Interview:

An interview with Jonathan Burt, author of Animals in Film.
Conducted by Devin Delliquanti 

Modern Mask: Can you give a brief overview of Animal Studies and its terminology for those who may not be familiar?

Jonathan Burt: My working definition of Animal Studies is the multi-disciplinary study of human-animal relations in the humanities. As to when the term Animal Studies arose I am not sure. Certainly when I first starting working in what I then privately termed animal history, back in the early 1990s, very few people were writing on animals and most of those who were didn't have larger theoretical frameworks and issues around method that their work might address. I co-founded the Animal Studies Group (U.K.) in 2000 with a group of scholars who met by chance at Nigel Rothfels's Representing Animals conference in Milwaukee. But we chose the name because we couldn't think of any other title that covered our very different areas of research. Although this hasn't created a uniformity of approach to Animal Studies, it means that many of us in the U.K. have hooked our particular field of research to larger questions of what it means to write about animals generally. An important essay for me in this regard is Erica Fudge's chapter in Nigel Rothfels's Representing Animals conference, where she tackles the question of what an animal history is. What marks it out, what are its particular constraints, and, above all, what is the object we are actually studying. I also started the Reaktion Books Animal series, which are cultural histories of particular creatures, to broaden the literature and to get people interested in other topics such as the history of insects, birds and so on. I think Animal Studies is inevitably fragmented by standard disciplinary divisions, but this is to some extent counterbalanced by a 'virtual' community of scholars linked by things like the H-Animals discussion site, the journal Society and Animals, and various conferences. There are a number of authors who outline some of the main issues of Animal Studies for me. John Berger's essay “Why Look at Animals?”, Cary Wolfe, Akira Lippit, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Erica Fudge, and Steve Baker are all especially important but this list could be much longer. Regarding terminology, that really depends on which discipline you are coming from. Sometimes there are issues around the term “animal” and people offer various alternatives to that, but I don't think there is a special language as such.

How did you first become interested in Animal Studies?

I was working on some aspects of the history of primatology and needed to check out some photos in the London Zoo archive in 1992. Perusing, by chance, an exhibit called the Monkey Hill, which was a community of Hamadryas baboons on an artificial rock in the 1920s, I was very struck by how many different accounts there were of this display in the press, amongst scientists, and from the zoo itself. I decided to check out what general literature there was on animal representation and zoos. Apart from John Berger, there was almost nothing. The idea that animal representation was wrapped up with anthropomorphism and metaphors for human concerns seemed to me totally unsatisfactory to explain many of the features of this particular exhibit. The baboons were more like resistant objects rather than things one could easily map. I came to an interest in film by trying to find footage of the Monkey Hill. I was intrigued by papers in the zoo archive which showed how the zoo foresaw the potential of film from the 1910s onwards but also sought to control any imagery coming out of the zoo. That's why I am interested to this day in the institutional structures of animal filmmaking and censorship. I think this also shaped my thinking in other ways. I have always been interested in trying to understand the impact of animals on humans in human-animal relations, and make my analyses as animal centered as possible. This piece of research has pretty much framed the rest of my work. In the Monkey Hill story, issues of technology, violence, representation, and institutional control were all interlocked. This seemed to me far more satisfactory and less limiting than simply identifying meanings projected onto animals.

The opening of your second of three sections in Animals in Film, entitled “Vision and Ethics,” discusses both film technology and a double standard of violence, specifically, “the central place of the animal in the development of film technology and, the unresolvable dialectic between humane and cruel attitudes to animals that governs their history in modern culture.” In regards to the technology, why do representations of animals force us to forward our technology as much as other cinematic representations, such as space or visions of the future? Is the use of digital technology to depict animals another assertion of power over nature?

I don't think representations of animals 'force us forward' as such. What I was trying to do was bring the animal closer to center stage in the history of the development of cinema both by recognizing how important it was as an object of interest and to emphasize that the history of animal representation always needs to take account of its technological framework. Otherwise, one ends up with anachronistic readings of the animal in modernity whereby our sense of the animal (and human-animal relations as they develop in the twentieth century) are somehow divorced from major shifts in the construction of the animal body from the fin de siecle. Obviously, there were plenty of other strands to the development of cinema.

I think that the issue of digital photography is a complicated one. Clearly, if anything, it represents a failure of our power over 'nature.'  Digital can be used to make up for the impossibility of getting certain kinds of shots and gains significance, for me, when considered in relation to that shift in documentary filmmaking where narrative, financial, and production demands increasingly governed the desire for specific kinds of imagery and shaped shooting schedules. Gail Davis talks about these shifts in her PhD on the history of BBC nature documentary. I am not sure whether this need necessarily always be a bad thing. Nature documentaries have always been, in various ways, 'fixed' or composite in terms of where the imagery comes from. The real problem is the directions things are going in. The picture painted by Cynthia Chris in her excellent new book, Watching Wildlife, about how changes in the structure of television since the early 1980s have had an enormous impact in driving particular kinds of storylines, especially in relation to sexuality and violence, is a depressing one. 

You discuss the evolution of animal representation technologies to recreate extinct species with the special effects of stop motion, animatronics and CGI in dinosaur films from The Lost World (1925) to Jurassic Park and say, “Such films reveal the modern at the heart of the archaic.” Can you elaborate on this? Also, would you say that the opposite is true as well, that as we push artistic technologies forward, it illustrates that art is serving archaic purposes of sacrifice before power greater than humanity?

I'm not sure I would write that sentence now, in fact I definitely wouldn't. I think I must have been thinking about how the history of dinosaur films enfolded their techniques into their own particular development over time, almost like some sort of archaeological layering (appropriate to their prehistoric themes, I guess): puppeteering, stop motion and later CGI. Some of the iconic dinosaur films were groundbreaking in many ways and then Spielberg referenced them all in the first Jurassic Park, whilst moving things himself. But archaic and modern sounds a bit overblown to me.

On the subject of sacrifice I think this idea is very problematic. Cary Wolfe, in that fantastic essay he wrote with Jonathan Elmer on Silence of the Lambs, mentions Derrida and the foundational act of sacrifice in establishing the symbolism of species difference, defined by what one can and cannot kill. This goes back to Rene Girard. But I am increasingly worried about this concept of sacrifice which strikes me as too abstract and too anachronistic to suggest that it underpins contemporary issues of animal death: the technologisation of slaughter, species eradication, and scientific practice. In fact I think that art, and film, actually muddles the notion of sacrifice on those occasions when it makes animal death visible because, and these are thoughts heavily indebted to Akira Lippit, it takes us out of the realm of language and thus the symbolic altogether. It questions the sacrificial logic by the trauma it induces and does not seem to me to re-establish the social order in the way sacrifice does. In fact, it is deeply threatening. Sacrifice has an acceptable ritual visibility whereas the representation of animal death definitely does not, as evidenced by censorship and public outcry. I guess I am saying that there is something of a paradigm shift in animal death and its symbolic trappings. I can think of ways in which sacrifice is depicted, the ritual films of Nitsch for instance, but I'm not sure that that changes my main point.   

In regards to the double standard of violence, you mention, “Animal film imagery can highlight the making visible of violence. For a society that does not so much conceal violence as attempt to restrict it to its proper place, this unavoidable visual attention to its mechanics is inevitably problematic.” This relates to the dog-fight scenes of Amores Perroes that you discuss. So often it seems that viewers and activists need the comforting disclaimer that “no animals were harmed” during the production. You have also commented that the images of animal violence, “threaten to reveal not just the isolated fact of coercion or cruelty but the whole system by which such coercion and cruelty are reproduced.” When we are face to face with these images, we suddenly gain awareness of the violence inherent in our cultural animal practices. Why do depictions of animal on animal or human on animal violence differ from the depictions of human on human violence? Also, do animal images in films such as Amores Perros actively challenge our cultural practices with animals (meat eating, pet keeping, etc), or do they simply use animals as a metaphor for human experiences and relationships?

I believe that the depiction of animal violence on film is different from other sorts of violence, in the same way that I believe that the animal is a particular sort of screen image. But it is difficult to establish a theoretical framework by which one can evaluate this. There is little audience research on attitudes to animals in any shape or form. Yet I have lost count of occasions when I've heard audiences in the U.K. react to what they perceive to be animal cruelty or potential cruelty on screen. And again, censorship and public debate seems to suggest there is a very raw nerve here. Maybe my perspective is particularly influenced by British culture, perhaps too much so. My solution to this problem in my work, in the absence of certain kinds of empirical data, was to investigate the institutional and legislative changes in the treatment of animals, shifting criteria of unacceptable behavior in public contexts and so on, and then locate animal film imagery within that trajectory. This means that film history gets tied in with things like the history of slaughter, public order, redefinitions of animal welfare and so on, all cast in terms of the changing status of the visible animal. This story begins way before film; it started in the early nineteenth century, and also marks my desire to situate animal film imagery in a multi-stranded story with the animal at its center. I understand that this is a very limited and partial account because I obviously couldn't claim that our emotional attitudes to animals are totally constructed on the back of, say, British government legislation! But I think it’s a good place to start. Much more work needs to be done on this.

In terms of the effects of film imagery, does Amores Perros change the way we might think and so on, that is a good question. It would be impossible to generalize. Again, we are stuck as scholars at the moment, because how can we measure a public response to animal imagery and what would it mean? How would we deal with the inevitable variability of response? Inarritu clearly intended the dog fight scenes in Amores Perros to be read at many different levels. Perhaps in the end we are asking the wrong question here. Maybe the question should turn on the immeasurability of this issue.

Even though animal violence can be disquieting for viewers, it is often seen in cartoons aimed at young children, such as Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes.  Why do cartoons, particularly those made by Warner Brothers and Disney, use animals to relate to children at a young age, and even in some cartoons imply animal rituals (i.e. Elmer Fudd hunting and repeatedly shooting Daffy Duck), but so often hide or sugar coat the realities of animal violence?

I began to take animation a little more seriously after I wrote the book. At the time I wasn't that interested. Now I realize that it needs to be taken seriously as it once was by artists, cultural commentators, and philosophers in the 1920s and 30s. My eyes were opened to that by Leslie's book Hollywood Flatlands and the work of Paul Wells. Animation is omnipresent and must be, quantity wise, the most common form of animal representation. I don't think I can answer the question why cartoons use animals to appeal to children beyond the obvious suggestions about toys, the long tradition of animal stories in childhood, and the ways in which animals are used as moral exemplars. I am intrigued by the way that cartoons and sentimental animal films for the family are somehow ring-fenced, and that we are supposed to suppress what lessons or messages these films have for us in other contexts—fair treatment of other beings, eating meat is, if not wrong, then problematic and so on. I wrote a short piece recently on the film Madagascar to try and address this. But again, I see this as partly a historical question and partly a question about modernity's construction of animals. I'm interested in the history of marketing in relation to animation and its transformations around cartoon films in recent years, especially commercial tie-ins with fast food chains like McDonalds and Burger King. And there is that peculiar ambiguity when animated beings are portrayed as hyperactive and exuberant, on the one hand, yet are totally controlled, puppet-like or mechanized, produced by production line animation factories, on the other. That really does tell us a lot about animal-constructed image-technology. 

What is the next frontier of technological animal representation, and how do you think depictions of animals and animal violence will change as digital technology in particular continues to evolve?

I think that there are optimistic and pessimistic answers to that. It hardly needs saying that commercial media pressures and the fragmentation of the media that Cynthia Chris talks about, will determine so much in the future of animal imagery. I think the answer should be an active one though, and not a passive one. I would like to see some interaction between people working on animal imagery as scholars and the people who are producing it, whether or not they are filmmakers. The violence towards animals has itself been shaped by technology, some of which has to do centrally with the camera and other optical devices. Mind you, if I had any sense of the future of animal imagery even I could make a bit of money.