LISA ÅKERVALL  Bauhaus-University, Weimar
Can’t Hug Every Cat: modulated sounds in digital media ecologies
This paper examines how the use of sound modulations in the viral would-be dating video Can’t Hug
Every Cat (Digital Video, YouTube, 2011) exemplifies a mutation characteristic of digital media ecologies. I show how these modulations display a growing emphasis on the non-anthropomorphous and non-subjective within digital media ecologies. In
Can’t Hug Every Cat
, which landed over twelve million hits on YouTube from July to December 2011, eHarmony online dater Debbie confesses her love for cats and bursts into tears. As the video spread virally, investigation showed that this emotional confession to interspecies love was the performance of the actress Cara Hartmann and did not involve
‘real’ tears. Within this performance the use of the plug-in auto-tune underscored the shifting lines between natural and artificial expression. The use of auto-tune allows the video to point to the mutations of media-specific norms. Whereas twentieth-century media cultures strongly opposed the natural and the artificial and aspired for the inconspicuousness of the artificiality of the reproduction of sounds, twenty-first-century digital media ecologies exhibit and emphasize the artificiality of expression.
BECKY BARTLETT  University of Glasgow
Gorilla filmmaking: acting the ape in Hollywood
Human representations of gorillas – men in suits – have featured on screen from the early days of cinema, with the first known example of a ‘Hollywood gorilla man’ appearing in the 1914 serial The
Perils of Pauline . Since then, particularly during the 1940s and 1950s, gorillas have featured in horror, science fiction, comedy and drama films ranging from big-budget, professional productions, to lowbudget bad movies. Inside the suits, a small group of men carved out careers playing gorillas: men like
Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan, George Barrows, Bob Burns, and others. These men, who often created and owned their own suits and were frequently hired on this basis, have created distinctive alter egos, each one revealing unique and identifiable visual and performative characteristics. The relationship between human and gorilla will be examined in this paper, particularly regarding the function of the gorilla in fiction film in terms of both narrative and spectacle. Through their portrayal of creatures that combine qualities of the human and inhuman, these gorilla men represent such duality through performances that exploit otherness yet remain distinctly anthropomorphic. In an area ripe for further study, this paper offers one of the first academic studies of gorilla men.
KARIN BEELER  University of Northern British Columbia
Beyond zombies: resurrected youth in telefantasy
Contemporary screen culture has featured a host of resurrected creatures, and artistic creators of the
‘undead’ continue to push the boundaries of the concept. While most films or television series about the undead tend to revolve around monstrous adult characters, two recent examples of telefantasy have incorporated children or youth to highlight the incongruity that the construct of a resurrected child injects into a narrative. A French series, Les Revenants, (2012; 2015– ) engages with the concept of the displaced, undead child by presenting a young boy and a teenaged girl who have returned from the dead. The American series Resurrection (2014– ) depicts the alienation experienced by an eight-yearold boy who returns to the world of the living after thirty-two years and is reunited with his considerably older parents. In each case, the resurrected child highlights a desire to suspend time and to preserve a particular bond that a traumatic incident has severed. Both series allow viewers to reflect on the concept of the resurrected child as the intersection of the familiar and the unknown, but Les
Revenants also imbues the resurrected child with an ‘older soul’, while Resurrection presents the child as a symbol of elusive youth.
STAN BEELER  University of Northern British Columbia
The werewolf as a symbol in young adult television
As the popularity of fantastic fiction in television increases, the trope of the werewolf has become more common in all of the subgenres that make up the fantastic. Consequently the werewolf has become a staple in young adult/teen television where it serves a more complex symbolic function than the simple bogeyman of horror fiction. In order to more clearly analyze these symbolic functions, I would like to consider the figure of the werewolf in the BBC production Wolfblood and MTV’s Teen Wolf . Both shows incorporate the connection between the werewolf and the physically maturing bodies of the young adults who are the protagonists of these serials. They represent the hormonal vagaries of puberty as the shift from rational human being to raging wolf. A new development is the wolf as representative of an animal living in the strict hierarchy of a pack. Young adults are quite comfortable with the idea of alpha, beta and omega character-types in the context of education and life within the boundaries of

adult expectations. The third aspect of the symbolic representation of the young werewolves in both serials is their ecologically sensitive connection to the natural world.
FRANCES BONNER  University of Queensland
Live animals: the role and place of BBC2’s Springwatch and related programming
Natural history television is primarily categorized as blue-chip, action-adventure or docusoap – all of which may or may not be presenter-led. All however are pre-recorded. What then to make of live natural history shows? Early natural history television (as some children’s shows today) involved live studio presentations with animals brought in from local zoos. This paper’s focus, however, will be on what liveness contributes to the BBC’s Springwatch and its spin-offs. These shows have provided a significant contribution to BBC2’s schedule since 2005. While the spectacle of the ‘live’ animal is at their heart, in many ways they draw as much on the conventions of sports broadcasting as wildlife television. Unlike most of the programmes that share the BBC Earth brand, the centrality of liveness to their address makes them unsuitable for overseas sales, or much in the way of repeat screenings to recoup costs. Their justification would appear to lie in their public service components, education and regionalism. However they should also be seen as a strong example of the tactics employed to maintain the importance of broadcast television and the perception of it as distinctive yet attuned to modern realities through dedicated online and other social media sites.
WILLIAM BROWN  University of Roehampton
The digital female body: ScarJo as inhuman
From the novel The Future Eve (1886) to Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), myths have circulated about how technology will help to create the ‘perfect woman’. This paper will analyze various films featuring
Scarlett Johansson and the ways in which her star image seems to perpetuate this myth, especially via an association with technology. A highly mediated star, ‘ScarJo’, as she sometimes is known, is associated both with notions of ‘female perfection’ and with the digital – as evidenced by her presence in Her , Don Jon (Joseph Gordon Levitt, 2013, Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013), Captain
America: The Winter Soldier (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2014) and Lucy (Luc Besson, 2014). Although her star persona is one of an empowered woman, as reflected in the action movies in which she stars,
‘ScarJo’ is nonetheless a problematic spectacle to-be-looked-at. Considering these films, the paper will suggest that her posthuman agency is digitally enabled, but that there is enormous tension surrounding the persistence of all-too-human gender definitions in these characterizations of ‘ScarJo’ as transcending humanity, and extending into the in- or posthuman.
ANDREW BURKE  University of Winnipeg
Blood and b eauty in Jack Chambers’s The Hart of London
Jack Chambers’s The Hart of London (1970) begins with found footage of a 1954 incident in which a deer wandered into the centre of London, Ontario. Chambers reveals the beauty of the animal as it bounds through fields at the edge of the city and leaps over suburban fences, but also documents the deer’s tragic demise when it is trapped and shot by a group of hunters and police. Chambers’s film has long been critically celebrated, most notably by Stan Brakhage, for its formal innovation and experimental vision, but in this paper I want to focus on the hart at the heart of The Hart of London .
The doomed deer plays a crucial role in Chambers’s film, which is at once a civic history, a meditation on memory, and the story of Chambers’s own artistic formation and development. The deer is a symbol of modernity’s brutal subordination of the natural, yet simultaneously represents the wildness that persists at the heart of modernity despite all efforts to eradicate it. This paper examines the cinematic force of the blood that spills from Chambers’s eponymous Hart and considers its importance in a longer history of animals and experimental cinema.
ELENA CAODURO  Queen’s University Belfast
Animal m otherhood: Rossellini’s Mammas and the maternal instinct
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between the idea of motherhood in the animal kingdom and postfeminist sensibilities in the Sundance TV series Mammas (2013), written, directed by and starring Isabella Rossellini. The quirky short videos explore the maternal instinct of different animals, from the dunnock’s practice of polyandry to the hamster’s tendency towards cannibalism. Mammas features Rossellini performing animal behaviours in absurd costumes and follows the humorous projects Green Porno (2008) and Seduce Me (2010), both authored by Rossellini herself, which consider animal mating strategies. Going against naturalistic documentaries, Rossellini plays with her body masquerading as an animal and directly addressing the viewer with tongue-incheek lines. These educational and experimental videos enhance our knowledge of the animal world,

but also challenge and confound our idea of maternity by voicing some human maternal issues. In this paper I argue that in line with present-day postfeminist reconfigurations of motherhood, Mammas goes beyond the fascination with baby animals, viral animal videos and stereotypical ideas of sweet and selfsacrificing motherhood. Drawing on works by Alphonso Lingis and posthuman studies, I read
Rossellini’s project as an attempt to confront ethnography and zoology, underlining the connections between human, animal and the nonhuman.
EU JIN CHUA  Birkbeck, University of London
Inhuman rustling: film theory’s fear of nonhuman nature
What is the most monstrous image that could be depicted on film? An unlikely answer to this question can be found in classical film theory. According to some of the earliest theorists, the most monstrous filmic image was that of chaotic physical phenomena such as rushing water or rustling leaves – any image of random, ungoverned nonhuman nature. Today, we are more likely to think of an image of ‘the wind in the trees’ as one that enchanted the earliest audiences. Yet the forgotten flipside to this trope is the fact that certain thinkers on film and photography – Kracauer, Baudelaire, Pirandello, Lindsay – felt that such images were improper and deeply threatening, for the reason that human consciousness is not meant to revel in such images, but rather to pull itself out of the soulless, empty-eyed morass of raw
Nature. This idea goes very deep into the history of western thought – its sources are in nineteenthcentury German idealism, in the Romantic motif of Nature’s inhuman ‘rustling’ ( rauschen ). By excavating these sources, I show how certain strands of film theory might actually be said to be anti -
Nature – begging the question of what stance we should take towards film theory’s deep-seated fear of nature.
GRAIWOOT CHULPHONGSATHORN  Queen Mary, University of London
The vegetal life in the films of Naomi Kawase
Though less-well known on the anglophone film scene, Naomi Kawase is a world-renowned filmmaker, thanks to her decades of association with the Cannes Film Festival. She also has a respectable career as a documentarian, and career retrospectives of her work have been held by several global art institutions. Viewed under the biopolitical lens, her work usually depicts an anthropocentric/non-anthropocentric tension. On the one hand, her films put the human animal at the centre of a narrative, prioritizing the human experience with topics spanning personal trauma, imperfect families and carnal senses. On the other hand, her cinematic style always demonstrates the umwelt where human is part of larger interconnected networks in which nonhuman entities prevail.
However, because film studies tends to be an anthropocentric field, that side of her work is usually discussed while the other is ignored. To reverse the reading, with the emerging field of critical plant studies, this paper attempts to look at the cinematic plants presented in Kawase’s work. From a botanic garden to the forest, from a pea to a banyan tree in the wind, what are the roles of the vegetal life in
Kawase’s world?
TIAGO DE LUCA  University of Liverpool
‘Cows! Dogs! Donkeys!’: animals, children and the inhuman in Carlos Reygadas’s Post
Tenebras Lux
This paper aims to use the experimental film Post Tenebras Lux (Carlos Reygadas, 2012) as a privileged springboard upon which to reflect on the relationship between humans, animals and the inhuman in the cinema. Set in a remote rural area of Mexico, the film deploys a number of features and techniques that arguably strive to frame the natural world and humanity through a non-anthropocentric perspective. This includes the visual motif of a half-human half-animal figure and the use of lenses that distort the edges of the frame, which intimates a strangely inhuman gaze. The film is further punctuated by a number of scenes involving the spontaneous interaction of children (the director’s own) and animals, thereby calling to mind the evolutionist notion that the former are the latter in the process of becoming humans. A case in point is its celebrated opening, in which the toddler Rut is seen in the midst of a waterlogged meadow surrounded by a number of animals, all of which she vocally designates ‘Cows! Dogs! Donkeys!’ By drawing on the conceptual framework of realism and theories of the gaze, this paper thus aims to examine the ways in which Post Tenebras Lux consistently blurs and questions traditionally separated notions of humanity and animality, depicting the human and the nonhuman world as simultaneously communion and estrangement.
ROSEMARY DELLER  University of Manchester
‘Everything is made out of meat’: visceral vitality and carnal equivalence in Beasts of
the Southern Wild

Despite commenting on regional precarity and environmental disaster, Beasts of the Southern Wild
(Benh Zeitlin, 2012) has nonetheless been praised for its exuberantly visceral depiction of the Southern
US swamplands. While the film’s attentiveness to the vitality of bayou life has been viewed as an ecologically minded vision, what has not hitherto been discussed is the relationship between the film’s meat economy and its posthumanist impulses. If the notion that scarcity can turn humans into meat has provoked horror in contemporaneous post-disaster films such as The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009), in
Beasts the claim that ‘everything is made out of meat’ suggests that the recognition of carnal equivalence between human and nonhuman life can encourage closer communion with the natural world. Yet, as the need for meat becomes integral to the central melodrama of the child narrator’s desire for maternal reunion, Beasts struggles to sustain its initial commitment to ecological harmony and interspecies communality. By tracing the shifting significance of meat throughout the film, this paper argues that Beasts of the Southern Wild does not so much affirm an unequivocal posthumanist perspective as evocatively show the lingering attachments that can render it difficult to push beyond
‘the human’ in the contemporary moment.
RAYNA DENISON  University of East Anglia
From cute to ugly-cute: Japanese cinema and the cute animal industry
Cute animals have become a significant industrial force within Japan, from celebrity cats and dogs to animal television and film stars, a growing industry of kawaisa , or cuteness, has become connected to a wider boom in Japan’s pet industry. This paper focuses on two distinctive film production cycles featuring animals as main characters: a cycle of ‘professional’ cute dog films that includes Quill (2004) and Dog x Police (2011); and a subgenre of iyashikei , or ‘healing-style’, films that feature cats and dogs solving the emotional problems of their human families, including, Neko-ban: Cats in your Life
(2011) to Wasao (2011). Moving from film genres to multimedia animal stardom, this paper demonstrates the reach of the increasingly profitable ‘cute’ animal film genre within Japanese media culture. In so doing, it shows that the industries of ‘cute culture’ in Japan have begun to commingle with those involving pets and their representations in Japanese media, creating a series of industrially significant subgenres of Japanese cinema. Through this examination of a booming cute pet industry that includes film, I explore both the cute and the ugly sides of the relationship between Japanese pets and the industries that represent them.
JONATHAN DRISKELL  Monash University Malaysia
Stardom and the inhuman in Malay cinema: P. Ramlee’s portrayal of the ‘oily man’ in
Sumpuh Orang Minyak
In Malay folklore the Orang Minyak , which literally means ‘oily man’, on account of the black oil that covers its skin, is a paranormal being that roams the countryside and kampungs (villages), preying on and attacking young women. The Orang Minyak frequently appears in Malaysian culture: in literature, songs, news stories concerning apparent sightings and, especially, in the nation’s cinema. This paper will examine the first film to portray the Orang Minyak , Sumpuh Orang Minyak (P. Ramlee, 1958), which starred P. Ramlee, Malaysia’s biggest ever movie star. The film explores how an outcast hunchback becomes transformed from his human self into the powerful but inhuman Orang Minyak .
Drawing upon archival materials and analysis of the film, the paper will explore such questions as: how did Sumpuh Orang Minyak shape ideas about the Orang Minyak ?; to what extent does P. Ramlee’s stardom influence his portrayal of the Orang Minyak and blur the human-inhuman divide?; and how does P. Ramlee use his celebrated acting skills to embody the Orang Minyak ? Above all, what does this particular example from Malay cinema reveal more generally about cinematic representations of the inhuman?
PANSY DUNCAN  Massey University
Shrubs and the city: the plant life of cinematic New York
This paper explores the language of vegetal life in an unlikely cluster of film texts: The Apartment
(Billy Wilder, 1955), Manhattan (Woody Allen, 1979) and New York, I Love You (Various, 2008).
Their setting, Manhattan, is a highly developed urban environment notable for its estrangement from the plant kingdom, while their genre, the romantic comedy, is remarkable for its solipsistic anthropocentrism. In this sense, this coterie of New York-based ‘rom-coms’ would seem to tell us less about how we imagine plants than about our failure to do so – except as set-dressing, symbol or object of exchange. Yet in tracking the itinerary of plants and plant matter across these familiar, even canonical texts, this paper will argue that the urban romance fables around which they ostensibly revolve at once displace and point to another story altogether: the story of the de-individuated, organic substrata on which city-dwellers in advanced western nations build their lives. This story, I contend,

can help us think differently about the conceptualizations of sexuality and sociality that these romantic narratives are widely assumed to sustain.
MATTHEW ELLIS  Brown University
I was walking with a ghost: Reddit’s nosleep, Marble Hornets and performed inhumanism in web-based horror
The arrival of Web 2.0 around the turn of the millennium empowered media creators with a myriad of new and participatory digital tools for storytelling, many of which have flourished within a trans-media genre form that has come to be known as ‘creepypasta’. These media objects often blur the line between reality and fiction through new modes of digital address, engaging viewers and users directly into their diegeses and providing agency to nonhuman modes of digital presence and embodiment. In this paper I look at two popular objects from this genre – Reddit’s /r/nosleep digital literature community and the Marble Hornets YouTube webseries – to ask questions about both the stakes and consequences of depicting inhuman embodiment within what is always already social, as well as the possibility of emancipatory political and social potentialities emerging in new media climates outside the control of corporate capital. To these earlier questions, I look to Friedrich Kittler and Jeffrey
Sconce in the reading of a haunted media presence elaborated in both objects. To the latter, I use Julie
Levin Russo’s notion of ‘seeing from below’ as a step towards Tiziana Terranova’s digital political affect.
GEORGINA EVANS  University of Cambridge
Framing aquatic life
There is an enduring parallel between the aquarium and the screen, both operating in the realms of public exhibition and domestic space as frames offering voyeuristic access to moving images of another world. Nineteenth-century aquarium practices, favouring illuminated flat panes puncturing darkened rooms, flourished in dialogue with proto-cinematic technologies. The formalizing film frame is mirrored in the conventional rectangular tank, containing what Phillip Warnell has termed ‘the sea with corners’. Screens and aquaria find new sympathies in the digital age, with screens used as simulacra of tanks to display moving images of marine creatures without the burden of sustaining their life. This paper uses this genealogy to prompt an analysis of the on-screen aquarium, the frame within a frame yielding a window into a world which is intangible, inaccessible and resistant to facilitating identification with its non-mammalian inhabitants. I will consider the presentation of the Williamson brothers’ underwater ‘photosphere’ footage embedded within Stuart Paton’s 1916 adaptation of 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea , before moving on to draw connections with the enlarged, matted-in film images used to animate the public aquarium scene in Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and the imprisoned octopus of Warnell’s Outlandish (2009) .
CLIFTON EVERS  University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
Becoming-wave-media: ‘posthuman performativity’, the GoPro™ camera and researching lifestyle sports
Since the 1960s, waves and animals have helped surfer/cinematographer George Greenough invent wave-riding and camera equipment to uniquely film what the flux of surfing (dolphins, water, energy, bathymetry, wind, and so on) brings forth. In The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1970), a cutting-edge sequence shot from the fold of the ‘tube’ – behind the falling curtain of water – allows the momentum of a wave to fill the screen (rather than the human surfer). Here, wave becomes screen whilst screen becomes wave. Inspired by Pure Fun, I interrogate ‘becoming-wave-media’ through an ethological study of events involving small wearable digital video cameras (such as the GoPro™, which has a fisheye lens) now popular among enthusiasts. I discuss how media technologies are woven through human sensation, biology, body techniques, cognition, sociality, culture and perception. I also consider how technologies create ‘autonomous spheres of action and expectations’, as well as how they become entangled with other living and material ecologies. The ‘posthuman performativity’ of the study and
‘ élan vital ’ (vital impetus) of becoming prompts a reconsideration of the relation between knowledge production, creativity and research intimacies in ways that move away from anthropomorphism and give inhuman beings their due as active participants.
JAMES FENWICK  De Montfort University
Producing the ‘ape’ in 2001: A Space Odyssey: questions of authorship
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.
DAVID H. FLEMING  University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China
Scarlett: the inhuman starlet, or the vamp becoming-Vampyroteuthis? Regarding squids, insects and digital becomings in contemporary science fiction
Scarlett Johansson has recently embodied a series of ‘posthuman’ or inhuman roles in sci-fi films such as Her (2013), Under the Skin (2013), Lucy (2014) and Captain America 2 (2014).
These diverse characters are united by their deceptive appearances, typically used to conceal their ‘true’ identity or nature behind an illusionary facade or body-form. Using this body of films as a focalizer, I explore some contemporary hopes and fears surrounding our creative and transformative embrace of new technological forms. By keeping an eye upon the role technology plays both within and beyond the frame, I argue that the current congress of digital software and biological wetware can be understood as opening up lines of flight that not only trouble everyday identity politics, but signal an ontological breakdown in our understanding of the divisions between the human and the inhuman. To explore these processes I engineer a productive encounter between Deleuze and Guattari’s immanent concept of
‘becoming-animal’ and Vilém Flusser and Roger Caillois’s provocative writing upon the ‘art’ and
‘politics’ of inhuman creatures. These models allow us to perceive how digital technologies
‘molecularly’ connect us to, and ignite strange forms of becoming with , the ‘alien’ kingdoms of squids, insects and software.
ISABELLE FREDA  Hofstra University
Womanliness as animal masquerade
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.
COLIN GARDNER  University of California, Santa Barbara
Louis Malle’s Kleistian war machine: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becomingimperceptible in Black Moon
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 becomingimperceptible. 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’.
JODI-ANNE GEORGE  University of Dundee

‘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.
KATHERINE GROO  University of Aberdeen
Ethnocinematic animals, following Derrida
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).
IRENE GUSTAFSON  University of California, Santa Cruz
Facing the subject
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.

OLIVIA HEANEY  McGill University
The contemporary (regional) Canadian dog movie
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.
TATIANA HEISE  University of Glasgow
From shock tactics to green sensibility: the environmental turn in animal-advocacy films
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.
ANKE HENNIG  Central Saint Martins / University of the Arts, London
Frogs, birds and dogs: locating the human in technologically charged times
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 preeminent 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.
CLAIRE HENRY  University of Melbourne
Frankenweenie and Disney’s dog discourses
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.
STELLA HOCKENHULL  University of Wolverhampton
Horseplay: personal expression and idiosyncrasy in The Turin Horse
The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr, 2011) opens with an image of a horse pulling a cart through the bleak
Hungarian landscape. Seen in closeup, and from a low angle, the animal walks towards the camera, her ears set back and the whites of her eyes on show, signalling unease. Despite the narrative’s focus on the horse’s illness, and the film language shaping such readings of the film, at no juncture is the animal provided an anthropomorphic treatment. Furthermore, neither is she presented with what Emmanuel
Gouabault, Annik Dubied and Claudine Burton-Jeangros term a superindividual status. Instead she produces discernible individual gestures which, while informing character animal, also grant her independence and choice. Indeed, as Brenda Austin-Smith suggests, when analyzing the performance of the donkey in Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson, 1966), what might ordinarily seem insignificant physical actions can contribute to ‘memorable film characterization’, and animal performance is valid and ‘counts for something’. This paper analyzes the performance of the horse in
The Turin Horse , and suggests that while the she is neither personified or starified, her presentation can be understood as
‘privacy, defined as personal freedom, the right to idiosyncrasy and the wish for perfect personal expressiveness’ (Stanley Cavell).
CHRISTOPHER HOLLIDAY  King’s College London
Animation, animism, animality: new modes of anthropomorphic subjectivity in digital animation
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 sixthcentury 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.
BRIAN HOYLE  University of Dundee
‘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 costars. 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.
NESSA JOHNSTON  University of Glasgow
The voiceless a cousmêtre: Paranormal Activity’s digital surround sound demon
Paranormal Activity ’s (2007) ‘found footage’ conceit hinges upon the efforts of yuppie Micah to use his digital video camera to capture proof of his girlfriend’s supernatural visitations. Micah concentrates on capturing visual evidence but the demon remains elusive. Only ephemeral effects of its presence are captured visually – instead, the invisible demon is embodied sonically. This paper will concentrate on this sonic embodiment within the broader context of found-footage horror’s cultural significance, demonstrating how Paranormal Activity uses 5.1 digital surround sound to three-dimensionally invade the exhibition space beyond its ‘home video’ digital screen. Michel Chion’s recent work on millennial horror’s ‘acousmatic sound presences’ that ‘drift through the movie theater via the play of speakers’ builds upon earlier discussions of the acousmêtre as an unseen diegetic character whose audible voice is thus imbued with a mysterious power. Referring also to work by Mark Kerins on digital surround sound, I argue that Paranormal Activity audiovisually transposes the ubiquitous domestic digital screen into cinematic representation, and opens up a space beyond the screen for the digital surround sound demon to sonically ‘haunt’ the exhibition space as a voiceless acousmêtre.
MISHA KAVKA  University of Auckland
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 Chineselanguage 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.
MICHAEL LAWRENCE  University of Sussex
Herds and biopower: on the stampede spectacle
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).
ALICE LEROY  University of Paris Est / French National Library
The animal turn of contemporary documentary film (Sweetgrass, Leviathan, Grizzly
Man)
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.
ALISON LOADER  Concordia University
Silk screens, caterpillars and animating an interspecies collaboration
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.
MOYA LUCKETT  New York University
Animal celebrity and social media: performativity, upwards mobility and transcendence
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.
DAVID MCGOWAN  Savannah College of Art and Design
This Is Your Life, Donald Duck: cartoon stars and the live aesthetic of early television
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.
SUSAN M C HUGH  University of New England
One or several dogs? Filming multispecies multitudes
Reviewers of Kornél Mundruczó’s White God (2015) praise its non-CGI execution of a mass streetdogs’ 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.
LAURA M C MAHON  University of Cambridge
Leviathan’s resource politics
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.

APRIL MILLER  Arizona State University
Hear her roar: gender, transhumanism and becoming/transcending the animal
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.
BRETT MILLS  University of East Anglia
‘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.
ROBERT MORACE  Daemen College
What’s Under the Skin?
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.

KATIE MOYLAN  University of Leicester
Uncanny moments in Les Revenants
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.
MATILDA MROZ  University of Greenwich
Reflections in and on the animal eye: Of Horses and Men and its equine encounters
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.
ADAM O’BRIEN  University of Bristol / University of Reading
Fishwater: The Bay and its hyperobject
‘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.
GILAD PADVA  Beit Berl College, Israel
Animated queerdom: animalistic performativity as transgressive allegory in Queer
Duck: The Movie
The animated film Queer Duck: The Movie (Xeth Feinberg, 2006) criticizes and ironizes contemporary queer subcultures by personified animals (a queer duck, a ‘gaytor’ alligator, a bi-polar bear, and so on) that echo Aesop’s fables, Krylov’s tales, Orwell’s book Animal Farm and icons like Bambi, Mickey
Mouse and Angry Bird. Such iconography not only mocks the Biblical association of sodomy and bestiality, but queerly problematizes the relationship between sexual dissidence and the hegemonic sexual order. This film demonstrates the power of queerdom in deconstructing, destabilizing, subverting and transgressing the straight and narrow (and often homophobic) anthropocentrism.
Through animated characters such as Oscar Wildcat and Bi-Polar Bear, this film negates the

dichotomous relationship between nature and aestheticism, sex drives and culture, instincts and respectability. If the orgasmic body cannot be identified with the organic body, but is more an interference in and displacement of the body of ‘nature’, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests in her groundbreaking essay ‘Animal sex: libido as desire and death’ (1995), than the queer body, which is lively animated and celebrated by Queer Duck: The Movie , denaturalizes heterocentric assumptions about love, relationships, intimacies and libidinal ‘animalistic’ needs, as much as the prevalent machismo, body fascism and sissyphobia within the gay male community.
KATY PEPLIN  University of Michigan
Studio magic, animal secrets: archival perspecti ves on the AHA’s Hollywood office
Robert Craven was the first head of the Hollywood office, American Humane Association, and worked closely with both studios and the Production Code Administration to ensure that animals were being treated well on set. However, correspondence within the PCA files suggests that his tenure, and the office he represented, was caught between serving the interests of the AHA and maintaining the magic and allure of Hollywood. This paper uses these letters, as well as studio and AHA archival material, to argue that animal bodies carry unique burdens of realism, and that the AHA had to work up, against and through the audience expectation that animals are vulnerable, and that even simulated images are dangerous to animal actors. Drawing on Anat Pick’s Creaturely Poetics , I demonstrate that animal bodies are viewed as both representation and reflection of the universal embodiment of vulnerability, and that the AHA was forced to demonstrate that animals were being protected even as the images claimed otherwise. To be on set was to observe that the animals were (often, but not always) safe, but to guarantee that to the public often required divulging of ‘trade secrets’, and Craven's shifting alliances do much, the paper contends to demonstrate the AHA's tenuous position.
ANAT PICK  Queen Mary, University of London
Why not look at animals?
Revisiting John Berger’s seminal essay on the visual animal, ‘Why look at animals?’ (1980), I invert
Berger’s title in order to explore instances where the visibility of animals is at stake and where seeing is intricately linked to forms of surveillance and control. In the context of advanced optical and tracking technologies that render animals permanently visible, the possibility of not-seeing emerges as a progressive modality of relation to animals. My talk is concerned with the implicit connections between looking and extinction, where rare or endangered animals are fatally observed, and where animal sighting acts as a lure and reward against the backdrop of animal vanishing. Not-seeing does not merely alter the optics of the human–animal encounter but mitigates human desire to make animals unconditionally visible. It is not a matter of endorsing the censorious attitude to images implicit in
Berger’s critique that seeks some primordial intimacy with animals. Nor does not-seeing reinforce the mystery and otherness of animals that mythologizes them in the human imaginary. Unseeing is attentive to the notion of animal privacy that denies human eyes and their technological proxies unlimited access to other lives. In its ultimate guise, not-seeing belongs to the repertoire of gazes of what I call ‘vegan cinema’, a cinema that approaches the vulnerable objects of the gaze without devouring them.
MARIA PRAMAGGIORE  National University of Ireland, Maynooth
The taming of the Bronys: animals, autism and fandom as therapeutic performance
The Brony fandom, an online and embodied community populated by men and boys devoted to the
Hasbro reboot of the My Little Pony franchise with Lauren Faust’s Friendship is Magic animated series
(2010), initially met with denunciations related to age and gender inappropriateness. It has subsequently witnessed not merely a public reappraisal but something more like a warm embrace.
Documentaries ( A Brony Tale [2014] and Bronycon [2012]) link FIM ’s parable-style homilies about friendship and personal growth to the anti-cynicism ethos of the now-tame Brony ‘herd’. This paper argues that the recuperation of the Brony fandom, and the celebration of the allegedly ground-breaking gender dynamics it represents, is achieved through the subtle appropriation of the discourse of equine assisted therapy (EAT). With EAT, the horse’s dance-like movements are understood as remediating the neural underconnectivity of those with autism spectrum and anxiety disorders, two conditions associated with the Brony demographic (Edwards and Redden). This paper forms part of a larger project on the horse and modernity that begins with Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms; as such, it contributes to a larger argument concerning the role of the horse as a signifier and a material enabler of physical and spiritual transport.
THOMAS PRINGLE  Brown University

Of grids and parasites: governmentality, energy infrastructure and the mediation of habit
The uniquely British phenomenon of the ‘TV Pickup’ illustrates a collective human behaviour that is at once social and individual. Millions of spectators simultaneously activate electric kettles following the broadcast of EastEnders every week. This synchronized power demand requires governmental anticipation, vigilant monitoring and the preparation of energy infrastructure and hydroelectric power.
The technological coevolution of two networks involved in the phenomenon– television and energy grids – demonstrates how technical ensembles develop a nonhuman rapport over time, and these historical relations are effaced as human habits develop. This paper analyzes methods of scientific videography and new media art visualizing the imperceptible effects of electrical transmission, and traces how media devices have evolved according to the frequency of the grid. Drawing from Michel
Serres’s understanding of governmentality as parasitic, where ‘the Leviathan’ is at once a social contract and a ‘bestial’ model of informational relationality, I contend that those collective habits that emerge from media relations – like those apparent in the ‘TV Pickup’ – are coopted in the move to
‘educate’, network and synchronize machines (smartphones, smart TVs and the ‘smart grid’). The habitual is increasingly integrated in green energy initiatives, signaling a shifting political relationship between the social and the machine.
CHRISTOPHER PULLEN  Bournemouth University
Queering the mother board: artificial intelligence and the singularity in science fiction film
The mainframe computer programme forms a central narrative archetype within many science fiction films. As an artificial intelligence that lacks a physical mobile form, its gendered presence is complex.
While the mainframe computer is often coded as maternal and/or paternal, implying artificial intelligence founded on procreation, at the same time it is inherently queer. This is evident in its potential to become the singularity, a post-human queer consciousness, beyond the corporeal world.
This paper considers this representational potential within mainstream film, foregrounding case studies such as: Forbidden Planet (1956), where the alien Krull computer replicated the psychological Id;
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), where the onboard computer Hal worries about death and the eternal dream state; Alien (1979), where Mother the main frame fails to protect her own; and Transcendence
(2014) where the post-human and the human coexist in order to save humanity. I argue Lee Edelman’s notion of the queer death drive is central here, in denying the need for a reproductive futurity. Within these films the post-human potential of the queer mechanistic world, offers a way save ‘the world’, becoming a displaced, but useful, form of queer and alien consciousness.
JOHN DAVID RHODES  University of Cambridge
Human flesh, porcine love: P asolini’s animals and the limits of allegory
This paper attempts to think through the figurative properties of the animal by exploring Pier Paolo
Pasolini’s film Porcile / Pigsty (1969), in which animal life and death, and the human love of the animal all figure prominently. Pasolini’s practice is marked by an obsession with realist referentiality, but at the same time his films tend towards a mode of allegorical critique. Porcile cuts back and forth between two stories. The first narrates the story of Julian (Jean-Pierre Léaud) who is in love with pigs; the second shows the wanderings of an unnamed man (Pierre Clementi) who (fictionally) kills and eats other humans, and also actually kills nonhuman animals. The real animal life expended in the film subtends the allegorical dimensions of other animal–human and human–human relationships. The equivalence that the film has notionally granted human and animal bodies – as both being susceptible to exploitation, sacrifice and ingestion by humans – is not borne out by the real economies of life and death onscreen. Thus, despite its allegorical ambitions, the film disrupts its own investment in allegory’s chain of equivalences. Porcile sketches the limits of any allegorical critique of capitalism, insofar as capital and allegory both trade in equivalence.
ARIEL ROGERS  Northwestern University
Special effects, synthetic space and the inhuman in King Kong and Bringing Up Baby
Special effects proliferated in Hollywood in the 1930s, when rear projection and optical printing pervaded the majority of studio productions, from the most fantastic to the most unobtrusive.
Considering the diversity of roles effects played, my paper explores their function in two otherwise dissimilar canonical films that revolve around uniting human characters and dangerous creatures.
Moving away from the focus on realism and spectacle that tends to guide scholarship on effects, I argue that the use of rear projection and optical printing contributed to the construction of particular forms of cinematic space in this period. Mirroring contemporaneous developments in theatre design,

which increasingly sought a seamless integration of theatre and image space, Hollywood films employed effects to create synthetic diegetic spaces constituted by the assembly of heterogeneous fragments, often figured as layered planes within the image. Within that context, the human–creature interactions in King Kong and Bringing Up Baby emerge as particularly thrilling experiments with the new possibilities opened up by this synthetic space. Moreover, since the films articulate the relationships among characters, in significant part, through their construction of that space, this exploration provides a new perspective on their portrayal of humanness and its intersection with race and gender.
NICOLA RUNCIMAN  University of Manchester
The (un)natural habitats of Alicia Scherson's animals
A key filmmaker of Chile’s post-dictatorship generation, Alicia Scherson’s feature debut Play (2005) and her follow-up Turistas (2009) construct intimate inventories of the worlds which surround their protagonists – Cristina, a maid from Southern Chile living in Santiago, and Carla, a middle-class woman abandoned by her husband in a national park. Amid this attention to the material and sensory experiences of the city and nature alike, nonhuman animals are frequently encountered, observed, imagined and dreamt; unsurprisingly, perhaps, as Scherson originally studied as a biologist. This paper explores how the presence of animals (both real and imagined) becomes a means through which to confront questions of habitat, belonging and being ‘at home’ in the world. The juxtaposition of
‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ modes of animal life, as well as the often unsettling or uncanny dimension of the human–animal encounter, opens up space fraught with the uncertainty and anxiety that accompanies the noncoincidence of self and world. If, in Donna Haraway's words, we ‘polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves’, then this paper seeks to demonstrate how Scherson’s creatures are a reflection of our misplacement.
AMY RUST  University of South Florida
Media, ecology and the long take
This paper explores the long take in three areas of 1970s American media practice in order to trace the ecologies it foments among living and nonliving things. More specifically, I put James Benning’s long take aesthetic in experimental works such as One Way Boogie Woogie (1977) and 11 x 14 (1977) alongside the first uses of Steadicam in Rocky (John Avildsen, 1976) or Bound for Glory (Hal Ashby,
1976) as well as films made by the Environmental Protection Agency to document air and water pollution during the 1970s. In each case, I argue, long takes mediate relationships to perdurance and change that prompt spectators to consider their encounters with perceptible environments as well as the ultimately unrepresentable experiences of nonhuman entities. The result thus not only offers the long take as an approach to ecological questions, but also understands the device as organizing ecologies in its own right. Such a conclusion proves particularly meaningful in the context of the 1970s, when both neoliberalism and the modern environmentalist movement were on the rise.
MARIA SAN FILIPPO  University of the Arts in Philadelphia
Captive viewers: learning in/humanity through film in Dogtooth and The Wolfpack
Though one is fictional and the other a documentary, Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009) and The
Wolfpack (Crystal Moselle, 2015) tell fascinatingly concurrent stories: in both, teenagers kept in captivity since infancy by their parents discover, through watching films, an alternative reality that presents them with a simultaneously promising and threatening means of escape. In gesturing at the liberating potential of encountering film, both works suggest that films effectively function to make us human, by constructing our sense of individuality and agency. Yet in the absence of other humanizing forces, namely the cultural referents acquired through socialization that equip us to distinguish reality from representation, these young people lack the necessary ability to contextualize what they watch. As a result, film’s aptitude for modeling empathy alongside self-preservation is compromised, with film instead enabling a continuation of the inhumane violence and vulnerability imposed by their captors.
This paper ponders the representational and ethical questions raised by these works’ troubling of the binaries real/unreal, nature/culture, and human/nonhuman. In so doing, these films self-reflexively engage critical issues in screen studies and animal studies to offer sobering observations on the link between our interactions with screens and with one another.
KEVIN SANDLER  Arizona State University
‘Scooby-Doo, where aren’t you?’: Time Warner, Cartoon Network, and synergizing a
Great Dane

As a forty-five-year-old product with fifteen original series, Scooby-Doo is a microcosm of American television history. Debates about the nature of children’s entertainment, battles over a free-market approach to regulation vs. governmental censorship, and the impact of media concentration and conglomeration upon diversity, quality and consumerism all play out alongside the Scooby-Doo texts.
Once a little Saturday morning series produced by Hanna-Barbera, Scooby-Doo is now a top-selling global brand for Time Warner. In line with the conference theme ‘Screening Animals and the
Inhuman’, Scooby-Doo ’s success is not simply attributable to the series themselves but to the brand’s ancillary properties that go across a range of media, formats and industries. Whether the Ice Capades or video games, these consumer products and experiences are an integral part of the brand’s commercial profitability, historically reflecting the larger industrial apparatus surrounding Scooby-Doo . This presentation examines Time Warner’s synergistic deployment of Scrappy-Doo via recontextualizations of the character on Cartoon Network. Series like The Venture Bros.
and Robot Chicken as well as various network bumpers have all satirized the character under Time Warner’s blessing, enabling the
Scooby-Doo brand to remain hip, relatable, and spreadable for adult consumers and fans who despise the 1980s cartoons featuring Scrappy-Doo.
CECILIA SAYAD  University of Kent
Monsters and everyday life
This paper addresses the topic of ‘Screening Animals and the Inhuman’ through a discussion of the coexistence between supernatural phenomena and the documentary mode both in mock found-footage horror films and in ghost-hunting reality TV shows. Here the ‘inhuman’ relates to demonic figures, even though this investigation also includes the more arguably ‘human’ ghost. I draw from studies about the relationship between new technologies and the occult by Tom Gunning, Jeffrey Sconce,
Annette Hill and Karen Williams in order to investigate, within the boundaries of genre studies, new articulations of the relationship between horror and the documentation of reality, and more broadly, the ways in which the connection between supernatural themes and documentary modalities change our relationship to the filmic and televisual image. I argue that the confusion between fiction and fact within both found-footage horror and reality TV blurs the boundaries between the films and the surrounding world, removing horror narratives from the exclusive domains of the symbolic, the unconscious and the escapist, embedding the ‘monster’ in everyday experience. Discussed works include the Paranormal Activity movies and the Paranormal State and Ghost Hunters reality shows.
COREY SCHULTZ  University of Southampton
The simian gaze: examining the human and nonhuman gazes in Visitors
Godfrey Reggio’s film Visitors (2013) is composed primarily of gazes. It begins with a gorilla’s direct gaze as it emerges from darkness, and this initial gaze is quickly followed by a series of human gazes.
The gorilla’s gaze haunts the film, however, as it reappears in the middle of the film and also concludes it. These gazes are affective; the viewer spends almost the entire duration of the film being stared at , and thus quickly becomes sensitized to these gazes and their idiosyncrasies, as well as their effects .
This paper examines these gazes and how they are experienced in the film. Focusing primarily on the gorilla’s gazes, I review theories surrounding the human gaze in regards to affect and power, and compare these theories to how the animal gaze has been examined, including concepts such as gaze sensitivity and its socioecological context and the effects of mirror neurons, arguing that this simian gaze acts as a bridge that combines, yet challenges, both. I ask: how do the gorilla’s gazes problematize how the human gaze has been theorized and its effects? How can theories of the animal gaze be incorporated in existing anthropocentric theories on the gaze?
BENJAMIN SCHULTZ-FIGUEROA  University of California, Santa Cruz
Ideas in the flesh
Our proposed panel 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 portion of the panel investigates the methodologies of experimental physiology as it approaches the animal subject. Taking Lisa Cartwright’s work as a springboard, the presentation asks how her history of onscreen bodies might shift when we focus on animal bodies. Specifically, the famed, and in some circles notorious, vivisectionist Claude Bernard is highlighted as the progenitor of certain methodology of abstraction still employed in scientific filmmaking. The presentation weaves between found footage from numerous educational films, as well

as new material of hundred-year-old animal specimens, shot at the Grant Museum in London. The audience is invited to consider the mediated processes through which living animals are transformed into scientific ideas and facts, as well as the corporeal remainders that are left behind.
ZOË SHACKLOCK  University of Warwick
Kinaesthetic empathy and the creaturely gaze in NBC’s Hannibal
In NBC’s Hannibal , Will Graham suffers from what Hannibal Lecter describes as ‘pure empathy’, which allows him to perfectly ‘assume the point of view’ of the murderers he profiles for the FBI.
However, Will’s empathic gaze is never simply an adopted visual perspective; rather, it always necessitates a re-enacted performance, suggesting that empathy involves an embodied understanding of the physicality of another. This paper presents such kinaesthetic empathy as a spectatorial paradigm that transcends the anthropocentric gaze. Combining work on kinaesthesia with the theory of
Einfühlung , it argues that the experience of ‘feeling into’ a foreign other involves a sensitivity to bodily comportment. Yet while current scholarship on kinaesthetic empathy retains a human focus,
Hannibal ’s striking animal imagery establishes the moving body as the locus of recognition for all types of creaturely bodies. Indeed, although Will worries about losing himself in his empathic intersubjectivity, his companion animals – his pack of stray dogs and the stag of his nightmares – always return his gaze and mirror his movements, kinaesthetically anchoring his embodied sense of self. Kinaesthetic empathy thus shifts the gaze from an axis of projection-subordination to one of creaturely, bodily accompaniment, opening up a new ethics of screen spectatorship and representation.
SHARON SHARP  California State University, Dominguez Hills
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.
CHI-YUN SHIN  Sheffield Hallam University
Pigeons, rooftops and heterotopia in On the Waterfront and Ghost Dog: The Way of the
Samurai
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.
SUVADIP SINHA  University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Animality and conjugality in Bombay cinema of 1970s
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 selfevaluation, 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.
MEREDITH SLIFKIN  Concordia University
Towards a queer posthumanism: blurred boundaries of animal melodrama in Wendy and Lucy
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.
BELINDA SMAILL  Monash University
Marmot Licks GoPro: the posthumanities and reflections on agency, the digital and documentary
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.
DAVID SORFA  University of Edinburgh
Dead metaphors: killing animals in art house cinema
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.

KIRSTEN STROM  Grand Valley State University
Human entomology: the influence of Darwin in the films o f Buñuel
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 .
THOMAS STUBBLEFIELD  University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Animality and machinic vision: drones in film and media
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.
PAO-CHEN TANG  University of Chicago
Of dogs and hot dogs: dialectics of image and language in early short films
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.
ANDREW UTTERSON  Ithaca College
Water buffalo, catfish and monkey ghosts: the materiality of reincarnation in Uncle
Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
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-toanimal 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.
YIMAN WANG  University of California, Santa Cruz
Regarding the agential nonhuman life
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.
OWEN WEETCH  University of Warwick
Koba’s lie: Capturing and performing animality in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
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.
SIMON WELCH  University of Strasbourg
The dog who knew too much: animal representation and performance in the films of
Alfred Hitchcock
[This is a filmed presentation as Simon Welch cannot attend in person.]
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.
WINIFRED WOOD  Wellesley College
Emus in France: Chris Marker’s bestiaries

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.
GWENDA YOUNG  University College, Cork
‘I shot Bambi’: death and the animal in The Yearling
Recent studies of conceptualizations of animals and ‘animality’ in film/visual culture have explored associations between animals, life and death (see Lippit; Burt; Pick; McMahon) – the ‘irreducible dimension of nonliving at the heart of life’ (McMahon) – and the ‘transformative potential’ of
‘attachments between human and animals’ (Burt). Such theorizations provide useful starting points for my paper, which analyzes the 1946 adaptation of The Yearling . Clarence Brown’s film, based on
Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s novel, focuses on a young boy’s love for a fawn that he hand-rears following the killing of its mother. MGM’s promotional campaign, which emphasized the film’s themes of frontier family values and the rewarding, though difficult, transition from childhood to manhood, employed appealingly ‘cute’ images of the human and nonhuman stars in a bid to appeal to a jaded postwar audience. However, drawing from archival sources and unpublished interviews, I will argue that this represents a profound evasion of the dark and complex themes – of the animal as facilitator (and victim) of the child’s development; of corporeality (human and nonhuman); and of what
Burt calls the ‘impossible spectacle’ of the death of an animal on screen – that the film explores.
LINDSAY ZACKEROFF  Brown University
Biomimetic jellyfish: animating the micro through scientific imaging
Information has the biological and evolutionary capacity to construct life from the bottom-up. I examine the intersection between the reinvention of life and the mimetism of life in the information age through scientific imagery of biomimetic movement. Considering velocimetry visualizations of a synthetic jellyfish engineered to replicate human heart muscle, I ask about the capacities for scientific imaging to animate the life of information through a different approach to mimesis that looks to mutation. Exploring the relationality between micro and molar opens the question of animistic propulsion and political emergence in screen culture. Throughout this paper, the synthetic jellyfish questions the paradoxes of conjoining life and information. Looking to how this paradox has been central in the life sciences, biomedia, and in Tiziana Terranova’s account of biocomputing, I investigate how scale and mimetism transforms life in biomimetic scientific research. By analyzing how recreating human heart ‘propulsion’ through the bioengineering of jellyfish propulsion affects movement and sensory experience, I propose a transformative potential growing within the virtual. The uncertain relationality between the micro and the molar promises virtual flexibility and the possibility of political resistance based on shifting durations, small scales and flowing sensoria.