Construction and Constraint: The Animal Body and Constructions of Power in Motion Pictures.

Abstract

This dissertation proceeds from the question “How does the camera capture animals, and how does the medium of that image structure the relationship between camera, animal and spectator?” by arguing that both the terms of the question and the answers themselves are culturally and historically contingent. The tension between the documented animal body as it is viewed on screen and the living animal captured in profilmic space demands a methodology attentive to both historical context and the power structures that shape the writing of history for non-speaking subjects. I examine cases such as the early Edison short Electrocution of an Elephant, the 1939 Hollywood production of Jesse James, BBC’s Planet Earth and cat videos on the internet through the moments of their filming and exhibition, I argue the relationships amongst animals, humans, landscape, and culture inform the representations of animals onscreen, and how animal images are seen and understood. My work privileges the conditions of production and exhibition because the power dynamics of the gaze at animals are not only implicated in the image textually, but also in the factors that produced the image. Drawing on institutional archives, public animal advocacy and legal discourse, I demonstrate that the power of the human to control not only the animal but the framing of that animal is elided in order to naturalize both the human-animal power dynamic and the relationship between camera, subject and viewer. Animals are often in the background, textually and historically, of American film history. By focusing on their performances, my work demonstrates how animals were understood through and ultimately regulated by a media industry that both profited from and dictated the terms of representation. The animal body has a unique status as familiar and distant, exotic and domesticated, unknowable and subject to human control. Media texts focused on animal bodies provide an ideal testing ground for examining how the relationship between human and animal is both reflected and created by media, and the power that fills each frame.