BOOK REVIEW SECTION
Animals in Film. London: Reaktion Books, 2002

Jonathan Burt

What are we to make of the animals who fill our screens? How are we to understand the seemingly endless menagerie of animals in the wild, heroic animal companions (pets), and cartoon creatures who have infested film since its inception. The classic work on animal imagery, Berger’s (1980) Why Look at Animals?, suggests that animal images in modernity substitute for a lost, direct relationship with animals. Animal imagery thus is understood as compensatory and inauthentic; being already understood, animal imagery not often is thought about in its own terms and is read, instead, for ideological content (Crowther, 1992).

Yet, perhaps “why” has been the wrong question to ask. What needs to be understood is not the motivation for animal imagery but its effects. Film has changed both how we see animals and how we think them. It has shaped human-animal interactions: We might consider the effects of Bambi on the social status of American hunters (Herman, 2001, p. 272) or the proliferation of abandoned Dalmatians after every re-release of 101 Dalmatians. Animal imagery does not soothe just a nostalgic desire for direct contact with animals but has real effects on human-animal relations. In short, we need to ask what do animal images do. This question is at the heart of Burt’s Animals in Film.

Animals in Film differs from other recent books on animals and film in terms of its approach to the subject (Acampora, 2001). Both Bousé (2000) and Mitman (1999) have written excellent historical studies of animal films, but their works treat animals in film largely as a question of genre by restricting their focus to wildlife films. Although more broadly framed, Lippit (2000) is a conceptual analysis of the position of the animal and film within Western thought rather than an analysis of actual animals or films. Burt’s argument has similarities to Lippit’s positioning of film as the mourning of the animal. However, Burt’s argument works historically rather than teleologically. Burt finds animals at the heart of film, not as a lost object mourned in technology but as central to the early technological investigations that made film possible. He addresses how animal films have worked, how they were made, and what they made possible.

The book addresses what Burt calls the “willful blindness” of film studies to animals in film (p. 17). It highlights the importance of animals to the development of film technology. Film has altered our understanding of animals; since Muybridge’s and Marey’s protofilmic experiments, the camera’s images have shaped how we see animals (Crary, 2001, pp. 138-148; Snyder, 1998, pp. 394-396). However, the centrality of animals to early film has been effaced by a scholarly emphasis on the role of the chronophotography in the technologization of the body. As Burt notes, Because images that Muybridge, Anshütz and Marey produced are often seen in terms of the wider history of the technologization of the body and the relationship between movement and efficiencyso important to theorizing the interaction between bodies and the needs of industrythe centrality of animals to their projects has been substantially ignored. (p. 105) Re-reading these images as images of animals will help us understand the active role animals played in the development of modernity.

Yet, while Burt makes a contribution to film studies and deftly explains difficult concepts from film theory, he ultimately is an animal historian. He is not just asking what animals can tell us about the history and function of film but, more important, what animals in film can tell us about the history of animals and human-animal relations.

The book is not a catalogue of animals in film; it is an attempt to map out the historical field of animal-film relations as they intersect with broader issues in human-animal relations. The book's key contribution is to stress importance of visual animals for the study of human-animal relations. Burt rethinks Berger’s formulation of the role of animal imagery in modernity by performing a historical analysis of animals in film. In so doing, he argues for the significance of animals to the history of film andmore important in this contextargues that it is essential for those interested in the history of human-animal relations to grapple with the animal image. Burt argues, “The position of the animal as a visual object is a key component in the structuring of human responses towards animals generally, particularly emotional responses.” (p. 11)

Analyzing animal imagery is not easy. We need to resist the sense that we know already what animal images do. Burt calls animals a “rupture in the field of representation (p. 11),” noting that audiences appear unable to accept animal images as merely fictional Yet, following up on this insight was difficult as Burt notes that there is not much work on audience responses to animal imagery (p. 136). I hope that his book will inspire those interested in human-animal relations to focus on the role of imagery within those relations.

* Matthew Brower , University of Rochester

References

Acampora, R. (2001). Representation cubed: Reviewing reflections on animal imagery. Society and Animals, 9 (3), 299-307.

Berger, J. (1980). Why look at animals? About looking. New York: Random House, Inc.

Bousé, D. (2000). Wildlife films. Philadelphia.

Crary, J. (2001). Suspensions of perception: Attention, spectacle, and modern culture. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Crowther, B. (1992). Towards a feminist critique of television wildlife programs, In P. Florence (Ed.), Feminist Subjects, Multimedia (pp 127-146.). New York: Routledge.

Lippit, A. M. (2000). Electric animal: Towards a rhetoric of wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Herman, D. (2001). Hunting and the American imagination. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Mitman, G. (1999). Reel nature: America’s romance with wildlife on film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Snyder, J. (1998). Visualization and visibility. In C. A. Jones & P. Galison (Eds.). Picturing science producing art (pp 379-397.). New York: Routledge.

 

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