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Seeing/Loving Animals: André Bazin's Posthumanism

Department of English, Michigan State University, 201 Morrill Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, fayj{at}msu.edu

French film theorist André Bazin was fascinated by films in which humans and animals are framed together, especially in circumstances in which the presence of one signals the endangerment of the other. By putting Bazin and two films he admired (Kon Tiki and Umberto D) in conversation with Jacques Derrida's writing on the animal and Walter Benjamin's infrahuman optics, this article argues that Bazin's commitments to cinematic realism and the recurrence in his writing of human/animal propinquity signal a distinctly posthumanist ethics. Jacques Perrin's Winged Migration realizes Bazin's interest in a cinema that de-centers and even absents the human. It may also be a film that answers Derrida's call that we not just look at animals, but feel ourselves seen by them.

Key Words: André Bazin • animals • Jacques Derrida • Kon Tiki • Umberto D • Walter Benjamin • Winged Migration

Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 7, No. 1, 41-64 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/1470412907088175


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