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Jonathan Burt1 Conference ‘Tiere im Film, eine Menschheitsgeschichte’, Köln, July
2006; Cynthia Chris. Watching Wildlife. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2006.
I understand “animal studies” to be the humanities-based study of human-nonhuman
animal relations in all their many dimensions. As a ﬁeld of research, it is best served
by a multi-disciplinary approach. One of the problems faced by animal studies is that
it is a very marginal and minor ﬁeld, from which few people appear to draw when
they address animal topics for the ﬁrst time. This is why so often the call for papers
for conference panels and journal issues that circulate on the internet always appear
to be the same, and quite frequently papers on animal topics feel like a reinvention
of the wheel. At the moment, animal studies is made up of a virtual and informal
community of scholars addressing each other via the discursive frameworks of their
particular disciplines. Ironically, the marginality and fragmentariness of the topic
neatly reﬂects the plight of its objects of study. One solution to this would be to
institutionalise animal studies a little more through things like regular conferences,
an international animal studies society, or more centres of study. However, this idea
has provoked fears of ghettoization, and the objection that animal studies will lose
its power to challenge assumptions within individual disciplines. Implicit in these
objections, which have always been made to me by American scholars, is the idea
that this loose and creative academic network will lose that sense of friendly
cooperation that transcends theoretical differences and prevents dogmatic rigidities.
However, at the very least, animal studies needs to keep building international links
as much as possible.
This intractable problem crossed my mind when I attended, for the second year
running, another very high quality animal themed conference in Köln, this time on
animals in ﬁlm. The conference was excellently organized by three lecturers in
modern history at the University of Köln: Maren Möhring, Massimo Perinelli, and
Olaf Stieglitz, and took its inspiration from Lippit ’s (2000) provocative elision of
cinema and the animal—Das Kino ist ein Tier’.2 As Lippit puts it, “cinema is like an
animal; the likeness a form of encryption. From animal to animation, ﬁgure to force,
poor ontology to pure energy, cinema may be the technological metaphor that con-
ﬁgures mimetically, magnetically, the other world of the animal.” (p. 196). The
Society & Animals 14:4 (2006)
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conference featured something of a division of interest between historians and peo-
ple working in ﬁlm studies, as became evidenced by a running joke about whether
a speaker was going to mention Deleuze or not. Norbert Finzsch’s comment that his-
torians should do more media studies and media theorists should take history more
into account, seemed especially pertinent for boundary-breaking discussions of
animal subject matter that constantly tracked back and forth between, for instance,
questions of the indeterminacy of the animal image and historical instances of the
colonial gaze in 1950s Africa, or the ambiguous relationship between animal welfare
and commodiﬁcation of the animal image on German television. Taking the confer-
ence as a whole, it was an important reminder that animal ﬁlm imagery requires a
cross-disciplinary approach.
There were four sections to the conference: cinemality, wild and exotic animals, insects,
and companion and family animals. In the ﬁrst session, Rolf Nohr looked at the status
of Tarzan, especially through a study of his face, as raising questions about articula-
tions of human selfhood and identity and human-animal difference. Sulgi Lie read
animal ﬁgures in the ﬁlms of Bresson as part of an anti-hegemonic or hierachical
system in which “humans, animals and things are rendered with the same sensual
materiality.” Taking his inspiration from the work of Jacques Rancière, Lie showed
how underdetermining the symbolic value of animals challenged the normal hierar-
chies of human—animal difference. Lastly, Christiane König, analyzed Neil Jordan’s
The Company of Wolves (1984) through the ﬁlter of Deleuze and Guattari’s thesis of
becoming-animal as articulated in Milles Plateaux (1980). Inevitably, much of the dis-
cussion turned on indeterminacy both as regards the animal—the tensions between
different levels of metaphoricity and the “real animal”—and the lack of resolution in
the idea of becoming-animal. This highlighted a problem of circularity in such work.
If one conﬁnes oneself to a reading of animal ﬁlm imagery, which is almost always
ambivalent, conﬂict ridden, and overdetermined, there needs to be at least some
grounding in a working idea of how animal imagery operates in society at large, in
other words outside the screen.
The second session on wild and exotic animals provoked a long discussion about the
politics of animal ﬁlmmaking. Vinzenz Hediger took as his starting point Bataille’s
notion that “the creation of the similar and the destruction of the similar are two facets
of the same activity” and described the hunting and ﬁlming connection (the camera-
gun association) as foundational for the later nineteenth and twentieth century in the
production of scientiﬁc knowledge about animals and the shaping of colonial cultural
meanings. Johannes Paulmann looked at the wildlife documentary maker Bernhard
Grzimek and attempted to show how it would be simplistic to denounce his work as
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an example of the colonial gaze. Pascal Eitler looked at another ﬁlmmaker, Horst
Stern, who made ﬁlms about animals in Germany in the 1970s.
Stern’s ﬁlms were not about exotic animals but concerned practices such as riding,
hunting, battery farming and animal experimentation. Both Paulmann’s and Eitler ’s
paper revealed important faultlines and paradoxes in the attempts to promote pro-
animal ideas through ﬁlm, whether in other countries or in one’s own. For Eitler,
Stern was not trying to moralise human-animal relations but was critiquing West
German society’s relation to nature. Stern’s scientiﬁc, regulatory attitude towards
reworking and improving these relations had ethical implications for animals. But it
also opened the way, as Eitler put it, for a bio-political regulation that ultimately put
society’s relationship to nature at the centre of concern rather than the animal. The
long discussion round Paulmann’s work turned on whether one could locate a neutrality
in Grzimek’s concentration on the natural behaviour of animals and his marginalisation
of the imagery of killing, eating and hunting, or whether the colonial gaze was still
at work. For example, his critique of civilisation as a threat to animals was also, as
one questioner implied, a critique of the development of Africa itself. The exchanges
in this part of the conference illustrated not just the key importance of ﬁlm’s inﬂuence
on conservation, from gleaning support to shaping perceptions, but also how ﬁlm is
symptomatic of the fact that conservation is almost always a series of inadequate
trade-offs within what still appears even now to be an overall colonial-type structure.
The third session on insects was a welcome addition, given the marginal interest
usually given to such creatures, which belies their extensive signiﬁcance in the
history of ﬁlm. Dorothe Malli discussed the malign and satanic imagery of the ﬂy
and noted its importance from early cinema to documentary and feature ﬁlms,
linking the documentary insect image to genres of the fantastic. Petra Lange-Berndt
returned us to Deleuze and Guattari with a look at the depiction of insect swarms as
well as referencing Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight in which he glued the wings of moths
onto celluloid.
Finally, Gudrun Löhrer’s study of animated health ﬁlms made for the American
military in World War II to educate soldiers about malaria, revealed a series of
subtexts about the masculinity of military culture and an elision of tropical diseases
with loose morals. In all these instances, insects set in play all manner of ideas around
boundary disruption and subversion.
Swarms especially, represented a doubled notion of the mass as, on the one hand, a
unity or individual with a purpose, or a collective intelligence, and, on the other hand,
as an undifferentiated, decentred, mechanistic crowd. Furthermore, many levels of
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self-referentiality were located in ﬁlm’s use of insects in a manner which echoed
Lippit’s elision of animal and cinema. For instance, the eyes of insects were depicted
as similar to pixels; Mothlight integrated moths and ﬁlm around their parallel desire
for light; and the proliferation of ﬁlm itself was likened to a swarm. It was also sug-
gested that the treatment of insects on ﬁlm should be placed in a longer historical
trajectory that took account of periods when insects had positive connotations as at
the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Why had ﬁlm come to rep-
resent insects as it did during its own particular historical moments?
The ﬁnal session on companion animals highlighted the differences between ﬁlm and
television in the depiction of animals and asked in what ways might animals in these
respective media have different effects. Olaf Stieglitz looked at 1950s American tele-
vision series, especially Lassie, reading them as reﬂective of the family values of the
time but also offered ways of reading them against the grain, showing how these pro-
grammes revealed a more fragile and threatened social order. Antonia Ulrich ana-
lyzed Oshima’s Max Mon Amour about the love affair between a woman and a male
chimpanzee, raising issues of zoophilia and cross species relationships as a contrast
with human ones. Finally, Eva Rosenberger described a German television series which
advertized dogs that needed new homes, where the animal was presented as both a
love object and a commodity. In addition to these papers there were two other pre-
sentations. Akira Lippit spoke on the signiﬁcance of speaking animals in Kafka and
in animation, interweaving his discussion with notions of minority, both racial and
linguistic. Jonathan Burt discussed representations of animal death and animal
livingness as structured by the difference between the animal as a linguistic sign and
as a visual image.
As can be seen from this extremely sketchy summary, which does little justice to the
richness of both papers and discussion, we have still barely scratched the surface of
the resource of animal ﬁlms and related practices for understanding human-animal
relations. In addition, this conference taken as a whole drew attention to a number
of issues. First, we need to integrate ways of reading the animal image on screen with
a better sense of how this imagery actually feeds into wider cultural preoccupations
and its more general historical roots. Clearly the complexity and open-endedness of
animal imagery is only one part of the analysis; how it operates is equally important.
Second, although we have been well served by some very good animal ﬁlm studies,
especially of wildlife ﬁlms in the anglophone world, there needs to be a more ﬁne-
tuned attention to the history of animal ﬁlm making in different parts of the world
paying particular attention to national similarities and differences. Third, the inter-
play between ﬁlm, television, and related print media, needs to be more carefully
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looked at. What does ﬁlm do that television doesn’t, and vice versa, in terms of their
respective impact on public attitudes and human-animal relations?
Cynthia Chris’s new book, Watching Wildlife, opens up a great deal of new and impor-
tant material for the kinds of questions posed above. It is an extremely impressive
addition to the two major extant studies of wildlife ﬁlms, Derek Bousé’s Wildlife Films
(2000) and Gregg Mitman’s Reel Nature (1999), adding much, especially with regard
to changes in the structure of television in the last 30 years and ﬁlm’s emphasis (or
troubled obsession with) animal sex. The main quality of the book lies in the way
Chris weaves discussion of animal representation through her account of the history
of the institutions of ﬁlm and television. At times, her wry accounts of the stranger
shores of animal programming such as The Pet Psychic, or Wildboyz, are extremely
amusing, though the book at root treats a deeply troubling subject.
One of the main intentions of the book is to expose the ideological underpinning
of wildlife ﬁlm especially with regard to what she terms the heteronormative
reading of animal (and human) social behaviour. Her focus is on popular ﬁlms and
television programmes for general audiences and the manner in which animal
representation is used as a template for human self-understanding. Chris identiﬁes
the important factor in the roots of animal ﬁlmmaking not so much in the motion
study photography of Muybridge and others, but in the ‘conventions of precine-
matic visual technologies that had long been used to describe and delineate the
boundaries of racial difference, sexual difference, and colonial power ’ (p. 1). This effec-
tively structures the book as she traces these themes through early ﬁlm makers, well
known ﬁgures like Martin and Osa Johnson, and Walt Disney’s revival of wildlife
ﬁlmmaking from the late 1940s. Where the story becomes particularly interesting is
Chris’s account of what happens when this trajectory becomes entangled with the
arrival of the Discovery Channel in 1985, National Geographic Television in 1995, and
Animal Planet in 1996, and against the backdrop of a general reordering of television
production.
The fragmentation of television audiences away from a few oligopolistic channels to
smaller niche markets, and the inevitable cost cutting which led to cheaper formats
such as reality shows, had important consequences for animal representation. Discovery,
which placed wildlife at the centre of its brand identity, gained a number of economic
advantages from the genre—‘animals and plants are non-union, not entitled to resid-
ual payments, and work for nothing’ (p. 86). Nature documentaries can also be rerun
season after season, and wildlife footage can be archived, re-edited and recycled in a
different form for entirely new shows. In this highly competitive environment the
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trend towards sensationalism, and the escalation of scenes of predation and aggression
in the 1990s reﬂected a general shift in other areas of television programming.
Chris analyzes the changing treatment of animal sex against this background, high-
lighting a peculiar combination of voyeurism and prurience. Her discussions of
the signiﬁcance of popular sociobiology, notions of monogamy, animal rape and homo-
sexuality creates a discomforting picture of a widespread masculine, reproduction
obsessed, heterosexual ethos framing the treatment of animal sex on screen. For
instance, in her discussion of The New Chimpanzees, a National Geographic Special
aired in 1995, Chris notes how we are not likened to bonobos when it comes to their
sexual behaviour even though they display many activities we would recognise as
similar to our own: ‘kissing, masturbating, oral-genital contact, and nonorgasmic
genital stimulation; same-sex, intergenerational, and juvenile sexual activity’ (p. 162).
In other segments of the ﬁlm, humans are likened to apes but not in this instance.
‘The program avoids this strategy when such a likening would require staking a claim
that homosexual behaviour is “natural” at a time that beliefs about the origins and
morality of homosexuality are hotly contested by an anti-gay Christian right and
determined but hardly uniﬁed gay-rights activists.’ (p. 162) Taking this into consid-
eration alongside her pointed comments about the absence of any political critique
within the genre itself, Chris ultimately portrays a depressing picture of the current
state of popular wildlife programming. “Televisual forms of nature have been made
to ﬁt a market that thrives on conﬂict that melts into happy endings, and drama that
does not get mired in real-world political impasses but resolves in comfort.” (p. 201)
Chris’s important book and the Köln ﬁlm conference indicate the fertility of ideas
circulating in animal ﬁlm studies but they need to be set in the context of the fact
that this is still a small area of study. The number of recent books, articles, and
dissertations on this topic are very few. In other words, it is a minor literature.
But the importance of this work for understanding, for instance, the mechanics of
animal representation, the populist politics of conservation, how a combination of
ideological and commercial forces straitjacket the narratives of animal ﬁlm and tele-
vision, indicate that this really should be a major literature. The onus here is to take
this as a starting point and think of ways in which this thinking might ﬁnd a much
needed impact on the ﬁlmmaking process itself, natural history programmers and
ﬁlmmakers. Chris’s account is far too troubling for people interested in the promo-
tion of animal studies as a positive and creative ﬁeld of study not to take up this
challenge.
*
Jonathan Burt, Cambridge
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Notes
1
Correspondance should be sent to Jonathan Burt, Ferry House, Bottisham Lock,
Waterbeach, Cambs., CB5 9LN, UK. E-mail: pcfav@aol.com
2
I would like to thank Silke Hackenesch for all the work she put into providing
such good translation services and notes for both myself and Akira Lippit.
Reference
Lippit, A. (2000). Electric animal: Toward a rhetoric of wildlife. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
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