Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film

A foray through the wilds where experimental films and animals collide

Like the flash of a tropical bird’s iridescent wing, cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful--and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals, her field notes from countless hair-raising encounters with films in their natural habitat.

Part of a growing focus on nonhuman animals in film, Cinemal ventures to the ＂furry underbelly＂ of global experimental film practice, focusing on films from New Zealand, Australia, and South America. Laird examines how animals are depicted in film and analyzes the various animal qualities of cinema, like scratching and sniffing, vibrant colors, and voices (barking, howling, or echolocation). Burrowing into the work of filmmakers such as Arthur and Corinne Cantrill, Sriwhana Spong, and Ana Vaz, Laird’s energetic prose embodies the films she discusses, seamlessly combining personal anecdotes with art theory and philosophy to spread a wide sensory buffet.

Lively and optimistic, Laird uses cinematic animal tropes to encourage readers to rethink what it means to be human. She argues that, in a time of ecological collapse, such an impulse is a necessary means of imagining other, healthier ways of being in this world. Connecting us with the more-than-human, Cinemal lures us toward the beastly becomings of film and, ultimately, our own animal natures.

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Tessa Laird is an artist, writer, and senior lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Her books include a fictocritical exploration of color, A Rainbow Reader, and a cultural history of bats, Bat, part of Reaktion Books’s celebrated Animal series.