Cinemal: Films and animals, majesty and mystery

Cinema can be furtive and intensely beautiful—and it can leave a viewer craving more. Cinemal is Tessa Laird’s passionate inquiry into the desire to write about animals and to write about art, juxtaposing the two and burrowing into the ways that films mimic the majesty, mystery, and movements of animals. Here, Laird is joined in conversation with Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard, editors of the Art after Nature series with University of Minnesota Press.

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, in Reaktion Books’ celebrated Animal series.

Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press.

EPISODE REFERENCES:

The Animal That Therefore I Am / Jacques Derrida

Donna Haraway

Arthur and Corinne Cantrill

Michael Taussig

Monocultures of the Mind / Vandana Shiva

What Animals Teach Us about Politics / Brian Massumi

Len Lye, New Zealand modernist artist

Sergei Eisenstein

Electric Animal / Akira Lippit

Baptiste Marizot

Undrowned / Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Sriwhana Spong

Praise for the book:

“Original, erudite, and playful all in one, Cinemal is not only a joy to read but estranges the very idea of cinema, and therefore of life, in ways wondrous and wise.”
—Michael Taussig, Columbia University

“A sparkling, engaging book, a virtuosic and thrilling interleaving of experimental cinema, philosophies of the more-than-human, and stories of animal encounters. Celebrating the variety and inventiveness of cinematic experimentation, Tessa Laird calls for us to remake our human senses in order to align better with the needs of the planet.”
—Laura U. Marks, author of The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos

Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities.

Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film by Tessa Laird is available from University of Minnesota Press.