Animal Worlds: Film, Philosophy and Time

by Laura McMahon

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.

232 pages, Hardcover

Published June 6, 2019

Reviews

[Parth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable, urgent, and thoroughly original intervention in critical animal studies and its application to film. Found this utterly inspiring in the kind of scholarship I want to pursue.