Introduction: Unfurling Worlds

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’.