way of accounting for the afterlife of the animal attack in The Falls. Immediately following Greenaway’s first feature A Walk through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978), The Falls reads at one level as the second instalment in the oblique story of the director’s ‘apocryphal hero’, alter ego and ‘ornithologist extraordinary’ Tulse Luper (J. J. Feild).33 Intriguingly, it doesn’t announce itself as such because here Luper plays a minor role like all of the film’s ninety-two characters, their stories told briefly and sequentially, with occasional cross-references. In keeping with the tongue-in-cheek foundformat of Greenaway’s documentary-style narrative in The Falls, random materials 280

Unknowing Animals

like photographs bought at car-boot sales are assembled to flesh out the fictive efforts of bureaucrats appointed to the VUE Commission to document an arbitrary segment of the survivors (those whose last names begin with the letters f-a-l-l) of a bird-on-human attack, the scale of which is expanded from The Birds here to encompass the globe. The ‘entirely rationalistic, coolly detached, and familiarly functional’ approach ultimately allows not just the film-within-the-film but indeed all conventional knowledge systems to be rendered foreign, mysterious and ultimately inadequate to represent the birds, let alone explain their again unlikely multispecies involvement in the VUE.34 As in The Birds as well as March of the Penguins, the formal disjunctures of verbal and visual also open a potential for something as-yet-unformed to emerge, something that enframes more clearly than it marks differences between individuals and the assemblages that produce them. Playfully touted as ‘a film being made about a film’, Greenaway’s homage to Hitchcock spins an ultimate fiction, an ‘exhaustive, thorough documenting of an event that did not happen, which affected people who do not exist, verified by experts who also do not exist, and ultimately invented by an array of possible authors, none of whom exist either’.35 Among the many VUE theories lofted by various characters, the notion that it is all a hoax of Hitchcock’s to give credibility to ‘the unsatisfying ending of his film’ clarifies the fact that viewers are intended to reflect more broadly on the limits of fiction through comparisons between film techniques as well as non-metaphorical representations of human and avian life. Critical, too, is the increasingly deliberate legitimation of a sense of the flock as an alternate form of agency. Greenaway claims that he actively supports the notion ‘that the whole VUE phenomenon was engineered by birds’, suggesting another level at which the film concerns transformations of knowledges of collective life.36 Among a host of bizarre mutations, including immortality, the ability to speak entirely new languages and gender quadromorphism, the otherwise quite disparate VUE victims serially presented in The Falls share a tendency to approximate birdlike behaviours. Many affected by the VUE pursue a desire to fly that follows the mythical Icarus’s journey, ending in tragedy. Likewise, the victims become ill at ease in the human world in birdlike ways, not unlike Hitchcock’s Melanie, who after the final attack seems fragile, twitchy, given to prolonged bouts of awkward staring, with her communication ability reduced to parroting ‘No!’ Because no one ever describes the moment when birdlife turned against humans, bits of dead birds scattered throughout The Falls are all that appears to remain of any form of avian agency. Also, because Greenaway does not elaborate ‘the few characters who direct their VUE languages back towards animals’, never mind Aves, it remains questionable whether this film can be said to be about birds at all.37 Along with the flocks themselves, here is where I think the wild bird film tradition itself – that is, the assemblage of texts across time and across conventional cinematic categories – becomes more important than a sum of its individual parts. Immediately preceding The Falls, A Walk through H functions in many ways as a companion piece, in part because the audiotrack introduces Luper as the guide 281

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (2003)

The Crimson Wing (2008)

to a lost ornithologist, and also because the visual component constitutes an obverse of The Falls, comprising ninety-two of the director’s abstract paintings and line drawings, which the narrator cues as ornithologically significant ‘maps’, which are interspersed with documentary footage of live wild birds, ‘single and in flocks, sitting, gliding, rushing across the screen’.38 The artwork frequently signals human-built environments, often from a bird’s-eye vantage point, but the central human figure, a bird scientist described as travelling ‘from known to unknown territory by way of bird reference through differing landscape’, along with all human characters here remains conspicuously visually absent.39 Ranged alongside The Falls’ assemblage of stories of affected individual humans into a collage of ‘the VUE community’ that absents animals, A Walk through H might be said to create a complementary population-centred portrait of birds sans humans; together the films can be read as a diptych, with the VUE charting the line in between. Like the different versions of March of the Penguins, the two films brought together as sides of the same events exploit the tensions between largely verbal human stories that identify individual characters and the largely visual presentations of bodies guided en masse by a collective will. Put another way, Greenaway’s films work in unison to perch groups of people and birds along with various cinematic techniques uneasily alongside each other, groupings that disrupt conventional assignments of personalities to bodies. Moving from the breakdown of subjectivity again so central to The Birds and into the representation of flocks that strings together more recent examples like The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and The Crimson Wing, 282

Unknowing Animals

Greenaway’s experimental films bridge a developmental trajectory for Burt’s argument that film animals operate as agents of a different order from human subjectivity, tracking a continuum between the singular human form of subjectivity and more fluid forms of agency. I conclude by considering how this pathway leads to contemporary zoöetic examples that call for social and ecological action beyond traditional anthropomorphic ways of relating and perhaps also beyond filmic forms of art.

Mediating ‘To the flock’ is the dedication of Bittner’s book The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a companion volume to the film that evokes The Falls most clearly with its conclusion, an illustrated, all-parrot ‘Cast of Characters’ that likewise briefly catalogues the physical, behavioural and relational particularities of all of the story’s avian (and, curiously, none of the human) players. In an abrupt departure from the film that unforgettably ends with the director’s voiceover declaration, ‘Mark and I became a pair’ (he and Irvine subsequently married), Bittner as book author acknowledges his dedication to the birds as a social group, voicing desires that far exceed the boundaries of symbolism. For the question persists: how does the separation of subjectivity and agency by filmic dramatisations of birdlife become conceivable, let alone sustainable? Pace Greenaway, who claims to resign himself to the ‘death of cinema’ (‘there’s no use complaining’), the wild bird films gathered here suggest that integrating species, social and media forms fuels as much as it complicates a growing and complex picture of collective life.40 Perhaps most obviously, the history of these developments no longer looks like a linear, progressive remediation of bird narratives now that it has come to include Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003–). The latest instalment of the Luper saga, this multimedia project, composed of three films as well as books, TV episodes, CD-ROMs, DVDs and an interactive website, may depart from the ornithological obsessions of the earlier texts but nonetheless signals how intermediation, or a looping around through different media that features no clear objective or endpoint, provides a mechanism for the serendipitous processes through which the filmic potentials for angry birds (and Angry Birds) take shape.41 As the didactic urge to convey knowledge about birds gives way to more creative envisionings of avian intelligence as mind-blowing, as fundamentally altering our ‘relationship to nature and the universe’, wild bird films confront us with an awareness of a multitude that follows neural and other pathways that remain inaccessible, perhaps to some of us more than others.42 For this reason, I conclude by referencing a handful of contemporary artworks that figure birds in ways that, as UK-based artist Rosie McGoldrick explains, ‘deny proximity to the animal’.43 Through several projects about animal practices focused on birds, McGoldrick pursues the breakdowns of imagination and communication that surround such pursuits as birdwatching, bird283

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

keeping and bird representation. Studio Interview with Cranes (2009), a video loop of a headshot of the artist nodding in a hat fringed with origami cranes, in which the artist is making them dangle and jostle against each other but otherwise doing and saying nothing, isolates the body language associated with successful visual media interviews to engage in an ‘unspoken conversation’ with the birds about whom she is thinking. More so than the films that include physical traces of animals, this video calls attention to the ways in which the artistic rendering of animal presence proceeds in conversation with its evacuation. Adding to this sense of the limits of representing birds, McGoldrick’s hat also quietly references a complex history in which metaphorical ‘birds’ or women emerged as villains and victims in the feather trade. Implicated in the devastation of nongame bird populations for millinery fashions at the end of the nineteenth century, women embraced the otherwise withering Audobon societies to become the galvanizing force behind the conservation movement credited with bringing some species back from the brink of extinction.44 In the same sort of serendipitous loops of media and species forms through which the rendering of birds into objects moved John James Audobon from hunter and taxidermist to painter and conservationist in the public imagination, McGoldrick’s work announces a very different and changing relationship with the human subject that emerges from engagements with avian multiplicity, particularly when viewers are enlisted as active agents. Tell Me Something: A Field Guide to the Voices of an Unkindness of Ravens (2011) is an artist’s book by Catherine Clover that subtly takes to task the assumptions built into the collective words for this family of birds, which include ‘conspiracy’ and ‘constable’ as well as ‘unkindness’. An Australia-based artist whose practice integrates audio field recordings, digital imaging and spoken/written words, Clover structures the book as a series of scenes, setting the stage each time by day, time, climactic conditions and the nature and kind of avian interactions along with human noises captured therein. Against this backdrop, the particular raven noises featured in each scene are figured as the main event. Each bird’s contribution is scripted phonetically, often with musical descriptions added tentatively, such as ‘Forte or perhaps mezzo forte’ (42) and ‘Rise in pitch, as if a question’ (30). What Clover is careful not to offer is exactly what readers expect of the field guide genre: any conclusive interpretations of what is actually going on in birdlife. In this presentation, the birds flitting across the pages become charismatic, interesting and unknowable. Read in conversation with projects more purposefully designed to advocate for and with wild avian species like the Ghosts of Gone Birds – a group of artists now working together through a variety of media forms, installations and events to raise a ‘creative army for conservation’ – the movement that defines such artworks invites further speculation. The loosely coordinated, collaborative efforts of the Ghosts may not so deliberately explore the limits of knowledge with wild birds in film and other media, but they do propose to complement the knowledges 284

Unknowing Animals

gathered by ecological science by opening and maintaining creative spaces for shared futures, in which our flocks, armies and other collectivities of unknowing animals are still somehow relating to each other. What’s at stake in these new aesthetic developments is the ability to conceptualise life as well as death environmentally in terms of global interpenetration, or (as my students put it in more colourful English) the worldwide clusterfuck that we cannot help but be entangled in and that doesn’t begin or end with human desires.45

Notes 1. Ernest Lewis [Vesey], In Search of the Gyr-Falcon: An Account of a Trip to Northwest Iceland (London: Constable & Co., 1938), p. 154. 2. Mark Bittner, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (New York: Harmony Books, 2004), p. 207. 3. Akira Lippit, Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 197. 4. Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 125–6. 5. Thom van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss on the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. 14. 6. On the de-transcendentalising performative dynamic – the ‘mere’ in ‘Of Mere Being’ – see Cary Wolfe, ‘Neither Beast nor Sovereign: Wallace Stevens’ Birds’ (forthcoming) in Ted Toadvine (ed.), Animality and Sovereignty: Reading Derrida’s Final Seminars (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming 2016). 7. Una Chaudhuri, ‘(De)Facing the Animals: Zooësis and Performance’, Animals and Performance special issue of Drama Review vol. 51 no.1 (2007), p. 9. 8. Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion, 2002), pp. 30–1. 9. Ibid., pp. 93–4. 10. Sy Montgomery, Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur (New York: Free Press, 2010). 11. Erica Fudge, ‘Pest Friends’, in Bryndis Snaebjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson (eds), Uncertainty in the City (Berlin: Green Box, 2011), p. 68. 12. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 241. 13. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 14. Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. 43. 15. Ibid., p. xix.

285

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

16. Elizabeth Leane and Stephanie Pfennigworth, ‘Marching on Thin Ice: The Politics of Penguin Films’, in Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane and Yvette Watt (eds), Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in Human–Animal Relations (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), p. 30. 17. Winged Migration ranks fifteenth and The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill fifty-first in the list of total grosses (www.boxofficemojo.com). 18. Gillian Calder, ‘Penguins and Polyamory: Using Law and Film to Explore the Essence of Marriage in Canadian Family Law’, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law vol. 21 no.1 (2009), p. 66. 19. Quoted in Calder, ‘Penguins and Polyamory’, p. 64. 20. Ibid., p. 87. 21. Noël Sturgeon, ‘Penguin Family Values: The Nature of Planetary Environmental Reproductive Justice’, in Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010), p. 110. 22. Jeffrey Karnicky, ‘What Is the Red Knot Worth? Valuing Human/Avian Interaction’, Society & Animals vol. 12 no. 3 (2004), p. 259. 23. Chris, Watching Wildlife, p. 27. 24. Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), p. 162. 25. Ibid., p. 162; Judith Halberstam, ‘Animating Revolt/ Revolting Animation: Penguin Love, Doll Sex, and the Spectacle of the Queer Nonhuman’, in Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (eds), Queering the Non/Human (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), p. 270. 26. Using ‘a novel and more comprehensive analysis than previous studies’, one recent study ‘predicts a decline of the Terre Adélie emperor penguin population of 81% by the year 2100’, and identifies ‘a 43% chance of an even greater decline, of 90% or more’. Stéphanie Jenouvrier et al., ‘Effects of Climate Change on an Emperor Penguin Population: Analysis of Coupled Demographic and Climate Models’, Global Change Biology vol. 18 no. 9 (2012), pp. 2756–70. 27. Quoted in Neil Smith, ‘Disney Gets Back to Nature Films’, BBC News, 25 September 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8270304.stm. 28. Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 160. 29. Raymond Bellour, ‘System of a Fragment (on The Birds)’, in Constance Penley (ed.), The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 30. Unravelling the pleasures of the cinematic text – ‘an always shaky, always compound equilibrium of a set of forms and structures which define the work’ – he distinguishes between film as an object of aesthetic beauty and its function as a site of desire (p. 28). 30. Ibid., p. 70. 31. Patrick O’Donnell, ‘James’s Birdcage/Hitchcock’s Birds’, Arizona Quarterly vol. 62 no. 3 (2006), pp. 45–62, glosses ‘narrative despair’ in The Birds as

286

Unknowing Animals

a narrative strategy that underwrites the formation of subjects whose desire is entirely constrained, in an oddly formal sense by the very drive – the supposedly, globally capacious libidinal pulsion that enables the manufacture and acquisition of desire’s objects [what psychoanalysis posits as the routing mechanism for desire] – which is supposed to get us where we want to go but only and always takes us where we’ve already been. (p. 49) 32. Bellour, ‘System of a Fragment’, p. 67. 33. Nigel Andrews, ‘A Walk through Greenaway’, in Vernon Gras and Marguerite Gras (eds), Peter Greenaway: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), p. 3. 34. Bart Testa, ‘Tabula for a Catastrophe: Peter Greenaway’s The Falls and Foucault’s Heterotopia’, in Paula Willoquet-Maricondi and Mary Alemany-Galway (eds), Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema (London: Scarecrow Press, 2001), p. 88. 35. Quoted in Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, ‘Two Interviews with Peter Greenaway’, in Willoquet-Maricondi and Alemeny-Galway, Peter Greenaway’s Postmodern/Poststructuralist Cinema, p. 319; Amy Lawrence, The Films of Peter Greenaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 48. 36. Leon Steinmetz and Peter Greenaway, The World of Peter Greenaway (Boston, MA: Journey Editions, 1995), no pagination. 37. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), p. 36. 38. Steinmetz and Greenaway, The World of Peter Greenaway. While the bulk of the film includes close-up and tracking shots across the artwork, there is also a long opening shot of a gallery/office space in which the paintings and drawings are hung on the walls. 39. Greenaway, quoted in ibid. 40. Greenaway, quoted in Marcia Pally, ‘Cinema as the Total Art Form: An Interview with Peter Greenaway’, in Gras and Gras, Peter Greenaway, p. 116. 41. On remediation, see Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). On intermediation, see N. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 42. Theodore Xenophon Barber, The Human Nature of Birds (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 148. 43. Rosie McGoldrick, ‘Interviews with Cranes: Art and the Animal – Figure or Abstract’, Minding Animals Conference, Utrecht University, Netherlands, 5 July 2012. 44. Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 59–62. 45. I thank the editors and Jonathan Burt for providing excellent feedback and other encouragement on earlier drafts of this essay, and the students enrolled in my spring 2012 course Nature Films for their inspiration.

287

Raymond Bellour

17 Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death Translated by Allyn Hardyck In March 1962, when Alfred Hitchcock started shooting The Birds (1963), his forty-eighth film, he had a long history behind him, in England and the US, of attraction to animals and their images. As an image of life, of the living as such, the animal is especially suited to embody death’s inevitability, given that it suffers death or inflicts it in this universe of fiction where murder is a primary motif. As though the life force with which cinema is endowed through its own quality of animating movement called all the more for this response from death, whether as act or as an interruption, either manifest or concealed, of movement. We see this at the very beginning of Sabotage (1936). The protagonist, Verloc (Oskar Homolka), who has sold out to English Nazis, brings life in London to a brief halt by pouring sand into the mechanism managing the power grid. But Verloc is also the owner of a cinema, the ‘Bijou’, whose screening schedule he inevitably interrupts. From here a distribution of the animal motif branches out on the basis of two intermingled logics. First, animals are associated, by an obscure analogy also containing antinomies, with the fatal action. As he watches giant tortoises turning about in the aquarium of the London Zoo, Verloc is ordered by a Nazi agent to spread terror in the city by placing a bomb in Piccadilly Circus on the day of the Lord Mayor’s Show. An astonishing special-effects shot, virtualising Verloc’s inner vision, momentarily transforms an aquarium full of tiny fish into a collapse of buildings, dragged down as they fall. A bird salesman that Verloc visits is tasked with providing the time bomb. It is conspicuously hidden in the drawer at the bottom of a birdcage that Verloc finds some excuse for giving to Stevie (Desmond Tester), his wife’s beloved younger brother; the package is accompanied by a letter bearing these words: ‘Don’t forget the birds will sing at 1:45.’ This birdsong then converges with the idea of cinema, heightening its symbolisation of death: fearing that the police have him under surveillance, Verloc entrusts Stevie with the mission of placing the package in a locker on his way to return the reels of a short film with the ‘juicy’ title Bartholomew the Strangler. Delayed by a traffic jam, Stevie ultimately dies in the explosion of the bus he ended up taking, despite the law against carrying film reels on the London public transport system.

Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death

But the animal also embodies life. We see this even at the bird shop, where the murderous proprietor desperately tries to convince a disgruntled customer that the bird he sold her does in fact sing, that it really is alive. Or through Stevie, who questions Verloc on how to distinguish the female from the male in his pair of birds, in a scene that is an early draft of similar conversations on lovebirds in The Birds, first between Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) and Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor) in the prologue, then later between Melanie and Cathy Brenner (Veronica Cartwright). The boy is associated with animals: we repeatedly see him playing with a dog on the bus almost until the bomb explodes (the animal is kept on the edge of the frame, in the shots where Stevie grows frustrated with the delay; these alternate with shots of the clock marking the approach of the fatal moment). Just before, while in the street, he was holding a pigeon in his hand, playing with it for a long time. In the aquarium, where Verloc was seized by his vision of death, a few words exchanged between a young man and his date associate the fertility of oysters with the difference between the sexes (‘[Its] rate of fertility is extremely high. After laying a million eggs, the female oyster changes her sex.’ ‘Hm! I don’t blame her!’) More subtly, animal movement integrates itself into that of the action, to which it imparts a kind of trembling: a flight of pigeons paralleling the progress of a policeman tailing Verloc, part of the dissolve that brings us to the young inspector in charge of the investigation, who ends up walking past Stevie playing with his pigeon. One moment stands out by the reversion it enables between these extremes of life and death that continually turn around to face each other. Learning of Stevie’s death, his sister enters the film theatre adjoining their apartment – the theatre through which the characters have been walking since the beginning of the film, repeatedly blurring the boundaries between spectacle and reality. The film on the screen is a Disney cartoon released a little less than a year earlier, Who Killed Cock Robin? (1935). Sitting down for a moment, the young woman can’t keep herself from laughing through her tears with the children, watching Cock Robin singing tenor while perched in a tree, until he is shot with an arrow by another bird and his long fall, underscored by the question in the film’s title, returns her to her sad reality. The film within the film thus intensifies the duality of the animal image that manifests itself throughout. Especially since this is a cartoon: only the explicit artifice of cinema grants it a supplement of movement, bringing it from death to life as long as the projection lasts, even while presenting death itself (incidentally, we go from performed death in the cartoon to ‘real’ death in the film, when the heroine walks upstairs to her apartment, soon to kill her husband). This is the tension and the power that Hitchcock will later make use of in The Birds by submitting the cinema of reality that had always been his to a generalised use of special effects, as though echoing the reversibility that his films have always stressed between life and death in the assimilation of animal and human. And so, with no claim to exhaustiveness, following for the most part the chronology of a glorious span of the American period: the old couple’s little dog 289

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

found lifeless in the courtyard of Rear Window (1954), the mirror image of the body of the wife of Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), who chopped it up to get it out of his apartment. In The Trouble with Harry (1956), the mysterious cadaver of a man, found in the middle of a forest, which may or may not have been the result of a hunting accident. And especially, in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), the terrifying chain of events that leads Dr Ben McKenna (James Stewart) to London and the taxidermist Ambrose Chappell (Frank Atkinson). The exchange between them that quickly turns aggressive and the ensuing struggle between the doctor and Chappell’s staff have as a backdrop two events justifying McKenna’s intrusion: the mysterious death at the start of the film of a fake Arab who whispers Ambrose Chappell’s name in the doctor’s ear after being stabbed in the back following a chase through a marketplace; then the kidnapping, associated with that death of the McKennas’ child, threatened with death himself. The vibrant presence in the taxidermist’s overcrowded studio, within each frame, of dead animals of all species – mammals, birds, fish, stuffed or about to be – does not really have a fixed meaning, unless it is an allusion to death itself. The startling moment when McKenna, while struggling, sticks his hand into the gaping jaw of a tiger’s head and can’t pull it out, shows that a dead animal doesn’t bite. Nevertheless, these immobile animals seem to come alive, as the people and the camera move about them (like the sawfish that Ambrose Chappell carefully places out of harm’s way, whose serrated edge slides past Stewart’s neck while, towering over him to his left, a stately lion teeters nervously). And so, between drama and comedy, as they let the threatening image of their true animality hang overhead, all these animals denote in an overall sense the animality inherent in the conflicts between human bodies. At the same time, however, they define by way of contrast the nature of the cinema image, intended to reproduce the movement of life that they intrinsically incarnate just as man does. Such is the tension that Hitchcock soon developed by concentrating on birds in two successive films, both complementary and dissimilar: Psycho (1960) and The Birds. Birds appear in Psycho during the encounter between Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in his small private living room behind the motel’s reception desk. Stuffed, hung on the walls or placed on furniture, they dominate, with their eyes, beaks and wings, a dialogue within the shots and between the shots in which they intervene and of which they become a constant motif. On the one hand, these birds are Norman’s passion – taxidermy is his only hobby; on the other, Marion, who barely touches the sandwiches made for her, is somewhat unreasonably compared to them by Norman (‘you eat like a bird’ – she whose name is both a type of bird and a piece of film equipment). We know how Norman, after having stared with bulging eyes at the image of Marion undressing thanks to a hole drilled in a wall which resembles that of a projection booth, returns to murder her in the shower during the scene that has perhaps become the most famous in film history. We also know that, while repeatedly stabbing her, Norman’s disguised body looms over her like an immense bird; in so 290

Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death

doing, he increasingly becomes his own mother, stuffed like his birds were, so he can continue to live within her as she lives within him. We could apply a thoroughly psychoanalytical interpretation, following the logic of fetishism pushed to the breaking point, especially since the psychiatrist at the end of the film has already done so, reformulating in his own way Norman Bates’s family history.1 This is what The Birds approaches from the opposite direction: in place of the motionless figures of stuffed birds, it substitutes the deployed logic of living birds. Actually, Hitchcock had already tried this once before, briefly, a quarter century earlier, in Young and Innocent (1937). The shot is striking. The scene where it appears comes after the opening scene featuring a violent confrontation between a man and his wife, who is accused of having a young lover. A shot of seagulls flying in the distance over an empty beach opens the second scene. We quickly discover a woman’s body, tossed about by the waves; a young man running toward it recognises her, utters her name and runs off; two young girls coming from the opposite direction notice the body and rush up to it, peering over before turning away with a horrified scream that immediately blends in with the call of the gulls. These birds, their bodies blurring together, then appear in an extreme close-up – as they shriek and flap their wings, with the sea in the background – for barely two seconds. Just long enough for the girls to turn back around for a second look at the body. Why this extreme close-up teeming with birds, inducing an intense shock and coming before what they should have been seeing? We could say (especially since, as they look up, they see the lover running off, becoming the ideal ‘wrong man’ accused of the murder that the husband carried out): the violence of man and his phallus is represented here by the birds’ flight and beaks. This is what they see, a phantasmatic image embodied by the animal. But the logic of the symbol also responds to the intensity that is produced, even in such a short span of time, between the wings and bodies of the birds, in the appreciable but almost imperceptible intervals imposing themselves from one turn of the body and one beat of the wings to another, without exhausting that intensity. I imagine that it was to develop such a tension between the story and its image, carried to an extreme through the flight of birds, that Hitchcock had the urge to adapt Daphne du Maurier’s short story immediately upon reading it, just after he finished North by Northwest (1959). Of the long chapter dealing with The Birds in Bill Krohn’s Hitchcock at Work (2000), one first retains two things, which seem to have been partly connected: the ‘emotional state of siege’ into which this shoot had thrown Hitchcock, completely out of the ordinary for him, leading to unexpected changes in the script and improvisations on the set; and his ultimate decision, after trying several possible approaches, to rule out any overt motivation for the sudden fury of the birds systematically concentrated on the small town of Bodega Bay, two hours’ drive from San Francisco.2 As the attacks proceed, everyone strives to discover the reason behind them, but only two answers are given during the one group scene in the film, in the restaurant when the birds attack the centre of the town. The first 291

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

answer is apocalyptic, pronounced by a drunkard announcing ‘the end of the world’, and driving his point home with biblical verses. The second seems to be psychological, indicating a fit of hysteria; a panic-stricken mother holding her two terrified children accuses Melanie Daniels of being the cause of the disaster: Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil! EVIL!!!

This is not an unreasonable interpretation; the plot itself encourages it. At Melanie’s first glance upwards at the very start of the film when she goes to the bird shop, a mass of seagulls flood the skies of San Francisco to her astonishment. Then, using the excuse of the lovebirds that she secretly brings to young Cathy Brenner, in response to the tempting interest that Cathy’s older brother showed in her at the bird shop, Melanie progressively insinuates herself into the intimacy of the Brenner family. As she does so, the bird attacks increase throughout Bodega Bay, carefully calibrated by Hitchcock in order to maintain the interest, emotion and fear (first attack on Melanie, struck in the head by the gull in the boat; then a solitary gull again, smashing itself against the door of Annie (Suzanne Pleshette) the teacher, with whom Melanie was spending the night; first mass attack of the gulls during Cathy’s birthday party; the sparrows’ invasion of the Brenner house through the chimney; the killing of Fawcett by gulls on his farm; the crows’ attack on the school; the high-angle shot of the gulls overlooking the town; the killing of Annie by crows in front of her house; then the full-scale attack on the Brenner house; and finally Melanie lacerated by birds of several different species in the attic that she’d carelessly entered). So the discovery of Melanie’s desire for Mitch does go hand in hand with the cosmological cataclysm associated with the birds. But one is not strictly the cause of the other; rather, they develop together, side by side. As opposed to what happens in Psycho, there is no inherent symbolism to the birds: they attack Melanie alone, at the beginning and end of the film, but they also attack men, women and children, a whole community and even beyond, as the radio announces: all the way to Santa Rosa, a neighbouring city in northern California.3 The film does not really lend itself, except for those who must interpret everything, to the phallic symbolism that figures in Marnie (1964), with a search for the originating trauma whose weight is carried for a long time by the heroine’s overly beloved horse – from this perspective, Marnie is also an intellectualised version of National Velvet (1944). Certainly, in The Birds, as almost always with Hitchcock and so often in the classic cinema, there is a couple and/or a family to be made or remade. But this is not like a force that reacts with the other elements of the film so as to saturate them with meaning. Melanie’s more or less scandalous conduct in the past; the mother’s loneliness since her husband’s death; the difficulty Mitch has in extracting himself from her grasp to find a wife; young Cathy’s adolescence, in short the neurotic 292

Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death

normality that the caged lovebirds vouch for psychically and socially – all this paints a more or less conventional portrait that the film draws on. But the essential – the everyday birds suddenly transforming into a savage force – becomes neither the proof nor the assurance of that reading, except in the overall sense that life and death are intertwined within the birds. This is a way of accounting for the lack of a secret to discover here: there is no puzzle to solve, no real or imagined guilty party. The Birds is practically the only Hitchcock film – apart from the uncharacteristic Waltzes from Vienna (1933) – that escapes from the pattern of crime or misdeed followed by an investigation. For all the energy that those elements generate elsewhere is concentrated here in the flight of the birds. In Young and Innocent, the metaphorised sexual crime seemed to be readable, in the space of two brief seconds, on their beaks and between the beats of their wings. In The Birds, this same material power expands, developed for its own benefit, becoming the raison d’être of a film intended to encompass a breakdown of nature as a whole. Both Hitchcock and his collaborators have described at length the various technical feats enabling the suggestion of a natural violence that their clarifications are powerless to temper.4 Patricia Hitchcock says it well, having visited the shoot and knowing all about the smallest detail but at each screening experiencing anew both the full illusion of reality and the emotion it elicits. This is mostly due to the birds themselves, the flight of the birds filling so many shots. For the bird is not just any animal. It is first of all always a collective animal, living in flocks. And its flight often stands out as such, with the sky in the background. So that between the bodies of birds flying together, intervals appear that are analogous to those produced in the flight of one bird seen alone, between the various stages of one beat of its wings. A photograph by Edouard Boubat brings this out well: we see a seagull, flying along a beach. The bottom of its foot seems to touch the gravel dune, the rest of its body is suspended above the sea; the right wing, turned toward us, is almost in focus, while the other, turned toward the water, shows a blurry range of variations that are staggered, like the imperceptible intervals of movement and time.5 As if these micro-intervals indicated in one single motionless image the ever more decomposed movements of wings that E´tienne-Jules Marey tried so long and so hard to multiply and collect in order to make them visible all at once. If ‘the movements of man are undoubtedly the subjects most often treated by Marey’,6 Michel Frizot also points out to what extent the bird was ‘his favourite subject but also the swiftest’.7 An essential aspect, due to what the recaptured movements of birds offer to the vision of the movements of man and the other animals. This excellence of the bird when it comes to movement is what made Deleuze choose its image to express the two aspects of time borne by montage, regarding a still indirect image of time: on the one hand, time as whole, as great circle or spiral, which draws together the set of movement in the universe; on the other, time as interval, which indicates the 293

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

smallest unit of movement or action. Time as whole, the set of movement in the universe, is the bird which hovers, continually increasing its circle. But the numerical unit of movement is the beating of a wing, the continually diminishing interval between two movements or two actions. Time as interval is the accelerated variable present, and time as whole is the spiral open at both ends, the immensity of past and future. Infinitely dilated, the present would become the whole itself: infinitely contracted, the whole would happen in the interval.8

A few pages earlier, by citing the example of the successive bird attacks in Hitchcock’s film, Deleuze tracked the variations of the whole, forming and reforming within the shot and acting as the camera’s consciousness (‘the single consciousness or the perception of a whole of birds, testifying to an entirely bird-centred Nature’).9 So this insistence on the shot, the whole and the interval must be understood in the context of what Deleuze says at the end of Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (1986) when he defines Hitchcock’s very particular status in the crisis of the action-image: ‘pushing the movement-image to its limit’ and introducing ‘the mental image into the cinema’10 by highlighting ‘the relation’ at every level, in the final analysis that relation which, through thought, links the film to its spectator. Deleuze then returns to The Birds, in which he sees ‘a symbol’ (neither in a Peircian sense, he stresses, nor, of course, a psychoanalytical one): a symbol in the sense that the birds present ‘the inverted image of men’s relationships with Nature, and the naturalised image of men’s relationships between themselves’.11 We can try to go further in this perspective of relations to suggest that Hitchcock has us see and feel and, from there, think – via the birds’ movements that are inseparably natural and simulated – about the invisible but appreciable intervals, which, from one still frame to the next, comprise the deceptive naturalism of their movement, their deceptive movement if you like. It is again a question of the reversibility between the small folds and the large fold of perception, mutual guarantees of the movement’s hallucinatory quality. The paradox is that this intensified acceleration of movement materialised by the flight of the birds leads the mind’s eye to constantly imagine the intervals contained in each phase of these wing beats, between these suddenly countless birds. As though the spectator could not stop mentally freezing them to consider the imaginary plastic in which his own body then finds itself modelled – transfixed by a nameless emotion, stopping short of the fear that the film wishes to share, while going beyond it as well – until the potentiality of the last shot. Here, the birds, spread all around the house, do not fly, but only quiver, by micro-movements and faint undulations, as the Brenner family carries Melanie to get to the car, the car then driving away in the landscape of falsely pacified apocalypse that the birds present.12 (It only takes, only will have taken, one step to go from a mental freeze to a real one. This could be the reason for the choice, which remained so obscure for so long, of a ‘sequence from The Birds’,13 a choice made forty years ago in order 294

Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death

to start testing that reality that was then so unreal of the freeze-frame, which has now become the everyday gesture that videocassettes and especially DVDs have made familiar.14 A film one stops, if it’s a powerful film, often becomes sublime, in proportion to the particular irrationality of the formal surprise that the interrupted movement suggests. In the case of The Birds, this sublime quality is even more manifest: penetrating the internal substance of wing beats in order to then relive them at their real speed is a truly startling experience. This is probably due mostly to the fact that we pause on so many moments involving special effects, thus entering into the heart of their rendering, image by image. From this point of view, we also understand why an animated film, Appétit d’oiseau (1964) by Peter Foldes, was what allowed Thierry Kuntzel, as he paused on an ‘ostentatious flight’ through which a bird transforms itself by the end of the film while appearing alternately as the genitals of both sexes, to conceive of the tension between ‘the film stock’ [le film-pellicule] and ‘the projected film’ [le film-projection] so as to situate ‘between the two’ the explorations of filmic analysis).15 From the title of their plateau, Deleuze and Guattari pinpointed what The Birds supposes and fulfils from beginning to end: ‘Becoming-Intense, BecomingAnimal, Becoming-Imperceptible …’.16 The programme woven by these three words is precisely what the film’s opening credits are driving at: a representation of the relation between the elements of the film, as well as the assumed relation between the film and its spectator. As we know, it is comprised only of hand-drawn or rotoscoped birds moving at high speed, zooming back and forth across the screen while tearing apart the names appearing there. The opening credits also let us hear in undiluted form the electronic sound effects associated with the flight of the birds that stand in for music throughout the film, punctuating each attack, whether mixed in with real birdcalls and wing beats or not. As proud as he was of the visual effects (which numbered 371, he proclaimed), Hitchcock was just as proud of this sonic exploit, a product of the collaboration between Bernard Herrmann, his regular soundtrack composer, and the German composer Remi Gassman. For example, as he confided to Truffaut about the scene where Melanie is relentlessly attacked in the attic, he removed all the birdcalls, leaving only the sound of wings beating in order to heighten the intensity: ‘We wanted to get a menacing wave of vibration rather than a single level. There was a variation of the noise, an assimilation of the unequal noise of the wings.’17 In this final attack, Hitchcock transforms the scene from Psycho. In order to emphasise the shock value of that scene and the power of its unfolding, he told Truffaut it involved ‘seventy camera setups for forty-five seconds of footage’.18 As for the scene in The Birds, it contains eighty-four shots presented in slightly less than two minutes.19 Putting aside the disparity between the two scenes that plays out in the handling of the symbol, the inherent force of this scene, less unique but differently accorded to the film that it helps bring to an end, is that it seems to have always already started, from the opening credits and the first shot of birds circling in the San Francisco sky, from the canary slipping out of Melanie’s grasp and fluttering madly 295

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

to the ceiling of the bird shop. One word, of image and sound, resumes the effect that is maintained throughout The Birds from one scene to the next, burrowing into the emotion-matter of the film with its visible invisible from frame to frame, through the violence and grace of the bird representing the excellence of the animal body: modulation.

Notes 1. See Roger Dadoun, ‘Le Fétichisme dans le film d’horreur’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse vol. 2 (Fall 1970), pp. 227–47 [‘Fetishism in the Horror Film’, trans. Annwyl Williams, Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald (London: BFI, 1989), pp. 39–61]. In this text, Dadoun associates some of the classics of German film, American horror films of the 1930s, and various English and American films of the 60s, with the concepts of the archaic mother and the ‘phallambulist’ (on Psycho, pp. 237–8 [50–1]). 2. Bill Krohn, Hitchcock at Work (London: Phaidon, 2000). For the first aspect, pp. 238–40; for the second, pp. 240–49. The intensity of the relationship between Hitchcock and Tippi Hedren had been one ‘emotional’ motif, but there was also the very nature of the project, and the difficulties in filming that it presented. See also François Truffaut, Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock (Paris: R. Laffont, 1966), pp. 217–23 [Hitchcock, trans. Helen G. Scott (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985 [1967]), pp. 284–99]. We should also remember how Hitchcock answered Truffaut: ‘Did you investigate before taking on the project to make sure that the technical problems with the birds could be handled?’ ‘Absolutely not! I didn’t even give it a thought. I said, “This is the job. Let’s get on with it”’, p. 217 [285]. 3. The allusion to Santa Rosa brings to mind Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which takes place there. In Laurent Bouzereau’s excellent documentary – one of the bonuses on the DVD of The Birds – the screenwriter Evan Hunter comments on the storyboard for the ending that was never shot, showing the birds’ destructive impact on the whole region (‘So it becomes not just a personal thing that’s directed against Melanie ..., we now see that this is a universal thing.’). Hunter suggests that it was for reasons of time and especially money (a month’s more shooting) that Hitchcock may have decided to abandon it. 4. E´douard Boubat, ‘The Seagull of Houat Island’, France, 1994. 5. Particularly all those provided in Laurent Bouzereau’s film. 6. Michel Frizot, La Chronophotographie, exhibition catalogue (Beaune: Association des Amis de Marey et ministère de la Culture, 1984), p. 81. 7. Michel Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey chronophotographe (Paris: Nathan/Delpire, 2001), p. 113. On the flight of birds, then on aviation, see also pp. 272–5.

296

Hitchcock – The Animal, Life and Death

8. Gilles Deleuze, L’image-mouvement (Paris: Minuit, 1983), pp. 49–50 [Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), p. 32]. 9. Deleuze, L’image-mouvement, p. 34 [Cinema 1, p. 20]. 10. Ibid., pp. 276, 269, 274 [Cinema 1, pp. 204, 200, 203]. 11. Ibid., p. 276 [Cinema 1, p. 204]. 12. In Bouzereau’s documentary, Steven C. Smith, Bernard Herrmann’s biographer, says of this last shot: ‘Hitchcock wanted to communicate the sense that the birds were thinking.’ 13. This text, published in 1969 as ‘Les Oiseaux: Analyse d’une séquence’, was republished in my collection L’Analyse du film. [Available in English as ‘System of a Fragment (on The Birds)’, trans. Ben Brewster, in Constance Penley (ed.), The Analysis of Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 28–68 (translator’s note)]. 14. Everything that Laura Mulvey appropriately referred to as ‘delayed cinema’, in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), p. 146. 15. Thierry Kuntzel, ‘Le Défilement’, in Dominique Noguez (ed.), Cinéma. Théorie, Lectures (Paris: Klincksieck, 1973), pp. 97–110 [‘Le Défilement: A View in Close-up’, trans. Bertrand Augst, Apparatus, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), pp. 232–47]. 16. The full English title for the chapter: ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible ...’ (pp. 232–309). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) (translator’s note). 17. Truffaut, Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock, p. 226 [Hitchcock, p. 297]. 18. Ibid., p. 212 [Hitchcock, p. 277]. 19. This is not a strict comparison: I used the sequence in The Birds from beginning to end as such, but for the scene from Psycho Hitchcock only counts the precise moment of the attack.

297

Index Page numbers in bold indicate detailed analysis; those in italics denote illustrations; n = endnote.

Abraham, Nicolas 140, 141, 145 Adams, Carol J. 209 Adorno, Theodor 47, 159, 161 Aerosmith 63 Agamben, Giorgio 19n38, 214, 225, 240, 268n13 Âge d’Or, L’ (1930) 59 Angry Birds (2009) 273, 278 animality xii, xiv, 10, 69, 77, 89n49, 96, 100, 101–3, 105, 106, 136, 139, 144, 193, 194, 257, 258, 260, 290 anthropocentrism 2, 4, 9, 15, 19n38, 24, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33-6, 59, 77, 86, 110, 113, 174, 181, 182, 204, 209, 210, 211, 221, 226, 227, 233, 242, 272, 275 anthropomorphism 2, 4, 5, 11, 15, 33–4, 35, 59–60, 64, 67, 69, 73, 109, 110, 111, 113–14, 119, 133n32, 223, 233, 237n61, 241, 243, 249, 255, 272, 283, Appétit d’oiseau (1964) 295 Archives de la Planète 24 Aristocats, The (1970) 100 Armageddon (1998) 63

Attenborough, David 110, 231 Audubon, John James 284 Avatar (2009) 104–5, 106 Bacon, Francis 208 Baker, Steve 47, 73–4, 106 Barbash, Ilisa 267 Barjol, Jean-Michel see Le Cochon Barthes, Roland 47, 88n18 Battleship Potemkin (1925) 210 Bazin, André 9-10, 15, 35–6, 43, 76, 193, 208, 221–4, 227, 228, 233 Beller, Jonathan 190–1, 194–5, 198 Bellour, Raymond xv, 10, 15, 254, 258, 260–3, 264, 266, 267, 279 Benjamin, Walter 124, 128, 130, 154, 162–3 Bennett, Jane 274 Berger, John 3–4, 9, 77, 110, 207 Berlin Horse (1970) 73–4, 78, 79–86, 82, 83, 84, 85 biopower 173, 187, 206, 208 biopolitics 194, 203, 208, 212 Bird, The (2011) 255

Birds, The (1963) 261–3, 272, 274, 278–80, 279, 288, 289, 290, 291–5 Blood of the Beasts (1949) 207, 210 Blue Velvet (1986) 127, 231 Bolt (2008) 97–8 Born Free (1966) 63 Bousé, Derek 8, 84, 109, 110, 112, 277 Boxing Cats (1894) 44 Brakhage, Stan 12, 48, 49–50, 51, 110, 114-5, 119 Bresson, Robert 221, 222, 228, 234 see also A Man Escaped Breton, André 111 Bringing Up Baby (1938) 261 Buck-Morss, Susan 165–6 Burt, Jonathan xv, 76, 78, 81, 196, 203–4, 213, 240, 241, 273 Buñuel, Luis 59, 65–8 see also Las Hurdes, Los Olvidados Burning Stable, The (1896) 83–5, 84, 85 Butler, Judith 122, 244, 250 Caillois, Roger 110–11, 114, 117, 118

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

Cameron, James 104 Capital 155 capitalism 84, 85, 86, 89n49, 89n50, 153, 155–8, 167, 174, 195, 205, 210 Carson, Rachel 280 Case of the Grinning Cat, The (2004) 47 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien 267 CatCam the Movie (2012) 54 Cat People (1942) 258–9 Cat’s Cradle (1959) 50, 51 Cats Listening to Music (1990) 48 Charcuterie mécanique, La (1895) 206 Chaplin, Charles 101, 155, 162–3, 167 Chavance, Louis 23, 34–5 Cheese Mites (1903) 221 Cheeta 100–1 Cheval emballé, Le (1908) 84–5 Chien andalou, Un (1929) 59 Chris, Cynthia 109, 110, 272, 273 Christian the Lion (2008) 59, 62–5, 63, 69 Clover, Catherine 284 Cochon, Le (1970) 204, 206–9, 210, 214 Cochon qui s’en dédit (1978) 204, 209–15, 211, 212 Coetzee, J. M. 132n18, 182 Colette 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 33, 36 Comandon, Jean 25, 33 Conrad, Joseph 157 Cove, The (2009) 188, 195–201, 196, 198, 200 300

Crimson Wing, The: Mystery of the Flamingos (2009) 272, 278, 282, 282 Crittercam (2004) 60–1 cummings, e. e. 4 Darwin, Charles 136, 166, 224 Da Vinci, Leonardo 43 dasein 149n57, 168n21, 225 Dean Spanley (2008) 134–9, 138, 142–9, 143 Defosse, Marcel 23, 32 Degas, Edgar 72 Deleuze, Gilles xiii, 10, 153, 208, 258, 259–60, 261–2, 263, 267, 293–4 Deleuze and Guattari 10, 61–2, 122–3, 124, 125, 128, 129–30, 274, 295 Delluc, Louis 23, 26, 27, 29, 31, 32 De Niro, Robert 125 Deren, Maya 48 see also The Private Life of a Cat Derrida, Jacques xi, xiv, 3, 5, 6, 16, 36–7, 43, 61, 62, 134, 135, 136, 139–42, 144–6, 191, 213 Descartes, René xi Disney, Walt 47, 97, 100, 101, 113, 162, 249, 252n29, 289 Djurberg, Nathalie 102 Doane, Mary Ann 38n16, 79 Donald Duck 106, 155 Dreyer, Carl 259 see also Passion of Joan of Arc Dulac, Germaine 23, 31–2, 33 Dunbar, Geoff 101–2 Durgnat, Raymond 223

Dziga Vertov 112 see also Man with a Movie Camera Edison, Thomas 43 Edison Manufacturing Company 83, 90n68 Eisenstein, Sergei 10, 188–95, 198, 200–1, 210 see also Battleship Potemkin, Strike Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) 43 Empire (1964) 8 Epstein, Jean 23, 26–9, 32, 33, 35, 36 Eustache, Jean see Le Cochon Falls, The (1980) 267, 272, 279, 280, 283 Fantasia (1940) 95 Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) 255 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 46 Felidae (1994) 99–100, 100 Felix the Cat 155 Feuillade, Louis 24 Foldes, Peter 295 Foucault, Michel 173, 187, 206, 208, 212 Franju, Georges 207, 210 Freud, Sigmund 124, 135–6, 138, 139, 140, 157, 163–4, 257 Friends (1994–2004) 106 Frozen Planet (2011) 109–10 Fuses (1967) 51 Gainsborough, Thomas 43 Genesis (2004) 117 Gidal, Peter 80, 81, 83 Goodall, Jane 101 Gramsci, Antonio 155–6, 167 Grandma’s Reading Glasses (1900) 44

Index

Greenaway, Peter 267, 279 see also The Falls, A Walk though H Green Porno (2008) 121–30 Grin without a Cat (1977) 47 Grizzly Man (2005) 238–53, 242, 244, 249, 255–6 Gunning, Tom 192, 202n19 Haanstra, Bert 2 Hammid, Alexander 48 see also The Private Life of a Cat Hamon, Geneviève 35 Haraway, Donna J. 60–2, 64, 86, 240, 241, 245 Heidegger, Martin xiv, 136, 158, 225–6, 234 Herzog, Werner 238–40, 242, 243, 247, 248, 249, 255–6 Hitchcock, Alfred 261–2, 267, 272, 279, 288–96 see also The Birds; Psycho; The Man Who Knew Too Much; Marnie; North by Northwest; Psycho; Rear Window; Sabotage; The Trouble with Harry; Young and Innocent Hooke, Robert 111 Hurdes, Las (1933) 59, 65, 67–8 Huston, John 171, 172, 176, 181–2 see also The Misfits Infinite Cat Project 53 Infinity Kisses (1981–8) 51 Jameson, Fredric 157, 158 Jacquet, Luc see March of the Penguins Jarry, Alfred 101 Jetée, La (1962) 48

Johnson, Martin 3, 24 Johnson, Osa 3, 24 Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973) 273 Jules et Jim (1962) 44 Kafka, Franz xiii, xiv, 121, 123–6, 128, 130 Kahn, Albert 24 Kearton, Cherry 276, 278 King Kong (1933) 159–70 Kirsanoff, Dimitri 23, 27 Kitch’s Last Meal (1973–6) 51–2 Kracauer, Siegfried 44–6, 49, 52 Kristeva, Julia 135, 136, 139, 144, 145–6 Lacan, Jacques 136 Latour, Bruno 240 Laurel and Hardy 85, 234 Legend of Pale Male, The (2009) 273 Le Grice, Malcolm 73–4, 78–86 see also Berlin Horse Le Tacon, Jean-Louis see Cochon qui s’en dédit Levinas, Emmanuel 136, 140, 141, 148n35, 227 Lippit, Akira Mizuta 9, 10, 15, 77, 138, 154, 207, 272 Lion, London Zoological Garden (1896) 3 Loch Ness Monster 166 Lost World, The (1925) 160–1 Lumière 3, 44, 46, 52, 73, 206 Luxemburg, Rosa 156–7 MacDonald, Scott 108–9, 110, 112, 113 Machin, Alfred 24 Malamud, Randy 4, 7, 77, 78, 88n33 Man Escaped, A (1956) 222, 227–31, 229, 232, 233–4

Manet, Édouard 43 Man Who Knew Too Much, The (1956) 290 Man with a Movie Camera (1929) 85, 112 Marc, Franz 82 March of the Penguins (2005) 272, 274–8, 275, 281, 282 Marey, Étienne-Jules 9, 25, 111, 154, 293 Marker, Chris 47–8 Marnie (1964) 292 Maru 44–6, 45, 54 Marx, Karl 155, 158, 166 Max (2002), 50 McGoldrick, Rosie 283–4 McHugh, Susan xv, 203, 204, 213 Melville, Herman 122 Metamorphosis, The (1915) 123–5 Metz, Christian 76 Mickey Mouse 155 Microcosmos (1996) 109, 110–21, 113, 115, 117, 118, 222, 227–8, 231–4, 233 Miller, Arthur 171, 173, 175–82 see also The Misfits Minima Moralia 159 Misfits, The (1961) 171–86, 172, 179 Mitman, Gregg 109, 110 Miyazaki, Hayao 104 see also Ponyo Monroe, Marilyn 171, 172, 175, 177–84, 179 see also The Misfits Monsters, Inc. (2001) 101 Mulvey, Laura 108 Musidora 23, 29–31, 30 Muybridge, Eadweard 9, 72–3, 74–7, 79, 80, 84, 111, 154 Nabokov, Vladimir 123–4 Nancy, Jean-Luc 245–6, 248 301

ANIMAL LIFE AND THE MOVING IMAGE

National Velvet (1944) 292 Nénette (2010) 1–9, 1, 6, 8, 15–16 Nietzsche, Friedrich 35 Night Cats (1956) 49 North by Northwest (1959) 291 Nuridsany, Claude 12, 14, 109, 110, 111–12, 113, 114, 115–17, 118, 119, 222, 227, 231–3, 234 Octopus, The (1928) see La Pieuvre Olvidados, Los (1950) 59, 65–9, 67 Ozu, Yasujiro 46 Painlevé, Jean 35, 60, 61, 115, 247 Parikka, Jussi 274 Pasht (1965) 49 Pasolini, Pier Paolo see Salò Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) 259–60 Pavlov, Ivan 194 Pérrenou, Marie 12, 14, 109, 111–12, 113, 114, 115–17, 118, 119, 222, 227, 231–3, 234 Petite fille et son chat, La (1899) 44, 46 Pfeiffer, Michelle 243 Phantom Carriage, The (1921) 85 Philibert, Nicolas see Nénette Pick, Anat 6, 193 Pieuvre, La (1928) 35 Pike, Oliver 276, 278 Pirates! The, In an Adventure with Scientists (2012) 98 Ponyo (2008) 104, 106 Porte, Pierre 23, 26 posthumanism 58–62, 67, 69, 182 302

Private Life of a Cat, The (1944) 48–9, 49, 50, 51 Private Life of the Gannets, The (1934) 277 ‘Projection, La’ (2010) 15–16 Psycho (1960) 290–1, 292, 295 Putting down the Prey (2008) 102–3 Rancière, Jacques 188–9, 190, 192, 201 realism 44, 68, 69, 114, 221–4, 227, 228, 233, Rear Window (1954) 289–90 Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) 102, 103 Rose, Jacqueline 178–81 Rossellini, Isabella 121–30, 127, 128 see also Green Porno; Seduce Me Rouch, Jean 209 Sabotage (1936) 288–9 Salò (1975) 211 Sang des bêtes, Le (1949) see Blood of the Beasts Schneemann, Carolee 48, 50–2, 53 Schrader, Paul 103 Seduce Me (2010) 121–2, 126–33, 127, 128 Selznick, David O. 160–2 Shoeshine (1946) 68 Shrek (2001) 101 Shukin, Nicole 79, 154–5, 204–6, 207, 208, 209, 211 Sick Kitten, The (1903) 44 Silent Spring 280 Silverman, Kaja 244 Simba (1928) 3, 24 Smith, George Albert 44 Sobchack, Vivian xv, 53 Sontag, Susan 187, 228–9 Stevens, Wallace 264–6, 271, 272

Strike (1925) 188–95, 190, 200–1 surrealism 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 67, 68, 69, 96, 110–11, 204, 210, 214, 229–30 Swarm, The (1978) 274 Sweetgrass: The Last Ride of the American Cowboy (2010) 267 Tannery, The (2011) 98–9, 99 Tarzan 100 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 79, 154, 155, 156, 158–9, 162, 163, 165, 166 techne 153–4, 162 Tedesco, Jean 23, 24–5, 36 Torok, Maria 140, 141, 145 Totem and Taboo (1913) 135–6 Trollhunter (2010) 104, 105–6, 105 Trouble with Harry, The (1956) 290 True Life Adventures (c. 1948–60) 113 Tyler, Tom 256–7 Ubu Roi (1979) 101–2, 103 von Uexküll, Jakob 6, 221, 222, 224–7, 230 Umwelt 6, 225–7, 228, 230, 232 Up (2009) 54 Vampires, Les (1915) 29 Vuillermoz, Émile 23, 32–4, 35, 36 Wallace and Gromit 98 A Walk though H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist (1978) 280, 281–2 Warhol, Andy 8

Index

Weissmuller, Johnny 100 White, Gilbert 264 Willard (1971) 62 Wild Birds of Telegraph Hill, The (2005) 271–2, 282, 282, 283 Winged Migration (2001) 272

Wizard of Oz, The (1939) 85, 158 Wolfe, Cary xiv, 59 Wollen, Peter 78 Wrong Again (1929) 85

YouTube 36, 42–3, 44, 52, 53, 59, 62–5, 69, 121, 278 Zoo (1962) 2

Young and Innocent (1937) 291, 293

List of Illustrations While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders, this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in any future editions. Nénette, © Les Films d’Ici/Forum des Images; The Private Life of a Cat, Alexander Hammid; Christian the Lion, Bill Travers/James Hill Productions; Los Olvidados, Ultramar Films; Berlin Horse, Malcolm Le Grice; The Tannery, Axis Animation; Felidae, Trick Company/Royal Filmproduktions/Fontana Film Production GmbH/Senator Film Produktion GmbH; Trollhunter, © Filmkameratene AS; Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe, Galatée Films/ France 2 Cinéma/BAC Films/Delta Image/J.M.H. Productions Lausanne/Urania Film/Télévision Suisse Romande; Seduce Me: Snail, Sundance Channel; Seduce Me: Earthworm, Sundance Channel; Dean Spanley, © Atlantic Film Productions (Dean Spanley) Limited/General Film Corp (Two Dogs) Limited; The Misfits, © Seven Arts Productions; Strike, Proletkult/First Studio Goskino; The Cove, © Oceanic Preservation Society; Cochon qui s’en dédit, Jean-Louis Le Tacon/Thierry Le Merre; A Man Escaped, Société Nouvelle des Établissements Gaumont/Nouvelles Éditions de Films; Grizzly Man, © Lions Gate Films; March of the Penguins, © Bonne Pioche/© Alliance de Production Cinématographique/ © Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.; The Birds, © Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions; The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, © Pelican Media; The Crimson Wing, © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

303

Index

Weissmuller, Johnny 100 White, Gilbert 264 Willard (1971) 62 Wild Birds of Telegraph Hill, The (2005) 271–2, 282, 282, 283 Winged Migration (2001) 272

Wizard of Oz, The (1939) 85, 158 Wolfe, Cary xiv, 59 Wollen, Peter 78 Wrong Again (1929) 85

YouTube 36, 42–3, 44, 52, 53, 59, 62–5, 69, 121, 278 Zoo (1962) 2

Young and Innocent (1937) 291, 293

List of Illustrations While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the copyright holders, this has not been possible in all cases. We apologise for any apparent negligence and any omissions or corrections brought to our attention will be remedied in any future editions. Nénette, © Les Films d’Ici/Forum des Images; The Private Life of a Cat, Alexander Hammid; Christian the Lion, Bill Travers/James Hill Productions; Los Olvidados, Ultramar Films; Berlin Horse, Malcolm Le Grice; The Tannery, Axis Animation; Felidae, Trick Company/Royal Filmproduktions/Fontana Film Production GmbH/Senator Film Produktion GmbH; Trollhunter, © Filmkameratene AS; Microcosmos: Le peuple de l’herbe, Galatée Films/ France 2 Cinéma/BAC Films/Delta Image/J.M.H. Productions Lausanne/Urania Film/Télévision Suisse Romande; Seduce Me: Snail, Sundance Channel; Seduce Me: Earthworm, Sundance Channel; Dean Spanley, © Atlantic Film Productions (Dean Spanley) Limited/General Film Corp (Two Dogs) Limited; The Misfits, © Seven Arts Productions; Strike, Proletkult/First Studio Goskino; The Cove, © Oceanic Preservation Society; Cochon qui s’en dédit, Jean-Louis Le Tacon/Thierry Le Merre; A Man Escaped, Société Nouvelle des Établissements Gaumont/Nouvelles Éditions de Films; Grizzly Man, © Lions Gate Films; March of the Penguins, © Bonne Pioche/© Alliance de Production Cinématographique/ © Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.; The Birds, © Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions; The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, © Pelican Media; The Crimson Wing, © Disney Enterprises, Inc.

303