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Letting the Evidence Speak for Itself
February 15, 2010 in Art, Critical Animal Theory, Evidence, Links | Tags: 1939, Abolition, Abolitionism, Abolitionist, Abuse, Advocacy, Animal, Animal Abuse, Animal Agriculture, Animal Awareness, Animal Care, Animal Consciousness, Animal Culture, Animal Cutlure, Animal Emotion, Animal Language, Animal Meaning, Animal Rights, Animal Sensation, Animal Sentience, Animal Thought, Animal Welfare, Animality, Animation, Anthropocentrism, Anthropomorphism, Antihumanism, Art, Becoming Animal, Biology, Blood, Bodies, Body, Body-Mind, Camp, Camus, Carnality, Carnivalesque, Cinematography, Colonialism, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation, Concentration, Conceptual Art, Consumer Culture, Consumerism, Corporation, Critical Animal Studies, da da, dadaism, Dante, Darwin, Death, Deconstruction, Deconstructionism, Dis-Ease, Divestment Movement, Eating, eco-criticism, ecocriticism, Epistemology, Ethical Philosophy, Ethics, Evolution, Existentialism, Expose, Exposing the Meat Industry, Factory Farming, Feminism, Film, Film Studies, Footage, Genocide, Health, Heidegger, Hell, Hidden, Human Abuse, Humanimal, Humanimality, Humanism, Incarnation, Inferno, Inhumanities, Inhumanity, J. M. Coetzee, Language, Larval Subject, Marcel Duchamp, Marxism, Masochism, Meat, Meat Industry, Mediation, Milton, Mind, Mixed Media, Modernism, Naturalism, Nature-Culture, New Criticism, New Media Studies, Nietzsche, Nutrition, Object, On the Physical Impossibility of Beauty In the Mind of Someone Living, Ontology, Origin, Pain, Pain in the "other", Paradise Lost, Peace, Peace and Conflict Studies, Phenomenology, Political Science, postanimality, Postcolonialism, Posthumanism, Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Realism, Sadism, Schizoid, Science, Secret World, Semiotic, Semiotics, Sign, Signifier, Slaughterhouse, Slavery, Social Construct, Soul, Speciesism, Stop This, Structuralism, Subject, Subjectivism, Subjectivity, Suffering, Symbol, The Ugly Duckling, Theory, Torture, Ulysses, Undercover, vegan, Veganism, vegetarian, Vegetarianism, What's It Like to Be A Battery Cage Egg Laying Hen?, Wittgenstein | Leave a comment
One of the things that frustrates me about recent cinematographic efforts currently used to advocate for animals is that they fail to fully anticipate the hyper-critical, already well practiced defenses that non-sympathizers are likely to have at their disposal in today’s age of relentless commercial and political media bombardment. Animal advocacy films tend to employ a whole host of rhetorical devises and dramaturgical effects, such as voice-over, labeling, music, etc. These layers of argument, though well meaning, do a disservice to our movement because they provide easy and ample material for constructing the types of abstractions that allow people to keep their emotional distance from the visual and auditory portrayals of the daily happenings many viewers have likely never witnessed before.
I found a montage of such footage (for advocates to both use and improve) with as little mediation as possible. It’s seven minutes and forty-two seconds long, a time signature which encodes backward (like Hamlet’s crab) the all encompassing temporality that aptly describes the relative frequency with which the violent events portrayed in the sequence occur in today’s world:
Another piece I found, in a kind of parody of hyper-mediated rhetoric, takes this layering to a new extreme via a disorienting use of superimposition: Footage taken of over a 1939 animated version of “The Ugly Duckling.”
Postanimal Reviews, Dylan Ravenfox 