Executing Species: Animal Attractions in Thomas Edison and Douglas Gordon

Abstract

Cinema has never been human. The central place of animals in the emergence and development of the cinematic medium is by now well established.¹ Yet, if there has been a recent ‘animal turn’ in film studies, it has focused less on animals themselves than on how animals are symbolically produced in representation. Animals remain cinema’s ‘elephant in the room’: the medium’s unacknowledged presence but also its potential for seeing the world, and animals, differently. As Jonathan Burt has consistently argued, screen animals exceed their symbolic value as representation and are located on the threshold between the figurative and the metaphorical. Despite their excessive use as mirrors of human concerns and as repositories of human attributes, the appearance of animals in moving images is always also concrete, and affects us as such.

How you glow, noble beast, in the infinite moment before your own death! Lydia Millet