Film and the Nonhuman

The cinema is a marvellous apparatus for taking us outside ourselves and outside of the world in which we believe ourselves to live.  – Jean Epstein What does ‘becoming nonhuman’ mean in relation to the cin...

Introduction: Intuitions and Intersensoriality The multiple. Water, the sea. Perceptional bursts, inner and outer, how can they be told apart? In ‘Science and the Humanities’, Michel Serres discusses the pain...

Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO (2022) both tell emotionally compelling, immersive stories that prominently feature donkeys. Bresson’s film follows Balthazar as he pas...

During the 1970s, American artist William Wegman created seven reels of short video works including many created in collaboration with his canine companion, Man Ray. Distinctive from both other artists’ use of ...

Place names accrue meaning and thus become the loci of contradictions. The beginning of Alanis Obomsawin's The People of the Kattawapiskak River (2012) points out such a misalignment of reading in the place men...

Writing in 1926 of some of her early experiences of the cinema, in this case pre-WWI actualities, Virginia Woolf made some observations that might yet contribute to an ongoing discussion or even creation of a ‘...

I See a Darkness (2023) delves into the shadow archive of image-capture technologies, and, with an emphasis on the non-human and animal, raises questions about the streamlining of cinematographic technologies i...

Filmmakers have long been fascinated with photography’s ability to thematise the productive, typically resistant, interplay between the human and the nonhuman, where the ‘nonhuman’ can refer to both technology ...

Real depression is boring, there’s not usually a lot of cinematic stuff going on. And Lars had a very creative way of making it not boring. – Kirsten Dunst ‘Why is it’, the author asked ‘that all men who ...

At the end of the 19th century, the emerging field of psychology adopted the concept of dissociation to describe mental processes that run counter to the assumed endeavour of the subject and its ego to combine ...

Animals are visual thinkers. We are verbal thinkers. – Vinciane Despret, What Would Animals Say If We Asked Them the Right Questions? An aerial view of Brasilia draped in shades of midnight blue. The sound ...

would have us be concerned not with the psychology but with the physiology of existence. – André Bazin, “Le journal d’ un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson” I wanted to be raw material...

At the end of Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz’s It is Night in America, (2022), it is not just the human contributors who are credited. Vaz lists the various filmstocks and cameras used in the production of the fil...

Patricio Guzmán is widely recognised as one of the most eminent Latin American filmmakers. Approaching his eighty-third birthday, he remains committed to research and cinematic production. Since the 1970s, his ...

Bill Nichols presents six conceptual lenses through which to examine the ways in which documentary film functions to invoke and convey its meaning or message, and they are the poetic, expository, observatio...

It was natural to think of connections above the ground—roads, electric cables, forests, and seas—but more disturbing to think of them being beneath the ground as well. What we stood on, shouldn’t that be abs...

Ali Abbasi’s 2018 film Border situates the central character, Tina (Eva Melander), as a liminal figure: lonely, strange, ugly. This is evident from the opening shot of the film, which frames Tina’s broad body ...