Full Description
From the proto-cinematic sequencing of animal motion in the nineteenth century to the ubiquity of animal videos online, the histories of animal life and the moving image are enigmatically interlocked.
Animal Life and the Moving Image is the first collection of essays to offer a sustained focus on the relations between screen cultures and non-human animals. The volume brings together some of the most important and influential writers working on the non-human animal's significance for cultures and theories of the moving image. It offers innovative analyses of the representation of animals across a wide range of documentary, fiction, mainstream and avant-garde practices, from early cinema to contemporary
user-generated media. Individual chapters consider King Kong, The Birds, The Misfits, The Cove, Grizzly Man and Microcosmos, the work of Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Bresson, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Greenaway, Carolee Schneemann and Isabella Rossellini, and YouTube stars Christian the lion and Maru the cat.
Contents
Foreword; Akira Mizuta Lippit.- Introduction: Animal Lives and the Moving Image; Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon.- PART 1: ANIMAL LIFE AND CINEMATIC SPECIFICITY.- 1. Animal Photogenie: The Wild Side of French Film Theory's First Wave; James Leo Cahill.- 2. Cats and the Moving Image: Feline Cinematicity from Lumiere to Maru; Rosalind Galt.- 3. Buñuel's Bull Meets YouTube's Lion: Surrealist and Digital Posthumanisms; Adam Lowenstein.- 4. Muybridgean Motion.- Materialist Film: Malcolm Le Grice's Berlin Horse; Michael Lawrence.- PART 2: CROSS-SPECIES INDENTIFICATIONS.- 5. 'You Can See What Species I Belong To, But Don't Treat Me Lightly': Rhetorics of Representation in Animated Animal Narratives; Paul Wells.- 6. A Cut or a Dissolve? Insects and Identification in Microcosmos; Georgina Evans.- 7. Subjunctive Desires: Becoming Animal in Green Porno and Seduce Me; Cynthia Chris.- 8. Animal Melancholia: On the Scent of Dean Spanley; Lynn Turner.- PART 3: ANIMAL ECONOMIES
9. King Kong Capitalism; Julian Murphet.- 10. Animal Life and Moral Agency in Post-war Cinema: Velma Johnston, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller and John Huston's The Misfits; Robert McKay.- 11. Being Struck: On the Force of Slaughter and Cinematic Affect; Nicole Shukin and Sarah O'Brien.- 12. Screening Pigs: Visibility, Materiality and the Production of Species; Laura McMahon.- PART 4: TOWARDS A NON-ANTHROPOCENTRIC CINEMA.- 13. Animal Life in the Cinematic Umwelt; Anat Pick.- 14. Bear Images: Human Performativity and Animal Touch in Grizzly Man; Cecilia Novero.- 15. The Tumult of Integrations Out of the Sky: The Movement of Birds and Film's Ornithology; Jonathan Burt.- 16. Unknowing Animals: Wild Bird Films and the Limits of Knowledge; Susan McHugh.- 17. Hitchcock: The Animal, Life and Death; Raymond Bellour.- Index.
