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On Animal Subjectivity in Contemporary US Cinema
Koilybayeva, Botagoz ; Roraback, Erik Sherman (advisor) ; Vichnar, David (referee)
With an aim to explore the possibility of depicting non-human subjectivity in film, the thesis centers on three contemporary American films that venture beyond the current state of human exceptionalism and bridge a caesura between humanity and animality. Therefore, the thesis puts forward a hypothesis whether film as a cultural and visual medium has an aesthetic, ontological and ethical potential to illustrate animal subjectivity. Terrence Malick's war film The Thin Red Line is an example of highlighting intersubjective experiences of human beings and non-human phenomena. Kevin Costner's western Dances with Wolves underscores reciprocity between humans and animals as well as animal agency and practical and spiritual engagement with animals. Okja, the Korean- American collaboration, is a dystopian satire that reveals the anxieties of the present state of farm animals. Applying an interdisciplinary approach, the thesis engages with philosophy, anthrozoology, animal studies, and critical theory, in an attempt to balance between examining visual representation of animals in film and deconstructing the state of dominant cultural and political ideologies that have locked actual animals within the ideological frameworks of anthropocentric status quo. These human-centered paradigms explicitly and implicitly...
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