Becoming-wave-media: ‘posthuman performativity’, the GoPro™ camera and researching lifestyle sports

This paper examines the depiction of the ‘ape’ in the Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968), utilizing a case-study of the art and makeup technicians and placing them in a key position as originators of the aesthetic construct of the ape. This will allow for a fuller understanding of the aesthetic constraints of the production and will emphasize how ‘the historian can illuminate the creative function of the film technician’ (Laurie Ede). The paper will draw on primary sources to argue for the repositioning of the film technician in the authorial vision of the ape. Central to this argument will be the Producer, Choreographer, Head of Makeup and the Art Director. The paper will give an overview of the role of these individuals in how the ape is represented, roles that were overlooked by the Academy Awards, with Arthur C. Clarke musing that Academy members had assumed the apes were real.

This paper will examine the intersection of the human and the animal as it is performed by Catherine Deneuve in Jacques Demy’s 1970 film Donkey Skin and Isabella Rossellini as she performs a spectrum of provocatively sexual animal identities in her two web series, Green Porno and Mommas. Both portray sexuality as masquerade and sexuality that is ‘outside’ the law, inviting a dialogue with Derrida’s assertion of the ‘troubling resemblance between the beast, the criminal, and the law’. Deneuve’s character’s adaptation of the donkey’s identity allows her to take a position outside of the law which parallels that of her father/sovereign who pursues her. While as a result she is treated as a beast and forced to dwell outside of the village, Deneuve’s appropriation of this sovereign position allows her to escape the law (of the Father) through another form of ‘femininity as masquerade’. Relatedly, Rossellini’s masquerade emphasizes, with even greater force, the arbitrariness of the law’s regulation of female sexuality: as Mamma-hamster in Mommas she eats a few of the offspring she has pulled from between her legs: now resolutely in the realm of the beast, the sovereign and the criminal, her masquerade elicits laughter and liberation at once.

Reading the battle of the sexes in Louis Malle’s Black Moon (1975) through the paradigm of Kleist’s Penthesilea, this paper explores Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion in A Thousand Plateaus that, ‘If becoming-woman is the first quantum, or molecular segment, with the becomings-animal that link up with it coming next, what are they all rushing toward? Without a doubt, toward becoming-imperceptible. The imperceptible is the immanent end of becoming, its cosmic formula’. More importantly, this molecular assemblage is connected directly to the Kleistian war machine, that pure form of exteriority or deterritorialization, a ‘climate of infection’ where one multiplicity of bodies is invaded by another, producing a series of affective encounters and lines of flight. It is in this sense that, ‘All of Kleist’s work is traversed by a war machine invoked against the state’. In Black Moon, Malle’s battle of the sexes is now superseded through the catalytic intervention of animal becoming, producing a deterritorialized velocity of affect, a form of waking dream that releases the utopian promise of an uncoded, intensive love: the fulfillment of what Mathieu Carrière calls ‘Kleist’s great desire – to live as two in madness’.

‘And your little dog too’: Toto, Terry and animal performance in The Wizard of Oz

Toto, Dorothy’s pet terrier, plays a central part in the 1939 MGM film of The Wizard of Oz. The animal, who appears in almost every scene, has become an indelible part of the film’s visual iconography, and also acts as the catalyst for the film’s narrative, as Dorothy runs away in order to save her dog from Miss Gulch. This paper will examine Baum’s novels and earlier films adaptations of The Wizard of Oz to demonstrate the greatly expanded role that Toto plays in the 1939 film. It will also address the casting of Terry, a Cairn terrier bitch, in the role, and her place in the tradition of canine performers in the Hollywood studio system. The paper will also offer a close reading of the shooting script – which is full of directions and ‘dialogue’ for the canine character – and the finished film, to the extent we can read Terry’s contribution to The Wizard of Oz as a ‘performance’. The paper will also briefly consider the theoretical and ethical issues surrounding the use of animals in film and assess the ways in which nonhuman performers can make us question our understanding of film acting.
Rebecca Mercedes gordon  Northern Arizona University

Affect, affluence and the inhuman

Several recent films that feature AI or robot protagonists situate them as creatures whose capacity for human emotion far exceeds that of the actual human beings also featured in the films (for instance, Wall-E, Ex Machina and Chappie). Often, this more-human-than-human capacity to feel is conveyed through the robot’s relationship with animals or even plants: Wall-E’s pet cockroach and concern for a single green seedling is an obvious example; Chappie the baby-robot learns from his off-kilter human family how to gently pat a dog’s head; and the AI lifeform Ava in Ex Machina is visually related both to enclosed rooms and to lush vegetation – as is the robot Eva in Wall-E, oddly enough. Though at first these characterizations seem simply ways to anthropomorphize nonhuman characters and thus render them more sympathetic, for only humans have pets and cultivate plants, read another way the affective relationships these nonhuman entities develop with other living creatures, but not so much with humans, suggests a likeness between the inhuman, the plants and the animals that humans lack: specifically, the AIs, plants and animals lack affluence and/or a desire for affluence. What needs to be ununlearned for affect to exist, I suggest, is affluence.

This paper takes the relationship between ethnographic writing and ethnographic cinema as its central concern. What difference does cinema make? What does the visual do to the textual? The paper also tries to follow several distinct lines of thought through the work of Derrida, including his foundational critique of anthropological discourse and his meditation on the spatial and temporal entanglements of following that ‘wholly other they call animal’. Animals of all kinds crowd the frames of ethnographic film. They visually compete with the objects of ethnographic study (humans) and, in so doing, confuse the boundaries between ethnographic and zoographic categories of otherness. Moreover, one of the few conventions of expedition cinema includes the hunt and slaughter of at least one, but more commonly multiple, animals. These films detail a gruesome transition from animal life to death as well as the extensive efforts required to produce a taxidermic rebirth. They undo the lifelike appearances that populate the corridors and glass enclosures of the natural history museum and overturn the theories of taxidermy and salvage that dominate studies of ethnographic cinema. Instead, and in pursuit of Derrida, I argue that these scenes of animal death and dying exemplify the ambiguities of hunting, following and pursuing (historical, ethnographic or animal subjects).

This paper forms part of a panel that addresses the languages through which multispecies investigations and critical animal studies approach their central topic of concern: nonhuman life. Utilizing a variety of media, including the spoken and written word, the moving image and audio, this panel questions the underlying capacities of each to think with animals. Whether through ekphrasis, theoretical investigation or filmic observation, the abiding concern of letting animals into the lecture hall will be examined from a variety of standpoints. My paper investigates the processes of subjecting nonhuman life to a visual accounting. Utilizing the conceit of the test – a common and routinized practice of both scientific and documentary inquiry alike – I pose questions about the possibility of seeing the ‘what is’, the ‘what could be’ and the ‘what can’t be’ of a nonhuman visual presence. The final product of our panel will be the integration of such techniques not only as the subjects of critical analysis, but also as the very method through which such analysis is performed.

Since Guy Maddin debuted his short film Spanky: To the Pier and Back (2008), there has been a wave of Canadian shorts that feature dogs as central characters. This paper examines two such films, Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (Stephen Dunn, Newfoundland) and Chef de Meute (Chloé Robichaud, Quebec), both of which were highly praised and widely circulated in the 2012 Canadian and international film festival circuits. Chef de Meute tells the story of the solitary Clara: when her aunt dies, Clara’s family convinces her to adopt the pug left behind because they feel that she ‘needs company’. Life Doesn’t Frighten Me is also about a young woman and her dog: when Esther has a terrible thirteenth birthday, she turns to the family pug for comfort. For both Clara and Esther, dogs act as peers within the delay of the impasse; however, the dogs also facilitate eventful moments of growth. As films that explicitly locate themselves within the respective filmmaking traditions of Newfoundland and Quebec, Life Doesn’t Frighten Me and Chef de Meute highlight relations of difference and cultural borrowing between their local filmmaking practices and between the regions themselves.

Thirty years ago The Animals Film shocked audiences by revealing on film for the first time the many ways in which animals are abused in factory farms and scientific experiments. The film had a considerable impact and raised the exploitation of animals as a serious political issue. Also in the 1980s, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) initiated the first of its many controversial campaigns with Unnecessary Fuss, a documentary made by piecing together stolen footage from a laboratory in Pennsylvania. The wave of protests that followed the film’s release led to significant changes in legislation. Since these two landmark films, animal advocacy documentaries have proliferated and become something of a genre in their own right, characterized by independent modes of production and ‘guerrilla’ tactics of distribution. The strategies used for mobilizing audiences have diversified, and the staple use of clandestinely captured imagery of animal suffering is now tempered by, and sometimes replaced entirely with, more ‘viewer-friendly’ methods. It is the changing spectrum of discursive and marketing strategies used in animal-advocacy films and their shift towards a more environmentalist orientation that this paper will examine.

Revolutionary Russian cinema had more in mind than managing a new technological condition, which was the dramatic upsurge of mass media, and the technological progress of which they were the pre-eminent force. They had even more in mind than revolutionizing society. Instead, the cinema meant to revolutionize human nature. But what constitutes human nature? What might look astonishing today is the fact that Russian avant-gardist cinema addresses the question of the nonhuman and turns its attention more often to things, and even more often to animals, instead of scrutinizing the human. We just have to think of the horse in Dovzhenko’s Earth (1930) that accompanies the revolutionary hero’s death or the frogs, birds and dogs in Pudovkin’s Mechanics of the Brain (1926) to feel puzzled by the unique sensibility of animal nature toward the shifts in the human condition that came along with political, technological and economical change in the Russian revolutionary society. This paper aims to examine the ways in which animals in early Soviet avant-garde cinema mirror the human under specific historical circumstances, and reflect on the human in a way that is highly relevant for the technological, economical and societal changes under the digital networked condition of our times.

Charting the representation of dogs in Disney films from Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957) to Frankenweenie (Tim Burton, 2012) illuminates the evolving relationship between humans and their canine companions. This paper examines the Disney discourses on dogs, including the role of a companion dog in a boy’s transition to adulthood; dogs as symbols for ideals of home, family, love and loyalty; dogs as conduits for heroics and adventure; and the foregrounding of the loss and death of dogs. As one of the most recent and self-reflexive of the Disney dog-focused films (alongside Bolt [Chris Williams, Byron Howard, 2008]), Frankenweenie crystallizes these values and the cultural construction of the human–canine relationship. Through its playful homage to the classic Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) and kaiju films within the framework of a 3D stop-motion-animated family film, Frankenweenie highlights the wholesome, heartwarming, fun and adventurous aspects of the Disney-constructed human–canine bond, while also reflecting the common darker themes of human manipulation and decision-making about life and death for dogs. Disney values converge with Tim Burton’s auteurism and the intertextual references in Frankenweenie to offer a fascinating lens on our relationship with dogs.

One of the prevailing orthodoxies concerning the construction of animated characters is their cohesion around dominant personality traits and predictable humanlike behaviour. At the root of this continuity sits anthropomorphism, a creative and interpretive model working to index recognition and identification through a familiar human vocabulary. With etymological origins as far back as sixth-century Greece – combining ánthrōpos, defined as human, and morphē meaning shape or form – the endowment of inanimate objects or animals with human ability, proportion and purpose remains the defining register of animated cartoons. This paper, however, rethinks anthropomorphic representation and animated animality within the context of the computer-animated feature film. By interrogating the fractured identity of the anthropomorph as a hybrid figuration, I suggest how computer-animated films exploit the nonhuman morphē element to manipulate virtual space through anthropomorphic subjectivity. The anthropomorph is refined into a more prescriptive and functional agent, absorbing the audience into a spectatorial game that sharpens their awareness of the digital realm. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘gaseous perception’ to elucidate this articulation of enlivened space, this paper argues the computer-animated film anthropomorph is implicated in a hierarchical switch away from humanlike behaviour to embrace the possibilities of its morphē, nonhuman identity.

‘Exit pursued by bear’: scripting animal performers

Animal performers are notoriously unpredictable, yet this has not stopped screenwriters attempting to write very complex actions for them to perform. This paper will examine the shooting scripts of several films, including The Big Country, The Searchers, The Wizard of Oz and The Thin Man, and demonstrate the way in which screenwriters have written for animal performers. At the most basic level, the scripts explain how the animals should move and interact psychically with their human co-stars. However, many scripts which involve significant roles for animal performers go much further and begin to anthropomorphize the animal character by implying their reactions and emotions. Moreover, some scripts even include ‘dialogue’ for these nonhuman characters. The writer, however, is limited only by his imagination. It is the director who must eventually find practical solutions to working with the animal actor. The shooting scripts will therefore be compared to excerpts from the finished films in order to show the ways in which directors have tried to respond to the scriptwriters’ demands and how the animals themselves performed when in front of the camera.
Anthony Iles  Middlesex University

Viktor Shklovsky in the film factory

This paper discusses Viktor Shklovsky’s work in the nascent Soviet film factory, his role as a screenwriter, cine-worker and critic of early cinema. Discussing some key sequences from Po Zakonu (1926), Bed and Sofa (1927), The House on Trubnaya Square and Turksib (1929), the paper reflects on the mediation of Shklovsky’s critical thoughts about the cinematic medium through his practical work in the film industry and the function of animals in relation to the films he worked on. Animals abound in Shklovsky’s literary, critical and cinematic work. Whilst animals are used to allegorical and humorous effect in his prose and criticism, in the films listed above they are often deployed as elements of plot delivery, enabling the human actors a greater elasticity. Animals have a dynamic and organizing function, leading the action rather than diverting it; they assist in making things strange, but are less enigmatic. If animals direct things in a linear yet chaotic direction, other devices (such as intertitles) interrupt, reverse and generally redirect the story. This paper will reflect on Shklovsky’s bestiary in different media and modes of writing and consider the critical role of their presentation in these early filmic experiments.