Paul Sheehan ‘Animals on Film: Godard, Bresson, Herzog and the “Politics of ‘Pure Seeing” ‘

ICA Cinema 2

Friday 18 January 2.00 pm

Animals are ‘anti-cinema’, given the irreducible, unmediated alterity they bring to the image. In posing a permanent challenge to the formal and financial controls exerted by the medium, animals reveal the otherness of the non-manipulable. In this paper, I explore some early episodes of animals on film, to outline the link between the two (animals and film), and how deep it runs. Then I examine the metaphysics of identity as the implicit screen logic that separates human actors from animal ‘performers’, and consider attempts to disrupt or bypass that logic in Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson. And thirdly, I outline Werner Herzog’s daring and extraordinarily varied use of animals, and show how it might be seen to exemplify a politics of animal being, one that both reveals and puts into question the cardinal tenets of a medium founded on the metaphysical privileging of human beings over animals.

Paul Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (2002) and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition. Most recently, he has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded, and Beckett after Beckett. His current project is a historical poetics of transgression in literature and film, entitled Violence and Aesthetics: From Dorian Gray to Hannibal Lecter.