Lisa åkervall  Bauhaus-University, Weimar Can’t Hug Every Cat

It’s Her: Scarlett and the inhuman

Since Clara Bow, the ‘it girl’ has been synonymous with Hollywood feminine celebrity, at once seductive and dangerous, alluring and alienating. The contemporary manifestation of the ‘it girl’ is arguably Scarlett Johansson, a diva of piercing eyes and pouty lips dubbed the ‘thinking man’s jailbait’ (Vanity Fair). Interestingly, Johansson has recently been crafting a metanarrative that reveals the alien kernel of celebrity, its fantasmatic enclosure of the inhuman, where the ‘it’ girl can be read as ‘I.T.’ Focusing on her 2013/2014 corpus, I trace a double meta-narrative across the films Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer), Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014), in which Johansson plays an alien seductress, an alluring operating system, and an enhanced human-turned-supercomputer and ‘original’ human animal. At one level, these films overlap to tell the same story: the ‘it girl’, both comfortingly human and alienatingly other, arrives from an extra-terrestrial, extra-biological dimension with superior powers – to consume, to love, to kill – before disappearing with a valediction to humanity into extra-technological space. At another level, this is a narrative about celebrity and the inhuman, which relies on femininity to serve as a vehicle for our simultaneously liberatory and fatalistic fantasies about technology.
Fiona Law  University of Hong Kong

Pet-animals in the concrete jungle: tales of abandonment and sentimentality on Chinese-language screens

With the increasing concern over animal abuse and animal welfare found in local media, there have been a rising number of screen representations on this subject in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the PRC in recent years. Among them the SPCA initiated the ‘Care for Life’ short film series in 2012 in order to advocate animal welfare in the three regions. Popular Taiwanese writer Giddens Ko also produced Twelve Nights (2014), a documentary that chronicles the final days of homeless dogs in the shelter before they are euthanized or adopted. Through a comparative study of selected images on Chinese-language screens, this paper attempts to map out the topography of an affective sphere mediated by the visual narratives between animals and human. It is found that images of abandonment and sentimentality concerrning these hapless animals have often been used as tools for improving public awareness of animal rights. Under this didactic discourse, how do we critically reflect on the gloomy conditions of these pet-animals and their agency? This paper aims to provoke contemplation of the impact of urban development on the wavering yet intimate relationship between animals and human beings, as well as examining the potential susceptibility of such representations.

While the Western has attracted considerable attention, the cattle so central to the genre are routinely marginalized if they are mentioned at all. Stampede sequences, in which the cattle are temporarily foregrounded for dramatic effect, will provide the basis here for a reconsideration of the genre focused explicitly on its representation of the management and movement of the nonhuman multitude that is the herd. Stampede sequences will be examined as cinematic spectacle and understood in relation to biopower. Cattle-drive Westerns are usually set during the ‘beef bonanza’ of the 1860–70s; the sourcing and sale of the cattle required for such films – and the difficulties of shooting stampede – complicates their relationship to the industry whose origins – the dangerous early drives – they dramatize. As the stampede disrupts the drive, threatening profits, so the stampede sequence, providing standard thrills, interrupts the film on a number of levels, since they were regularly the responsibility of the second unit, were dependent on stunt doubles and usually utilized stock footage. This presentation will consider the stampede sequence as biopolitical spectacle by referring to a range of films, including The Big Stampede (1932), Stampede (1936), Cattle Stampede (1943), Red River (1947) and Stampede (1949).

A number of recent documentary films have crossed the boundary between humans and animals, exploring the hybrid condition which Deleuze and Guattari have defined as ‘becoming-animal’. Sweetgrass (2009), directed by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, and Leviathan (2012), which the latter co-directed with Verena Paravel, have experimental dispositions which convey an experience of animality through the manifold heterogeneity of sensory perceptions. It is somewhat paradoxical that these filmmakers who are also anthropologists attempt in their works to dislodge the anthropos from its hegemonic position within the order of representation. Neither observational documentaries nor pastoral fictions, these films are hybrid objects, in a similar vein to Werner Herzog’s portrait of Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man (2005). Herzog’s editing of and comment on Treadwell’s video footage substitutes a Bazinian realism for a Disney-like anthropomorphism. But it also makes Treadwell’s performance a completed metamorphosis: an act of transgression, in Bataille’s words. Whereas animality used to signal a divide between human and nonhuman, culture and nature, it now designates a hybrid community of humans and animals. This paper explores the aesthetic and epistemological turns entailed by these new modes of hybridity on screen.

Bringing together science and art, human and animal, subject and object, En Masse is an interdisciplinary and interspecies media art project made by an animator (Alison Reiko Loader), an entomologist (Christopher Plenzich), and hundreds of forest tent caterpillars. Though initially inspired by Brakhage’s Mothlight, which uses insect bodies as filmic material in a narrative that identifies cinematic experience with the suicidal captivation of moths, their project explores the agential potential of caterpillars as social bodies that are innately creative, communicative and oriented towards life. Forest tent caterpillars spin communal silk mats and forage together – forming queues and clusters as they prepare for transformation to adulthood. For En Masse, insects and humans made cartographic drawings and living painting of caterpillar choreography that were filmed and edited for projection onto screens made of cocoon silk. Complicating connections between observer and observed, Loader and Plenzich study and care for insects hatched alongside their video displays, inviting viewers to join them, ask questions and engage directly with their media and its bugs. Loader will present documentation from their Montreal exhibition (FOFA Gallery, April–May 2015) and discuss the aesthetic and epistemological potentials of interdisciplinary practice, as well as the ethical possibilities of asymmetric collaborations between animals, both human and not.

Often seen as a recent phenomenon, animal celebrity spans circuses, vaudeville, early films and Classical Hollywood cinema, as well as viral/social media. While animal representations typically address difference, innocence, power, ecology, embodiment and transcendence, I argue that animal celebrity constitutes a discourse on social mobility, audience belief and public knowledge of media’s operations. Using examples from early cinema to social media, I distinguish two forms of animal fame: figures defined purely as animals, even those approaching the anthropomorphic, like Lassie, Bambi, Jean the Vitagraph Dog or the Blue Peter pets, and those personae barely masking a human performance, like Sockington, Boo and Grumpy Cat. In a fame-conscious era, such digital animal celebrity seemingly offers a faster route to mass visibility than other forms of internet fame. But why animals? Embracing/creating an animal persona establishes a space of innocence, bypassing harsh online interactions, while enabling recognition of the person behind the image. Furthermore, public awareness of this charade testifies to audience knowledge of mass media institutions and their modes of representation, pointing to their inherently participatory character. Finally, digital animal celebrity points to the difficulty of (human) upwards mobility, particularly in austerity, while pointing to historical changes in stardom and celebrity.

This paper will discuss the phenomenon of animated stardom, in which American film studios regularly publicized their cartoon creations not as mere characters, but as complex personalities with an implied off-screen ‘existence’. With the rise of television in the 1950s, previous models of promoting stars were challenged: whereas Hollywood had traditionally privileged the glamour and ‘superiority’ of its film performers, early broadcasting placed a focus on ‘liveness’ and intimacy. This presentation will argue that animated star images, like their live-action equivalent, were altered during this period. Television networks encouraged appearances from cinematic performers (whose pre-existing fame could attract viewers), but also aimed to give the impression that more of the actual ‘person’ (behind the apparent veneer of stardom) was being revealed and shared to the viewer than in previous discourse. A broadcast such as This Is Your Life Donald Duck (tx 11 March 1960) sees Donald make various revelations about his pre-fame life and express humility – attributes that were highly valued by the aesthetics of early broadcasting. Despite the self-reflexivity and parodic qualities often associated with animation, it is suggestive how often these shows tended to reproduce, rather than denounce, television’s markers of authenticity.

Reviewers of Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2015) praise its non-CGI execution of a mass street-dogs’ revolt, but express confusion about its meaning: is the uprising metaphorical, like a canine Spartacus (1963)? Or is it just more evidence of the impossibility of animal revolutions, The Birds (1960) gone to the dogs? The uncertainty arguably flags an even more revolutionary shift taking place for animals in film, a change that is captured in viewers of White God’s shifting perceptions of one or several dogs. Drawing comparisons with two contemporary films that link canids to historical acts of mass killing, The Last Dogs of Winter (2011) and Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths (2010), this project examines how attention not only to content but also to formal aspects helps to track the halting emergence of multispecies multitudes in film.

Drawing on recent theorizations of screen animals (Burt, Pick, Shukin), this paper explores the ethical, political and ecological stakes of Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel, 2012), an experimental documentary featuring a commercial fishing boat off the coast of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Shot on multiple miniature GoPro cameras attached to fishermen and filmmakers, capturing life in nets and images, the film reveals a ‘material-semiotic’ entanglement of species beings and visual technologies (Haraway). Yet this entanglement – central to the film’s immersive aesthetics – is shaped by a violent asymmetry whereby human labour results in animal death. Leviathan thus makes visible the ‘resource politics’ (Bozak) not only of fishing but of film – what Shukin has described as a biopolitical logic of rendering that enacts ‘a transfer of life from animal body to technological media’. Yet Leviathan also unfolds a mode of durational attentiveness to nonhuman lifeworlds, as unremittingly long takes reveal fish slowly dying – scenes that assume a particular ethical, political and ecological charge. Working with and against resource extraction, Leviathan highlights the importance of temporality in attending to lives beyond the human; it intimates how cinematic duration might work to question biopolitical regimes.

From Frankenstein to The Fly, Hollywood is teeming with monstrous bodies that simultaneously warn against scientific hubris and laud the possibilities of a posthuman world. While transhumanism often emphasizes the need for humanity to capitalize on technology in order to exceed our ‘natural’ form, some renderings of the movement indulge in a romantic vision of animality, suggesting a need to coopt, or reclaim, powers found in less ‘civilized’ creatures. In scrutinizing the double-edged sword of such scientific endeavours, I examine three recent renditions of transhumanism, Splice (2009), Hanna (2011) and Lucy (2014). My paper assesses the respective fantasies and nightmares of transhumanism found in each film, considering how their transhumanist vision blurs the boundaries between animal and human. By linking the feminine, the monstrous and the animalistic, these films’ female protagonists suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms by which bodies are culturally defined – human and animal, male and female, and so on. Often honouring the connection between the technologically enhanced human and the natural powers of the unadulterated animal, I consider how these films challenge transhumanism’s anthropocentric prejudices and contemplate what it means to embody both the human and animal in an increasingly posthuman world.

‘If this was a human …’: pets and vets on television

Reflecting on the quick recovery of a Labrador he recently completed major surgery on, vet Noel Fitzpatrick remarks, ‘If this was a human, you would not be walking around a field the day after your hip replacement. Dogs are amazing.’ Fitzpatrick is the star of The Supervet (Channel 4, 2014– ) and The Bionic Vet (BBC1, 2010), and a pioneering surgeon known for his development of innovative forms of animal surgery. Veterinary programmes offer an interesting subgenre for the discussion of the representations of animals because the patients are nonhuman. Firstly, decisions about medical treatments cannot be made by the patients, and so humans always speak on their behalf. Secondly, an option commonly absent from discussions of human medicine – euthanasia – is often present. Thirdly, the owner–pet relationship is centred on ‘dominance and affection’ (Tuan) symbolic of the broader human–animal divide. This paper will outline how these three function within The Supervet, and the contradictions that exist ‘when species meet’ (Haraway). By noting what would be different ‘if this was a human’, Fitzpatrick notes the particularity of the dog he has treated, and this paper will examine the implications of this for debates about the representations of animals on television.
RAchel Moore  Goldsmiths, University of London

Kalatozov’s animal eye

This paper looks at the fragility of the human in Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia (1929). The traditional historical materialist notion of progress, which is to replace that which is animal, nonhistorical and cyclical with the technological runs parallel with one in which the animal takes on a transgressive role. In so doing, it interferes with normal revolutionary fare at key moments. The emergence of sweat, excrement, and the final ride of the horse to its death derails the narrative of progress, the historical materialist story told, but does so through montage and imagery. Considered a failure for its ‘formalism’ in its own time, this paper delves into the reasons why it is now championed today for that formal excess.

Originally conceived as a faithful ‘rendering’ (as it were), Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation not only transforms Michel Faber’s satirical novel Under the Skin into a dark fable of uncertain meaning, it also creates, in conjunction with its source text, a continuum along which animal, human, android and alien lose their fixed positions, while nonetheless retaining trace elements of their former selves. Equally importantly, the relationship between Glazer’s evocative and destabilizing film (an exercise in various forms of estrangement) and Faber’s darkly satirical, at times grimly funny, novel mirrors the relationship between film adaptations and source texts more generally. In this sense, Faber’s novel functions as both original and natural, and Glazer’s film as the novel’s technological other. Despite its sci-fi premise, Faber’s novel is closely associated with nature: its central character Isserley is the alien as sheep- or llama-like animal (her natural self), surgically and grotesquely transformed into human form but still possessing her original consciousness and self-awareness. Glazer’s film is, like film itself, a technological/manufactured product: its unnamed femme fatale is the alien as android whose artificial intelligence develops beyond the merely programmable to the recognizably human.

In this paper, I argue the French miniseries Les Revenants (Canal+, 2012– ) produces moments of the uncanny within a televisual aesthetic that deliberately unsettles the viewer. I suggest the series employs formal strategies, particularly the televisual moment, to produce a textual ‘labyrinthian space’ (Cixous) enabling a diegetic and dialectical preoccupation with the failures of the rational in an increasingly irrational place. Uncanny moments function as ruptures in the narrative and as jarring moments of realization, producing multiple meanings in fragments of narrative excess. I argue that Les Revenants is built on such moments; taken together, they foreground the abject nature of the ‘returned’ and the strangeness of ‘home’ as central themes of the series. At the level of aesthetic form, each uncanny moment draws us more deeply into the storyworld of Les Revenants, in which rational logics and procedural practices are ultimately subsumed by the familiar made strange. Across the levels of narrative, plot and style, I suggest Les Revenants is about the uncanny, focusing on a village’s negotiations with its manifestation as performed by its televisual aesthetic and revealed in standalone televisual moments. Les Revenants produces moments of reflection which refer back to past shared histories and forward to the possibilities of abject subjectivity, but which offer no avenues for escape.

The shared look between human and animal, though frequently rendered as a site of mutual incomprehension, is a privileged motif in theory and visual culture. The aim of this paper is to delineate the ways in which the look of the animal, as an active and directed gaze, and the eye of the animal, as a material image of vulnerability, structure cinematic encounters between animal and human, and the implications such structures have for an ethics of spectatorship. Making reference to the films of Bill Viola and the writing of Anat Pick, the paper examines Of Horses and Men (Benedikt Erlondsson, 2013), an exploration of the imbrication of horse and human in an Icelandic rural community. The film is punctuated by the recurring closeup of an equine eye, in which the landscape and its human figures are reflected. These images highlight the animal’s material vulnerability, which finds its echo in our own embodied acts of viewing, while inverting the usual relationship of dominance that human figures hold in the visual space between the animal and the human. The paper traces the implications of such an image to an understanding of cinema as a ‘creaturely medium’ (Pick) of ethical reflection.

‘A species does not discover an environment waiting for it’ (Sean Cubitt). Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects (2013) argues for more sustained and creative attention to those things that are ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’. Impatient with notions of localism and presentism, Morton believes that hyperobjects must provoke ‘a sense of asymmetry between the infinite power of cognition and the infinite being of things’. They challenge our capacities of interpretation and articulation, and present particular difficulties to the medium of film, which invariably deals with units of presently unfolding time in clearly delineated space. In The Bay (Barry Levinson, 2012), a small seaside town with a polluted water supply is ravaged by flesh-eating isopods. I wish to argue that its found-footage premise and media-collage aesthetic can be understood as grappling with some of the conundrums set out by Morton’s writing. More specifically, Levinson’s film explores the phenomenon of contamination as something which collapses together cause and effect, local and global, victim and culprit, fish and water. Our assumption of a complete symbiosis between fish and their habitat, combined with their global presence, gives fish a special potential for the impossible but vital task of hyperobject representation.