(Un)dead Images. Spectrality and Corporeality of Animals in Film
Michał Matuszewski
m.matuszewski@int.plUjazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0459-7559
Abstract
The author analyses the film medium as an effective tool in animal studies, focusing on the issues of death and ability to re-animate dead bodies. Based on the analysis of several films (Un animal, des animaux, dir. Nicolas Philibert, 1996; Sirius Remembered, dir. Stan Brakhage, 1959; Kala Azar, dir. Janis Rafa, 2020), the author shows how reflection on animal bodies and animal death brings out a paradoxical feature of cinema – its simultaneous corporeality and spectrality. Referring to the historical connections between cinema and natural history museums, the author proposes the category of a “taxidermic cinema”. This allows him to point to the role of cinema in recognizing human “vulnerability”, shared in the face of death with other animals.
Keywords:
animal body, mourning, dead body, film animal studies, spectralityReferences
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Authors
Michał Matuszewskim.matuszewski@int.pl
Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0459-7559
Film curator, researcher and author working at Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, where he is in charge of the film programme and runs an art-house cinema with various programmes – from experimental films to midnight movies. He curated a number of film events and retrospectives (Posthuman Cinema. How Experimental Films Teach /and Learn/ How to Show Animals, Cinema of the Anthropocene, Party’s Over). He was a member of international festivals juries (Venice, Berlin, Cannes, Oberhausen) and published several articles on VR and animals in film. His most recent projects relate to VR and cinema, and the non-human perspective in film. He is the grantee of Culture and Animals Foundation and works on a visual research-based film project on animal gaze in film.
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