2015/1 – #Animals
Features
Recent Submissions
- ArticleEditorial NecsusNECSUS Editorial Board (2015) , S. 1-2
- ArticleWhy not look at animals?Pick, Anat (2015) , S. 107-125Revisiting John Berger’s seminal essay WHY NOT LOOK AT ANIMALS? (1980), this essay inverts Berger’s title in order to explore instances where the visibility of animals is at stake and where seeing is linked to forms of surveillance and control. In the context of advanced optical and tracking technologies that render animals permanently visible, the possibility of not-seeing emerges as a progressive modality of relation to animals that takes seriously the notion of animal privacy and the exposed animal’s resistance to the human gaze.
- ArticleWhen Lulu met the Centaur: Photographic traces of creaturely lovePettman, Dominic (2015) , S. 127-144The brief triangular love between Nietzche, Salomé, and Rée – as crystallised in the famous photograph of kitsch (literal) horse-play, where the woman is depicted as treating the two men as beasts of burden – allows us to consider the role of ‘creaturely love’ in our more general understanding of the lover’s discourse. That is to say, through such images we can explore the role and figure of the animal within ‘the anthropological machine’, itself designed to produce a sense of the human from the inhuman (especially through mediated forms of intimacy). Further, in the different intermedial relationships between photography, poetry, and philosophy, the Centaur – in the letters and texts circulated by this group (later including Rilke) – provides a charged specific totem for a libidinal ecology of souls, striving to understand themselves as simultaneously creaturely and spiritual. Such a figure allowed both a recognition and a disavowal of the nonhuman basis (and telos) of human affections.
- ArticleTasmanian tigers and polar bears: The documentary moving image and (species) lossSmaill, Belinda (2015) , S. 145-162In this essay I explore how two divergent examples of the nonfiction moving image can be understood in relation to the problem of representing species loss. The species that provide the platform for this consideration are the thylacine, better known as the Tasmanian tiger, and the polar bear. They represent the two contingencies of species loss: endangerment and extinction. My analysis is structured around moving images from the 1930s of the last known thylacine and the very different example of ARCTIC TALE (Adam Ravetch, Sarah Robertson, 2007), a ‘Disneyfied’ film that dramatises climate change and its impact on the polar bear. Species loss is frequently perceived in a humanist sense, reflecting how we ‘imagine ourselves’ or anthropocentric charactersations of non-human others. I offer a close analysis of the two films, examining the problem of representing extinction through a consideration of the play of absence and presence, vitality and extinguishment, that characterises both the ontology of cinema and narratives about species loss.
- ArticleCinematic slowness, political paralysis? Animal life in BOVINES, with Deleuze and GuattariMcMahon, Laura (2015) , S. 163-180Deleuze elaborates accounts of cinematic time and of becoming-animal quite separately, without addressing potential links between these accounts. Drawing on a range of works by Deleuze and Guattari, this article allows these accounts to intersect through a reading of the aesthetics of slowness in the documentary art film Bovines ou la vraie vie des vaches (THE TRUE LIFE OF COWS, Emmanuel Gras, 2012) and its generative focus on (de)territorialisation, becoming, and affect. In privileging what Peter Hallward calls ‘virtual creatings’ over ‘actual creatures’, Bovines implicitly proposes a celebration of biovitality rather than an interrogation of biopolitics, pointing to the possible political limitations of the film and of the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework deployed here.
- ArticleHorseplay: Equine performance and creaturely acts in cinemaHockenhull, Stella (2015) , S. 181-198Throughout Béla Tarr’s latest and reputedly final film THE TURIN HORSE (2011), the horse (Ricsi), as the title of the film indicates, leaves the spectator in no doubt that she is an important, if not the most important, individual within the narrative. However, unlike most films which feature animals as central protagonists, at no juncture is the horse’s behaviour articulated in human-driven semantics. Furthermore, she is never presented with what Emmanuel Gouabault, Annik Dubied, and Claudine Burton-Jeangros describe as a superindividual status. This stated, neither does the director devalue the role of the animal. Instead, Ricsi’s performance can be analysed in what Brenda Austin-Smith argues is ‘memorable film characterization’, whereby animal performance is valid and ‘counts for something’. While it cannot be suggested that Ricsi deliberately acts as a character her performance is equally valuable for analysis both within and outside the context of the narrative. Applying performance theory and film theory to a study of the role and performance of the horses in two films, THE TURIN HORSE and OF HORSES AND MEN (Benedikt Erlingsson 2013), this essay proposes an alternative and more fitting approach to the study of animals in film. The contention here is that neither film humanises or ‘starifies’ the horses, yet all of the equine presentations are significant, as well as examples of what Michael Kirby terms simple acting. This essay begins by examining the ways in which animal performance has predominantly been represented and discussed in media and film before proposing Kirby’s notion of simple acting as a mode of analysis.
- ArticleCows, clicks, ciphers, and satireTyler, Tom (2015) , S. 199-208The social network game FARMVILLE, which allows players to grow crops, raise animals, and produce a variety of goods, proved enormously successful within a year of its launch in 2009, attracting 110 million Facebook users. However, the game has been criticised for its mindless mechanics, which require little more than repeated clicking on its colourful icons. By way of parody, Ian Bogost’s COW CLICKER permits its players to simply click on a picture of a cow once every six hours. In this essay I extend Bogost’s critique and suggest that COW CLICKER highlights not just the soulless inanity of FARMVILLE gameplay but also the paucity of that game’s portrayal of the painful reality of a dairy cow’s punishing daily existence and untimely end.
- ReviewTelevision studies reloaded: From history to textScaglioni, Massimo (2015) , S. 209-214
- ReviewThe documentary film bookWahlberg, Malin (2015) , S. 215-219
- ReviewStorytelling in the media convergence age: Exploring screen narrativesÇağlayan, Emre (2015) , S. 220-226
- ReviewEDUCATION IN THE SCHOOL OF DREAMS: Travelogues and early nonfiction filmFreeman, Adam Ludford (2015) , S. 227-233
- ReviewDossier: International Film Festival Rotterdam 2015de Valck, Marijke; Baars, Fanny; Bower, Molly; Butt, Marina; Celeste, Aidan; Gialitis, Aleksas; Maciver, Frances; Schumacher, Anne; Suchá, Lenka; Vandergeerde, Sarah (2015) , S. 235-247
- ReviewDispatches from the dark: A conversation with Neil Young at the 2015 International Film Festival RotterdamSteinhart, Daniel (2015) , S. 248-254
- ReviewHollywood legacies and Russian laughter: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto / Pordenone Silent Film Festival 2014Harkema, Gert Jan (2015) , S. 255-260
- ReviewWe can haz film fest!: Internet Cat Video Festival goes viralBurgess, Diane (2015) , S. 261-268
- ReviewToo much world: A Hito Steyerl retrospectiveAlbuquerque, Paula (2015) , S. 269-278
- ArticleOppositional banality: Watching ordinary Muslims in LITTLE MOSQUE ON THE PRAIRIEChao, Jenifer (2015) , S. 27-45This essay interrogates how the globally-syndicated series LITTLE MOSQUE ON THE PRAIRIE (2007-2012) mobilises one of the most beloved television formats – the situation comedy – to insert a banal and normalised gaze toward Muslims and contest hostile representations of Islam in Western media. Through what I have termed ‘oppositional banality’ the show relocates Muslim identities to the realm of everyday life and out of the confines of global terrorism. Rather than being under the scrutiny of news cameras and viewed through cataclysmic international events the Muslims in LITTLE MOSQUE are made comical and timeless, subjected to the emotional entanglements of ordinary life.
- ReviewMcMansion of media excess: Ryan Trecartin’s and Lizzie Fitch’s SITE VISITÅkervall, Lisa (2015) , S. 279-286
- ReviewReaching out!: Activating space in the art of Olafur EliassonEriksson, Olivia (2015) , S. 287-293
- ReviewDavid Reeb: Traces of Things to ComeTorchin, Leshu (2015) , S. 293-299