Awards

• Short-listed for Zoological Surrealism 2020

Overview

ZoologicalSurrealismdraws from French scientific and nature filmmaker Jean Painlev's early oeuvreto rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientificresearch in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painlev's archive, James LeoCahill develops an account of ""cinema's Copernican vocation"" - how it was used toforge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquinganthropocentric viewpoints.

Full Product Details

Author:   James Leo Cahill
Publisher:   University of Minnesota Press
Imprint:   University of Minnesota Press
Dimensions:   Width: 14.00cm , Height: 5.10cm , Length: 21.60cm
ISBN:  

9781517902162

ISBN 10:   1517902169
Pages:   384
Publication Date:   19 February 2019
Audience:   General/trade ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

Contents Introduction: Cinema’s Copernican Vocation 1. Neozoological Dramas: Comparative Anatomy by Other Means 2. Metamorphoses: Crustaceans, the Coming of Sound, and Plasmatic Anthropomorphism 3. Amour Flou: The Seahorse and the Blur of Sex 4. Substitutes, Vectors, and the Circulatory Systems of Modernity: Dr. Normet’s Serum: Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog and The Vampire 5. Carnivorous Cinema: Freshwater Assassins and The Blood of the Beasts Conclusion: Unfinished Revolutions, Untimely Nature Acknowledgments Notes Index

Reviews

Reading Jean Painlev 's archive, James Leo Cahill excavates an urgent nonhuman ethics made possible through film. Each chapter of this lively, meticulously researched, and beautifully written book reveals a complex vision of animals-for-themselves and animals as figures for a fraught political culture. The 'cinematic nature' of Painlev 's world, as theorized by Cahill, unsettles any presumed separateness of human- and animal-being, even as it offers a vision of animal existence that is beyond human existence altogether. --Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene A remarkable study of Jean Painlev 's cinematic attention to the marvels of animal life, James Leo Cahill's study elegantly resolves the contradictions between intellectual biography and non-anthropocentric modes of inquiry. At once a focused critical biography and a wide-ranging study of organic systems thinking, Zoological Surrealism is alive with the intellectual ferment of the French 1930s. It is an essential text for any reader invested in the development of systems thinking, as well as in the history of experimental film, art, science, and thought. --Jonathan P. Eburne, author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas

Author Information

James Leo Cahill is associate professor of cinema studies and French at the University of Toronto and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

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