Domesticating the wild: fictional animal US television programming in the 1960s

While the representation of animals in documentary and wildlife television programmes has received sustained scholarly attention, the representation of animals in fictional television programming has received comparatively little consideration. This paper examines the cycle of fictional live-action animal-related television programming produced in the 1960s in the USA by Ivan Tors Studios. I analyze animal representation and performativity onscreen in programmes featuring trained animals in children's programming such as Daktari (CBS, 1966–68), Flipper (NBC, 1964–67), and Gentle Ben (CBS, 1967), which feature exotic and wild animals as companions to young children and families. In addition, I consider how animals are represented off-screen in promotional material about Tors’s California wild animal park ‘Africa, USA’ and in Tors’s ‘affection’ animal-training discourse. Using a human animal studies-informed historical research method, I argue that these representations of human and wild animal encounters circulate an understanding of the wild animal as pet and conservation as a form of animal domestication. Further, I argue that the domesticated wild animal as pet image circulated by Tors on- and offscreen would inform both conservation discourse and later televisual representations of wildlife.

Rooftop pigeon coops prominently feature in Elia Kazan’s 1954 film On the Waterfront and Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999). For the protagonists in both films – dockworker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) and a contract killer Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), caring for pigeons on the rooftop space provides ‘another’ world, far away from what they do for a living. Yet what they do down below has a devastating impact on the rooftop coops, the pigeons suffering a reprisal for their actions. Drawing upon the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia, this paper illustrates the ways in which the rooftop pigeon coops in these films constitute heterotopias, being in relation with all the other places by both representing/mirroring and at the same time suspending/inverting them. Exploring pertinent juxtapositions between pigeons and the protagonists in the films, the paper also discusses the ways in which the tradition of rooftop pigeon breeding/flying (once ubiquitous in the working-class neighbourhood in NYC) links these two films.

Often having a major influence on the narrative but sometimes simply providing comic digressions, animal characters have made recurring appearances in Bombay cinema since the 1950s. While such interspecies coexistence certainly adds an element of cinematic attraction, it also creates a register that transcends the human–nonhuman binary. This paper will specifically look at two mainstream melodramas – Haathi Mere Saathi/Elephant My Companion (1971) and Gaai Aur Gori/The Cow and the Damsel (1973) – to analyze how they effectively provoke the spectators to receive the animal not as an ontological lack, but as a cine-ethical rejoinder to their humanist position. Released at a historical moment when the Indian political community was going through a momentous phase of self-evaluation, Haathi Mere Saathi, with an orphan protagonist who forms a community of creaturely fellowship with his animal companions, and Gaai Aur Gori, in which a village girl is forced to desert her bovine companion in order to be with her husband in the city, project human–animal relationships as a possible alternative to dominant familial and juridicial structures. Touching upon social issues such as class difference, caste hierarchy and patriarchal prejudices, these films imply that a human–nonhuman sociality can offer a way out of the structures of injustice created by humanist predispositions.

This paper will examine the queerness of the human–animal relationship, using as a case study Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008). Kathryn Bond Stockton in The Queer Child asserts that the presence of the animal is a surrogate for the sideways growth of the child and a metaphor of queerness. I intend to question whether this reading is either contradictory or conducive to a queer posthumanism. Posthumanist scholar Donna Haraway asserts that the human–animal relationship is objectified by relegation to metaphor, and claims rather that the animal deserves equal agency in its ‘significant otherness.’ Haraway’s and Stockton’s respective stances on the nature of the human–animal relationship seem initially in contradiction to each other, but I will determine whether there is not actually a degree of commonality in these pieces located in the inherent queerness of posthumanist philosophy. Wendy and Lucy presents an opportunity to reconcile the queer and posthuman perspectives on the human–animal bond, as the film privileges both in its depiction of the two title characters. I will furthermore examine the degree to which Wendy and Lucy’s bond is articulated and mediated by melodrama, with an eye to the affective power of animal melodrama.

This paper is concerned with animals, representation and questions of agency in the digital era. Its methods align with the posthumanites, an endeavour that, for Cary Wolfe, signals the possibility of rethinking the humanities in relation ‘to the human’s entangled, complex relations with animals, the environment, and technology’. I begin by proposing Grizzly Man as a film that sits at the cusp of a new epoch in documentary that is influenced by changing manifestations of agency, digital technology and ecological interconnectedness. This epoch sits against the background of both a ‘green wave’ of film and television and Deborah Bird Rose’s notion of ecological existentialism. I expand on this new era, considering the case of online examples from nature cams (Crittercam and WildCam) to YouTube clips (Marmot Licks GoPro, Elephant Takes Selfie & Films His Family and Last Tasmanian Tiger, Thylacine). These examples disturb traditions of anthropocentrism in moving-image culture and contribute to a rethinking of human and animal agency, principally through the work of observation and repetition. This paper sits within a larger project that explores how human entanglements with nonhuman animals are rethought and affirmed though the codes, conventions and traditions of the documentary moving image.

A number of art house films employ the killing of animals as a metaphor. Usually this metaphor works as a comment on the exploitation of humans by economic or political powers. From Eisenstein’s Strike! to Burnett’s Killer of Sheep to many of Michael Haneke’s films, the death of the animal stands in for human suffering and is in itself often merely a vehicle for this other message. The death of the animal is largely anthropocentric. Seldom is the death of the animal anything more than a parable and I will explore the way in which metaphors more generally may, or may not, work in film and the extent to which the ‘reality’ of film death may interfere with metaphoric function. I will concentrate on films in which an actual living animal’s death is recorded on screen and expand on Richard Rushton’s discussion of the supposed difference between the killing of cows in analogue and digital cinema. Using the work of J. M. Coetzee and Jacques Derrida on the erasure of the animal, I will map a certain metaphoric tendency in art house cinema and I will also develop Dylan Trigg’s recent work on the ‘unhuman’ in film and phenomenology.

Though Marx and Freud are the major touchstones in most discussions of Buñuel’s films, close inspection rewards the consideration of Darwin’s influence as well. Indeed, Buñuel has cited reading On the Origin of Species as one of the major turning points in his life, and he spent two years studying entomology in Madrid before deciding that he was more interested in the ‘life and literature’ of insects than in their anatomy and classification. The influence of Darwin and the study of natural history in general plays itself out in his films in two important ways: not only do insects and many other nonhuman animals play a conspicuous role in his works, often in ‘uncanny’ interspecies confrontations that highlight both sameness and difference, but his treatment of his human characters often stresses their animality, as they must compete, and sometimes collaborate, in struggles to ‘mate’ and/or survive. Darwin identified Eros and Thanitos as the two major vehicles driving evolutionary change, and indeed both play a peculiarly significant role in Buñuel’s films, as does the near heretical Darwinian assertion that humans are also animals. Films to be discussed include Un Chien andalou, The Exterminating Angel, and That Obscure Object of Desire.

The history of drones is typically read in terms of a technological evolution which begins with the advent of aerial reconnaissance in World War I, moves through the use of remote-control vehicles by the Germans in World War II and culminates in modern, networked applications such as the Reaper drone. However, what is often left out of this technologically determined narrative is the role that animals played in forging the relationships between automated vision and military technology that animate the contemporary drone. From Dr Julius Neubronner’s World War I system for fitting pigeons with lightweight, double-lensed cameras to B. F. Skinner’s ‘Project Orcon’, which sought to train birds during World War II to guide missiles towards their targets, the animal served as an integral part of the drone’s prehistory. Using works such as Mato Atom’s short film Seagulls (2013), this presentation will consider the ways in which this overlapping history sheds light on the technical capacities and cultural position of the contemporary UAV. Of particular interest is the way in which this lingering animality informs the specific relations of sound, visibility and identification in the filmic representation of drones and their unique mode of vision.

In the concluding paragraph of his monograph Electric Animal, Akira Mizuta Lippit argues when animals, philosophically lacking language as per traditional western thought, become ‘filmic organisms’, they are ‘transformed into languages, or at least, into semiotic facilities’. My paper takes up Lippit’s insightful but perhaps underdeveloped claim and poses three related questions. First, is Lippit referring to the cinematic animal in general or specific kinds of onscreen animals? Second, how does cinema enact this process of signification? Third, are animals as filmic elements necessarily turned into languages or signs? I will address these questions by tracing the appearances and functions of animals, especially dogs, in early commercial shorts, in relation to Tom Gunning’s now paradigmatic account of early cinema as medium of attractions. Certain dogs on film, I argue, complicate Lippit’s claim. By no means mere languages or signs, they function as contingent events, vaudeville gags, and syntheses of attractions and narratives. The films I will examine include: Dickson and Heise’s Athlete With Wand (1894), the Lumière brothers’ La sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon (1895), Méliès’s Une partie de cartes (1896) and Porter’s Dog Factory (1904) in the context of a peculiar film genre: the ‘sausage-making’ film.

This paper analyzes Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Loong Boonmee raleuk chat/Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) in terms of its representations of animal-to-human and human-to-animal reincarnation, with a particular focus on the use of Super 16mm film at a time in cinema history when physical film experiences its own existential transformation. In Weerasethakul’s narrative of the cycle of life, the titular Boonmee inhabits human as well as nonhuman forms – a water buffalo, a catfish, a monkey ghost … – in an endless cycle of birth, death and reincarnation. ‘I don't know if I was a human or an animal, a woman or a man’, he notes of one such past life, placing it within the context of transmogrification. The use of Super 16mm film manifests a materiality whose visual qualities have become increasingly associated with the past, and which now carry a series of potent signifiers concerning ageing, mutability and indeed death. This paper discusses this representational strategy as both an aesthetic corollary of the film’s central themes and as a broader historiographic exploration of the very nature of cinema at the point of its evolving film-to-digital representational base and its own historical cycle of birth, death and reincarnation.

My paper, as part of the panel ‘Facing the Subject,’ specifically addresses the issue of animals’ faces and gaze as captured on camera. I ask: how do we understand the cinematic aporia when a nonhuman animal appears on camera, or reacts to things both visible and invisible to the human-cum-camera eye? What kinds of transaction emerge from film and other media figurations of nonhuman animals and their interactions with an environment (humans included)? What representational limits do they confront? How might we recognize and ‘speak nearby’ (as Trinh Minh-ha suggests we do) agential otherness through the lenses of multiple media? Working with thematized and contingent (close-up) images of animals’ faces and gaze drawn from Sinophone documentaries and fiction films, I probe ways of letting animals into the lecture hall through ekphrasis, theoretical investigation, and filmic observation/ intervention. By interweaving media performance and critical analysis, I strive to open up film and media (re)presentation to address nonhuman agency beyond our anthropocentric and anthropomorphic perspective, and to create venues for nonhuman animals to speak for themselves, and for us to ‘speak nearby’ nonhuman life.

This paper closely analyzes a key sequence from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014) in which the renegade bonobo Koba acts like an ignorant circus animal to deceive two humans whom he intends to murder and rob. In doing so, this paper demonstrates that performance capture technology allows human actors (with the help of technicians and animators) to perform animal characters convincingly in order to construct meaning. It argues that this sequence is particularly notable for showing an animal performing its own animality. This paper closely analyzes how such deceitful performativity is constructed through movement and gesture alongside framing and 3D shot composition. It investigates how the representation of Koba’s deception relies on gestural and compositional conventions that are often associated with slapstick cinema to create tension. The paper therefore analyzes how these ‘circus-like’ representational strategies spatially connote a hierarchy of knowledge between the animal and the humans in this sequence. To this end, the paper delineates how 3D and motion capture work together to connote this disparity, charting how the animal’s mastery of the situation – invisible to the human characters – is made clear to the viewer.

At the Screen Studies Conference in 2010, I gave a presentation concerning the high incidence of animal signifiers in British cinema, the argument being that certain particularities of English language and British social history related to animality are echoed in popular cultural forms such as the cinema. However, my subsequent research revealed that a similar phenomenon is equally present in American cinema. It is therefore possible to regard this question as pertaining to English-language cinema as a whole. I therefore propose to revisit the question of cinematic animal representation by concentrating on the films of Alfred Hitchcock, in which the representation of animals is particularly rife. Hitchcock also had the distinction of being both a British and an American film director. This twenty-minute film presentation will explore the nuances of the multiple usage of animals in Hitchcock’s films in symbolic terms (by referring to social class, gender, nature, good and evil, and so on) as well as in cinematic and linguistic terms. It will also examine the role of animal representation as a form of self-representation in the Hitchcock oeuvre. The film will also consider the ways in which the unpredictabilty of animal performance challenged Hitchcock’s highly controlled approach to filmmaking.

The degree to which media artist Chris Marker engaged the animal is well known; Marker’s totemic fascinations with cats and owls draw frequent comment. The broad body of his work reflects the full range of human–animal relationships so elegantly articulated by John Berger in ‘Why look at animals?’ Marker was not a nature photographer and he did not openly decry zoos: in his work, animals emerge not from ‘out there’ but from ‘in here’; wild or domesticated, they share our world (our historical world and our representational world) and we share theirs. Marker’s explorations of cultural ‘otherness’ extend to reflect on how others represent animals, and include his own continual return to ‘the gaze’, both human and animal, a gaze insistently coaxed by his camera. For Marker, the question of the animal is always already there, percolating up from remote consciousness to interrupt his ongoing (human) questions of memory and time: ‘By the way’, his narrator asks in Sans Soleil, ‘did you know there are emus in the Île de France?’ ‘An animal looks at me’, writes Derrida; then, ‘What should I make of this sentence?’ This presentation examines how Marker translates ‘this sentence’ into the grammar of cinema.

‘I shot Bambi’: death and the animal in The Yearling