Animal Worlds
Film, Philosophy and Time
Focusing on a recent wave of international art cinema, Animal Worlds offers the first sustained analysis of the relations between cinematic time and animal life. Through an aesthetic of extended duration, films such as Bestiaire (2010), The Turin Horse (2011) and A Cow’s Life (2012) attend to animal worlds of sentience and perception, while registering the governing of life through biopolitical regimes.
Bringing together Gilles Deleuze’s writings on cinema and on animals – while drawing on Jacques Derrida, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Nicole Shukin and others – the book argues that these films question the biopolitical reduction of animal life to forms of capital, opening up realms of virtuality, becoming and alternative political futures.
Key features- Revitalises Deleuze’s thought for studies of animals in film, forging new connections between his writings on cinema and on animal life
- Engages with a range of key concepts: the time-image and the virtual (Deleuze), ‘animal capital’ (Shukin), ‘pensivity’ (Bailly) and the Umwelt (Uexküll)
- Moves between film-philosophy and critical animal studies, drawing innovative connections between these two burgeoning fields
Introduction: Unfurling Worlds
Chapter 1: Cinematic Time and Animal Worlds
Chapter 2 Still/Moving: Bestiaire’s Lives in Limbo
Chapter 3: The Turin Horse: Animal Labour and Lines of Flight
Chapter 4: Leviathan, Meat and the Annihilation of Worlds
Chapter 5: Actual/Virtual: Bovines ou la vraie vie des vaches
Conclusion: Cinematic Worlds and Beyond
Bibliography
Filmography
In Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time, Laura McMahon offers a thoughtful reconfiguration of the links between cinema, philosophy and animal life. Her rigorous approach brings together Deleuzian film theory and animal studies, interrogating both disciplines through the aesthetics of extended duration.
'Animal Worlds is a significant addition to the field of animals in film. There are genuinely novel observations in every chapter, and some much-needed correctives of existing assumptions. The book charts new pathways across the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, linking Deleuze’s writings on cinema with his collaborative writings on animals in A Thousand Plateaus. These new connections extend the scope of Deleuzian film theory on the one hand, and animal studies on the other. In Animal Worlds, cinema is revealed as the art of containment and surpassing. The durational aesthetic examined here seeks out the small gesture and fleeting expression as the marks of life’s exuberance.'
