Animal Worlds

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 thr...

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.

Laura McMahon is Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Cinema and Contact (Legenda, 2012) and co-editor, with Michael Lawrence, of Animal Life and the Moving Image (BFI, 2015).