576 research outputs found
Episode 87: Vegan Cinema with Anat Pick
No full textIn this episode of Knowing Animals I am joined by Anat Pick. Anat is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London. We discuss Anat’s book chapter ‘Vegan Cinema’ which will appear in the book 'Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory', which was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. That book is edited by Emilia Quinn and Ben Westwood
Review of Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics; Mark Payne, The Animal Part; Susan McHugh, Animal Stories
No full textAnat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 249 pp. ISBN 9780231147873; Mark Payne, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 164 pp. ISBN 9780226650845; Susan McHugh, Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 336 pp. ISBN 9780816670338 (paper)
Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film
No full textExploring the "logic of flesh" and the use of the body to mark species identity, Anat Pick reimagines a poetics that begins with the vulnerability of bodies, not the omnipotence of thought
“Sparks Would Fly”: Electricity and the Spectacle of Animality
No full textPick traces the ambiguous and problematic history of electricity in relation not only to early cinema in the U.S., but also to its use in electrocution as capital punishment, in the torture of vulnerable bodies, and in electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in psychiatric institutions. Focusing primarily on the film that Thomas Edison made depicting the electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903, as well as Sylvia Plath’s work in The Bell Jar and other poems, Pick follows the development of electricity as a less visible instrument of control in democracies supposedly committed to human rights and the monitoring of punishment and interrogation methods, up through and including the current use of Tasers by police targeting communities of color. But there are surprising inconsistencies and ambiguities in these histories as well, such as constructions of nonhuman agency in which an elephant can be judged culpable and therefore deserving of capital punishment, while Sylvia Plath can exemplify the logic of ECT that can claim the ability to restore human agency in the mind of a schizophrenic or psychotic person.</p
Some Small Discrepancy: Jean-Christophe-Bailly's Creaturely Ontology
No full textFrom Journal of Animal Ethics. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. This material cannot be reprinted, photocopied, posted online or distributed in any way without the written permission of the copyright holder.This extended review essay on Bailly's first major work in English translation, The Animal Side, situates Bailly in the continuum of Continental philosophy on the topics of animality and animal ontology, from Rilke to Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze. Exploring Bailly's linking of thought and vision and his insistence on the pivotal role of animals in the emergence of European art and image-making, the essay argues that the political dimension, implicit in Bailly's text, nevertheless remains underdeveloped. This points to a broader concern within Continental theory: the need to connect new human and animal ontologies with ethical and political normative models for the effective articulation of post-anthropocentric collectivities
Ten skies, 13 lakes, 15 pools - structure, immanence and eco-aesthetics in 'The Swimmer' and James Benning's land films
No full textThis chapter, and my interview with James Benning published in the same book, are part of my wider research project into new materialism, eco-aesthetics and documentary moving images. They develop the notion of eco-aesthetics with respect to moving images, and argue that the connections between the world and the image – including the land and the landscape – are what make the documentaries of the experimental filmmaker James Benning eco-aesthetic. My chapter argues that immanence is vital for an eco-aesthetics that links the plane of the world (ecology) with that of the image (aesthetics). In contrast to the readings of Benning as a filmmaker of the perceptible, this text proposes that his films bring out the imperceptible, and that eco-aesthetics are about what cannot be directly perceived.
This research project has been developed in a range of settings. I presented sections of the chapter as the paper ‘Land Film: Subjectivities and Structure, Ecology and Economy in James Benning's Documentaries' at the Third International Deleuze Studies Conference, Amsterdam, 13 July 2010 and at the Visible Evidence XVII conference, Bogazici University, Istanbul, 11 August 2010. Sections of the chapter also formed my paper 'Planes in the Plane of Immanence, or: Who or What Moves the Leaves' at the symposium and screenings event (which I co-organised) held to launch the AHRC-funded network Screening Nature: Flora, Fauna and the Moving Image in May 2013 at Queen Mary University and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Themes from the research also informed my curation of two 'Fauna' screening programmes, 'Leaves in the Wind' and 'Water', at the same event. These themes have been developed further in my essay 'Fauna', in the brochure for the network’s launch, and form the basis for the development of a book proposal for a monograph for Duke University Press, titled Documentary Protagonists in Film, Television, Art and Life
Screening Nature
No full textEnvironmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology
Land as protagonist – an interview with James Benning
No full textThis interview with James Benning constitutes part of Silke Panse's ongoing research into documentary and the beginning of new research into eco-aesthetics.
The interview was first heard at the Duisburg Documentary Film Festival on 4th November 2009.
The interview transcript is Chapter 3 in the book Screening Nature: Cinema beyond the Human
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