Animal WorldsPub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0002
Laura McMahon
{"title":"Cinematic Time and Animal Worlds","authors":"Laura McMahon","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter develops key aspects of the book’s theoretical framework, moving between philosophies of animal worlds and Deleuze’s account of cinematic time. It draws on the concept of the Umwelt proposed by Uexküll, and the different responses to this concept offered by Heidegger and Deleuze and Guattari. Focusing in particular on Deleuze and Guattari’s reworking of the Umwelt as a process of ‘desubjectified’ assemblages, the chapter links this to Deleuze’s thinking of the time-image as a shift from subject to world, and as a realm that is intricately bound up with questions of differing, becoming and the virtual. While suggesting ways of thinking through links between Deleuze, cinema and the slow animal film, the chapter also turns to recent accounts of the relation between animals and film, by Burt, Pick, Lippit, Sobchack and others. Engaging with yet also moving beyond the recourse to Bazin that has tended to shape the field thus far, it emphasises what Deleuze’s theory of cinematic time can add to this developing body of work, as well as what a more detailed and wide-ranging account of Deleuze and Guattari’s model of animal worlds can contribute to the field of critical animal studies.","PeriodicalId":160928,"journal":{"name":"Animal Worlds","volume":"110 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127111861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Animal WorldsPub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0003
Laura McMahon
{"title":"Still/Moving: Bestiaire’s Lives in Limbo","authors":"Laura McMahon","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores Côté’s Bestiaire, an experimental documentary about a zoo that initially seems in thrall to Bazin’s idea that the onscreen animal reveals cinematic specificity. Exploring the exhibition of animals both living and dead, still and moving, Côté’s film invokes two key metaphorical positionings (cinema as zoo/taxidermy), privileging a self-reflexive form of ontological investigation. This chapter traces these ontological investments by drawing on accounts such as Lippit on the ‘electric’ animal, Bellour on hypnotic animal images and Haraway on taxidermy. Folded into Bestiaire’s set of somewhat essentialising, ontologising reflections, however, is an implicit questioning of the politics of the zoo and its links to biopower, neocolonialism, captivity and suffering. Structured by these tensions between the ontological, the aesthetic and the political, Bestiaire reflects on the zoo both as a metaphor for cinematic ‘animality’ qua cinematic specificity and as a set of lived, material conditions. While Bestiaire’s distension of ‘dead time’ keeps the focus above all on questions of captivity – its durational aesthetic bearing witness to lives left in limbo – its Deleuzian time-images invite attentiveness to animal worlds of embodiment, perception and meaning-making that reach beyond the biopolitical grid of imprisoned life.","PeriodicalId":160928,"journal":{"name":"Animal Worlds","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130605655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Animal WorldsPub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0001
Laura McMahon
{"title":"Introduction: Unfurling Worlds","authors":"Laura McMahon","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"The Introduction situates the emergence of this recent wave of films about animals in relation to contexts such as ‘slow cinema’, the question of the animal in philosophy, the arts and humanities, and cultural anxieties around the accelerating biopolitical transformations of animal life addressed by Shukin, Derrida, Haraway, Wolfe and others. The Introduction foregrounds Shukin’s model of ‘animal capital’ as particularly useful for addressing filmic engagements with the (re)production of animal life within the shifting regimes of late capitalism. Yet the Introduction also moves beyond the closed loop of biopolitical rendering diagnosed by Shukin, turning to Deleuze’s accounts of the time-image, virtuality and lines of flight (and to his engagement with Foucault), through which the relation between cinema and animal life is imagined otherwise, beyond the biopolitical grid of ‘bare life’.","PeriodicalId":160928,"journal":{"name":"Animal Worlds","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132369861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Animal WorldsPub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0007
Laura McMahon
{"title":"Conclusion: Cinematic Worlds and Beyond","authors":"Laura McMahon","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The question of animal suffering, and of forms of vulnerability through which animal and human lives are differentially exposed, runs through the films explored in this book, from the reflections on ‘enduring’ and death-in-life states in Bestiaire and The Turin Horse, to the scenes of slaughter in Leviathan and the powerlessness explored by Bovines. In all of the films in this study, there appear to be two different concepts of life at stake: the ‘bare life’ produced by biopolitical regimes and the worlds that unfurl, and make meaning, beyond this. This corresponds to the two different orders of power traced throughout this study, following Deleuze (particularly in his readings of Spinoza and Foucault) – power as domination (pouvoir) and power as potential (puissance), understood as being in a relation of continual exchange. Bestiaire, Bovines and The Turin Horse offer a subtle diagnosis of our biopolitical present and its seemingly relentless ‘subjection of the animal’ (Derrida). Yet these films also hold out the promise of something else, gesturing to possible lines of light and political futures, in which our relations with animal worlds – both onscreen and off – might be reconfigured otherwise.","PeriodicalId":160928,"journal":{"name":"Animal Worlds","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124497484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Animal WorldsPub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0006
Laura McMahon
{"title":"Actual/Virtual: Bovines ou la vraie vie des vaches","authors":"Laura McMahon","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Gras’s Bovines/A Cow’s Life is a contemplative documentary reflection on a herd of Charolais cows, offering up delayed, wandering images of bovine life. The film invites particular links to be drawn between the ‘pure optical and sound situations’ of the Deleuzian time-image and the account of animal art and expressive territory given by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?. Building also on Bailly’s notion of pensivity, while expanding this account beyond its privileging of the gaze (through attention to bovine sounds in the film), this chapter allows for further development of dynamics of worlding traced in previous chapters. Yet it also suggests that Bovines allows us to probe the possible limitations of Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. In risking a privileging of what Hallward calls, in his critique of Deleuze, ‘virtual creatings’ over ‘actual creatures’, the film’s time-images might be seen as aestheticising political paralysis over political action, favouring a celebration of biovitality over a critique of biopolitics. While Bovines’s pastoral setting and lingering, durational aesthetic thus stage a set of ambivalences and contradictions, the film also points to the limitations, as well as the ongoing possibilities, of a Deleuzo-Guattarian engagement with cinema’s animal worlds.","PeriodicalId":160928,"journal":{"name":"Animal Worlds","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114558662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Animal WorldsPub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0004
Laura McMahon
{"title":"The Turin Horse: Animal Labour and Lines of Flight","authors":"Laura McMahon","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Tarr and Hranitzky’s The Turin Horse opens with a voiceover recounting Nietzsche’s apocryphal encounter with animal suffering – a horse being beaten in the streets of Turin on 3 January 1889. The film approaches this history obliquely, through the fictional story of another horse – a horse kept by a man, Ohlsdorfer, and his daughter, in a desolate, inhospitable part of Hungary, in an unidentified time. As the horse increasingly resists eating or moving, the film traces human lives of routine pitted against a nonhuman life refusing to submit to routine any longer. While critical commentary on the film has tended to emphasise an existentialist, Beckettian focus on the inescapability of death and an apocalyptic ‘end time’, this chapter reads The Turin Horse as a film about labour, and about animal labour in particular. Alongside the work of Deleuze, it draws on Jacques Rancière’s discussions of duration in Tarr’s work, while engaging critically with Rancière’s apparent neglect of questions of animal labour. While bearing witness to modes of exhaustion and precarity that reach across human and animal worlds, The Turin Horse is a quietly revolutionary film that patiently documents an animal’s revolt through her withdrawal of labour – a deterritorialising line of flight.","PeriodicalId":160928,"journal":{"name":"Animal Worlds","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129329440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Animal WorldsPub Date : 2019-07-01DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0005
Laura McMahon
{"title":"Leviathan, Meat and the Annihilation of Worlds","authors":"Laura McMahon","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474446389.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s Leviathan documents the daily activities of a commercial fishing boat, captured on multiple GoPro cameras. Its radically mobile, unstable audiovisual world represents a striking contrast to the long takes and static shots that shape the other films in this book. This chapter argues that Leviathan’s lack of durational attentiveness leads to a closing down – rather than an opening up – of animal worlds. While much attention has been devoted to the film’s sensory, immersive aesthetics, commentary has tended to elide questions of industrialized slaughter. This elision is striking given the celebratory framing of the film as nonanthropocentric by critical commentary and by the filmmakers themselves. Drawing on Shukin, the chapter traces how the ‘carnal traffic’ of Leviathan’s dying animals is simultaneously disavowed and exploited – by the film and its critical reception – as a form of theoretico-aesthetic capital that frames the film’s immersive, visceral vision as a return to a prediscursive ‘real’. In place of the durational attentiveness to animal lives traced elsewhere in the book, Leviathan’s flitting, indiscriminate vision reduces the fish to undifferentiated matter, closing down the possibility of singularity, the film’s deathly, fusional logic refusing what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the ‘spacing’ of the world.","PeriodicalId":160928,"journal":{"name":"Animal Worlds","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114683689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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