Executing Species Animal Attractions in
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PROOF
Part VII
Us and Them: Posthuman
Relationships
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Executing Species: Animal Attractions
in Thomas Edison and Douglas Gordon
Anat Pick
How you glow, noble beast, in the infinite moment before your own
death!
Lydia Millet
Cinema has never been human. The central place of animals in the emergence
and development of the cinematic medium is by now well established.1 Yet, if
there has been a recent ‘animal turn’ in film studies, it has focused less on animals
themselves than on how animals are symbolically produced in representation.
Animals remain cinema’s ‘elephant in the room’: the medium’s unacknowledged
presence but also its potential for seeing the world, and animals, differently.
As Jonathan Burt has consistently argued, screen animals exceed their symbolic
value as representation and are located on the threshold between the figurative
and the metaphorical. Despite their excessive use as mirrors of human concerns
and as repositories of human attributes, the appearance of animals in moving
images is always also concrete, and affects us as such.
The ‘reality effect’ of film animals is partly achieved by the constant threat of
real violence commanded by the animal image (like the portentous appearance of
a gun in the first act of a stage play). Violence is sometimes realized (it is a regular
feature in ‘serious’ European and world art cinema, for example), and sometimes
disclaimed (in the feel-good adage of the American Humane Association’s ‘No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of this Film’). The permanent exposure of the
cinematic animal to onscreen violation signals its reality, and lends the medium its
realism. This exposure and this threat open up the screen as a zoomorphic space –
a space inhabited by more-than-human lives.
As a technology and a mode of encountering, the cinema captures and projects
human and non-human beings in their materiality, their contingency and finitude, namely, in their precariousness and vulnerability. At its best, cinema can
be attentive to modes of existence that are not limited to our own. It can also
reveal our own existence to us as something unknown or disavowed – as animal. As assemblages, in the Deleuzian or Latourian sense, images are not mere
copies, but instances of relations between objects, materials and bodies in a morethan-human world: each image contains elements, and is itself part of complex
311
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interfaces that include not only the image interior, but also the camera, the space
around the camera and the relations between them.
André Bazin’s cinematic realism imagined the cinema as offering an immanent,
non-hierarchal, lateral view of reality, composed of multiple beings and things
whose connection to one another is of equivalent force, beauty and wonder.2
There is much to seduce (and alarm) us in this posthumanist view of cinema that
regards living beings and things as interchangeable: drawing out the aliveness of
things, and the thingness of the living. For John Mullarkey, such radical equality
can trigger fear:
The horror of encountering unexpected alterity – from animals no longer taken as
mere objects (and perhaps from objects no longer regarded as mere ‘objects’ either) –
doubtless stems from fear: what will become of ‘us’ in a democracy of all the living?
(2012, 54)
While cinema’s ‘flat ontology’ (Mullarkey 2012, 40) proposes a view of the world
as radically equal, what should we make of the unequal distribution of power, and
vulnerability, between different agents or ‘actants’? For cinema is also an institution and a manifestation of particular economic, political and moral milieus,
bound not only to dominant ways of seeing, but to dominant ways of living
as well.
Film, perhaps more than any other art, is closely related to other modern industrial institutions, from the science laboratory to the factory farm. As posthumanist
theorists like Donna Haraway have shown, these are relational sites in which
human and non-human entities meet and comingle, ‘flatly’ as Mullarkey would
have it. But these are also, significantly, sites of political, or biopolitical, power.
Cinema’s real and symbolic instrumentalization of animals means that – like the
laboratory and the slaughterhouse, as well as the circus and the zoo – the power
exercised over non-human animals as the dominant mode of interspecies relations
is on display. The two examples below, Thomas Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant
(1903), and Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (2003), exactly one hundred
years apart, reveal the intersection of humans, animals and technology that gives
rise to a peculiar and precarious form of life: the cinematic animal.
Cinema is a key modern relational site of encounter between technology,
humans and animals, an encounter that gives rise to a new form of life: the cinematic animal. Like farmed animals, modified by the industrial apparatuses in
which they live and die, cinematic animals are a new kind of being.3 Cinematic
animals are living commodities whose very ‘aliveness’ is probed and made visible. As a cinematic attraction, combining entertainment and instruction, animal
vulnerability is generated as a source of knowledge about animals’ bodies, and as
cultural and aesthetic currency. Cinematic animals, then, are not simply animals
captured on film. They are ontologically, ethically and even biologically distinct,
a creature that is, almost without exception, constituted as vulnerable.
In opening up the world as more-than-human, cinema blurs the boundary
between humans and animals, but normatively, it tends to reinforce species
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distinction. This ambiguity resonates in cinema’s twofold ‘inhumanity’: ontologically, the inhumanity of film frees cinema’s potential to eschew a strictly
human perspective and attests to the interdependence of humans, animals and
the cinematic apparatus. Ethically, the inhumanity of film reminds us that cinema continues to be politically and culturally wedded to forms of human power
over non-human life that are, quite literally, spectacularly cruel.
The examples I have chosen trace early film’s complex relations to animals as
a particular type of cinematic ‘attraction’. They render cinema as an interspecies
space in which other lives unfold (reveal themselves or come undone) spectacularly. These unfolding relations are not always benign. Electrocuting an Elephant
and Play Dead; Real Time encapsulate the contradictory attitudes to animals in the
field of vision and point to cinema’s inhumanity, in the double inflection of ontology and ethics. If, ontologically, the cinema is not simply reducible to a human
perspective, history or concerns, morally, cinema participates in the disciplining
(and violating) of bodies, whose vitality and vulnerability it explores and often
exploits.
Electrocuting an Elephant (1903)
Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) is a haunting example of early actuality
to which scholars of film, and of animal film, repeatedly return, perhaps because
the film crystalizes the basic components of the cinema: living bodies (material,
temporal, fragile), technology and spectacle. The Edison Manufacturing Company
arranged for, carried out and filmed the execution of Topsy, a wild-caught African
elephant brought to Coney Island, who reportedly killed three handlers, the last
one after he fed her a lit cigarette. A crowd of 1,500 gathered to watch Topsy die,
a finale performance ending some 20 years of captivity.
The film’s grainy, degraded footage contains two shots: a capped man leads
Topsy to the site of her execution where she is strapped into place. Three other
men are walking behind her, and a couple wander across the front of the frame.
Coney Island’s Luna Park is seen at the background. In the second shot, Topsy is
standing, her front leg restlessly shuffling, she suddenly stiffens and smoke billows from her feet and fills the frame. She collapses onto her side. The shot is
held until the smoke clears, revealing Topsy’s body (or is it the film’s?) in its final
convulsions.
Electrocuting an Elephant is a literal example of early cinema’s carnivalesque roots
in the fairground. By 1903, following the upholding of Edison’s motion picture
patent in 1901, the Edison company had established itself as a major force in
the motion picture market. Although, according to Charles Musser, 1903 was ‘the
year in which the story film came to prominence, beginning with the completion of Life of An American Fireman and culminating with the incredible success of
The Great Train Robbery, quite possibly the most successful American film before
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)’,4 Electrocuting an Elephant is an example of
what Tom Gunning called the ‘cinema of attractions’; that is, films made between
1895 and 1906, in which narrative and storytelling are secondary to the display of
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spectacular action and the foregrounding of technology – in Edison’s case these are
the two interlinked technologies of electricity and film. The cinema of attractions
belongs to vaudeville and the fairground, where films were first shown alongside
other attractions, and it suggests the primacy of exhibitionism, novelty, surprise
and affect, over the more cerebral, and one might argue humanistic, conventions
of narrative film.5 If the ‘relation between films and the emergence of the great
amusement parks, such as Coney Island, at the turn of the century provides rich
ground for rethinking the roots of early cinema’ (Gunning 2006, 383), Electrocuting an Elephant is both concretely and symbolically significant since it takes place
onsite at cinema’s historical birthplace.
The film’s inhumanity, in the twofold sense described, occurs at a number of levels. First, as Michael Lundblad explains, Topsy’s execution ‘might suggest that an
elephant could be required to take responsibility for criminal acts: that an animal
could possess the agency of a human being. It could thus be read as an example of resisting distinctions between human and nonhuman agency’ (Lundblad
2013, 94). But the distinctly disciplinary flavour of this public display concerns
the association between animality and violence, and the subsequent need to bring
animality under control. Topsy’s animality extends to other forms of savagery and
unruliness, and her execution is a warning of sorts to the unwashed masses –
both the spectators and the target of this show of force. In this sense, Lundblad
claims, ‘Topsy’s physical body . . . can be seen as representative of the working
class’, whose disruptive potential at the turn of the 20th century (demands for
humane treatment and labour reform) was a threat to the burgeoning market
economy.6
Edison’s motivation was partly commercial: he was promoting DC (direct current) in a bid against AC (alternating current) of his rival, George Westinghouse.
But the film is more than a chapter in the so-called ‘war of the currents’
between rival industrialists.7 Electrocuting an Elephant is an illustration of cinematic
biopower. In her study of early medical imagery, Lisa Cartwright claims that the
film:
Documents ( . . . ) public fascination with scientific technology and its capacity to determine the course of life and death in living beings ( . . . ). The film ( . . . ) is evidence of
a widespread popular interest in the power of technology to regulate and discipline
bodies.
(1995, 18)
Edison’s film is pivotal because it exemplifies the convergence of science, technology and spectacle in the production of the attraction of the vulnerable animal
body, the DNA of the cinematic animal as a hybrid organism manufactured by
photographic motion pictures. In addition to being ‘a ceremony of corporal punishment’ (Cartwright 1995, 42) that asserts human dominance over non-human
animals, the film renders Topsy’s body as the site at which something called ‘life’
is – and yet is not – visualized through the joint rituals of cinematography and
science, whose subject is the condemned animal body. The animal here is not just
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raw material, but the site of extraction. What the camera seeks to powerfully wrest
from Topsy is her very vitality, the invisible secret of life, of animation, which the
animal’s body at once displays and obscures.
With their common interest in bodies in motion at the turn of the 20th century,
film and the life sciences, especially physiology, inaugurated what Cartwright calls
‘biological modes of representation’ (Cartwright 1995, 10). The ‘biological gaze’,
to borrow Laura Mulvey’s phrase, seeks the elusive and invisible object of ‘life’.
But biological modes of representation also announce a break between observation and the object of knowledge, ‘a break in which the visualization of “life”
becomes all the more seductive to the scientific eye even as the limitations of representation are made plain’ (Cartwright 1995, 10)8 Animal vulnerability in early
film is produced and controlled by the technological and institutional apparatus of
film, whose historical ties to the science laboratory, and specifically to vivisection,
reveal cinema as one modern system among others that looks to extract from bodies their ‘aliveness’. As such, cinema is both progressive and ‘primitive’: it deploys
technological rationalism to interrogate, decipher and extract from living beings
the enigma of animation – their biological life, and maybe even their soul.
Bodies, their manipulation, and sometimes their destruction, offer cinema an
object of study and an object of beauty. Capturing bodies in motion in early film
suggest that cinema – like science – sought to extract from bodies what the camera
could and could not make visible: the secret of their vitality, revealed as the limits of vitality and the laws governing those limits. In so doing, cinema becomes
an apparatus for the disciplining of bodies, but it is also a space in which these
disciplinary practices are publicly negotiated and so potentially resisted. Both Electrocuting an Elephant and Play Dead; Real Time deploy the biological gaze in the
course of producing the attraction of the vulnerable animal body.
Play Dead; Real Time (2003)
As narrative cinema slowly gained prominence, the cinema of attractions disseminated across a variety of film practices. From about 1907, most notably in the
films of D. W. Griffith, a fascination with multi-reel story films takes hold, obscuring the pre-continuity origins of cinema. For a time, film history succumbed to
an evolutionary model, tracing the gradual maturation into classical narrative.
But narrative and attraction are not incompatible. ‘In fact,’ writes Gunning, ‘the
cinema of attraction[s] does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but
rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films’ (2006, 382). New expressions of the cinema of attractions
arguably flourish today in action and special effects mainstream cinema, and in
the art gallery.
A recent example of what I am calling interspecies attraction is Play Dead; Real
Time (2003), by the artist Douglas Gordon. This three-channel video installation is a revisiting of Edison’s film, exactly one hundred years later. It features
Minnie, a circus elephant, transported to New York’s Gagosian Gallery to perform
a series of movements, including lying down and ‘playing dead’. The sequences
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of movements are projected on two large screens, completed by a small monitor,
placed on the floor.9 Each of the three projections shows three different versions of
the same sequence of commands. Gordon says the idea came to him one morning
when he realized he had never seen an elephant lying down, and he wanted to
see what happens when the animal was made to perform an uncomfortable movement. In the piece, shot on 16 mm then transferred to video, the camera circles
Minnie, filming her as she lies down and stumbles awkwardly back to her feet.10
Play Dead; Real Time alludes to previous works that placed live animals in the
art gallery (from Joseph Beuys and William Wegman to Damien Hirst), but the
connection to Edison seems to me the most pertinent.11 Gordon described Play
Dead; Real Time as something between ‘a nature film and a medical documentary’,
allowing us to ‘observe the subject in a way that could be used for a practical
purpose but also had a very certain aesthetic’.12 The description invokes the main
registers of the cinematic animal established from animals’ earliest appearances in
and as moving images: science, hunting and spectacle. Each register highlights a
different kind of ‘capital’ accrued from animals: scientific knowledge, trophies and
visual pleasure.
In the second half of the 19th century, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge
and the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey conducted photographic studies of animal motion, which are considered the precursors of the moving pictures of the
cinema. As Cynthia Chris suggests, pre-cinematic motion studies are contradictory
in conveying the illusion of continuous motion yet also fragmenting motion into
its composite gestures (Chris 2006, 8).13 The duality of stillness and motion is, of
course, a central feature of film, and with better – faster – technology, movement
could be more efficiently captured, fragmented and reassembled.
Like Muybridge’s animal motion studies, Gordon’s piece offers visual scrutiny
in the contrived, laboratory-like, conditions of the art gallery. The segmentation
and abstraction of motion by photographic technology have been replaced, in
the work’s final form, by video technology. But the camera’s circling motion in
the ‘white cube’ of the Gagosian Gallery expresses the desire for unlimited optical
access. In both Edison and Gordon, the impetus is to render visible the living
animal as knowable, controllable and sensational.
Beyond its knowing ironies and its institutional critique of the art gallery, Play
Dead; Real Time’s relation to Edison’s seemingly straightforward elephant execution is telling. The two works explore elephant bodies as a source of information
and titillation. Edison’s film conflates the scientific and disciplinary functions of
cinema: the desire to control life by capturing the precise moment of death. And,
like early executions, it is public, ritualistic and punitive. The punitive element
in Edison’s film is central. As the historians Hilda Kean (1998) and Jonathan Burt
(2001) have shown, there is a strong link between animal visibility and public
morality:
One of the inspirations behind the formation of the RSPCA in 1824 was the sight of
animals being driven to Smithfields Market in London. The issue of visual order was
an important factor in increasing control exercised over all sorts of different domains of
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animal-related practice – including bear baiting, vivisection, slaughter, or the clearing
of the city streets of strays.
(Burt 2001, 208)
Modern codes of civility and civilization are inseparable from interspecies relations, and the appearance of these relations in the public sphere. It is no wonder,
therefore, that Topsy’s electrocution was couched in moral, even legalistic terms
as the execution of a criminal. This logic is far from archaic. In our own time,
such killings have been reframed by the joint rhetoric of security and humaneness, renamed as either ‘euthanasia’ or ‘culling’: the putting down of dangerous
animals. In 1903, retributive logic, however thinly underpinning Topsy’s killing,
was partly intended to reconcile the violent spectacle with public concerns over
humane and inhumane treatment, and not only of animals. Seen as a ‘cleaner’
method of execution, electrocution was to replace less humane methods of killing,
specifically hanging. As with the cinema, Thomas Edison – and animals – played
a crucial part in the development of execution by electrocution and the electric
chair (Burt 2001, 215–216). In 1888, Edison conducted animal electrocutions in
his New Jersey laboratory, using dogs, calves and horses, experiments that contributed to the first human execution by electric chair in the United States, in
August 1890.
Lundblad points out that the ‘claim of a “painless” death was emphasized in various newspaper accounts’ of Topsy’s killing (Lundblad 2013, 94). Nonetheless, the
public spectacle of animal death, in reality and in film, speaks to the ‘combination
of repulsion and fascination that marks a response to certain kinds of animal representation and relates, in turn, to the problematic negotiation between co-existing
humane and cruel impulses’ (Burt 2001, 212). In a feat of technological, scientific,
commercial and moral prowess, then, Topsy’s unruly body (doubly unruly in its
opacity as a living body and in its active retaliation against human authority) was
to be brought under control via film.
Electrocution is ‘a method of execution that is virtually isomorphic with cinema’s invention’, writes Alison Griffiths (2014, 1). Electrocuting an Elephant is one
of a number of execution films, including the Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama
of Auburn Prison (1901), shot by Edison two years earlier. There is no essential
difference in Griffiths’ account between Electrocuting an Elephant and Execution of
Czolgosz; there is no species bias, as it were, in thinking of both in the context
of execution films that ‘derive meaning as [sic] “as ceremonials of punishment”,
Michel Foucault’s term for all manner of staged public punishments and macabre
visual spectacles that exploited the idea of the uncanny, of being copresent with
the dead’ (Griffiths 2014, 5). Indeed, Edison sought permission to film the real
execution of Czolgosz but his request was denied. He therefore had to make do
with shooting on location outside Auburn prison, and film a ‘detailed reproduction of the execution of the assassin of President McKinley faithfully carried out
from the description of an eye witness’.14 Electrocution films are situated ‘within a
rich field of pre-cinematic entertainments’ as one type of cinematic attraction. In a
footnote, Griffiths adds that: ‘Electrocuting an Elephant is a relic of the pride of place
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afforded elephants as prized taxidermy specimens in museums of natural history
and of eighteenth-century experiments with animals conducted in London’s galleries of practical science such as the Electrical Society and the Royal Institution’
(Griffiths 2014, 6). The link between early cinema and science, all the way to the
museum and the contemporary art gallery, is thus uninterrupted.
Play Dead; Real Time is an ironic updating of the tradition. Minnie, the circus
elephant, is subjected to ceremonial procedures whose sanitized nature simultaneously conceals and invokes the fascination with public execution. Made to
play, rather than become, dead, Minnie calls forth animals’ permanent exposure
to violence. The currency has shifted somewhat – a real execution is replaced by
a mock one. But in Edison and Gordon alike, the use of the elephant as physical and symbolic trope remains intact, as does the interplay of experimentalism,
technology and visual pleasure, whose object is the attraction of the vulnerable
but recalcitrant animal body.
Gordon’s is an uncanny corollary to Edison’s own uncanny film. Real animal
death is substituted for a more benign form of bodily discipline, and the rowdy
fairground is replaced by the clinical and bourgeois space of the gallery. ‘Execution’ is reversed: Topsy is executed (for disobedience), while Minnie dutifully
(if unhappily) executes her trainer’s commands. In the latter, visitors watch the
coordinated movements performed on cue, supplemented by the camera’s circumnavigation of the elephant’s body. The camera orbits the room close to the floor,
capturing Minnie from below. Minnie’s eye, in extreme close-up, appears at the
start of the third version of movements (titled Other Way), shown on the small
monitor.
More overtly than Electrocuting an Elephant, Play Dead; Real Time features gestures in excess of the disciplining gaze. These fleeting moments are traces of animal
agency and resistance that suggest not only the existence of an autonomous being,
but her subjection to the interlocking technological and institutional apparatuses
of the camera, the art gallery and the ‘institution of speciesism’ (Wolfe 2003,
6). Minnie lies down and rolls on her side on demand, she struggles back to her
feet with some difficulty, and paces. While on her side, she flaps her trunk lightly
on the floor in what could be agitation, or perhaps stress relief. The gesture is
unscripted and so its effect on the visitor is different: it is an expression that belies
the controlling gaze of the camera in tension with the piece’s scripted movements
that Minnie is made to perform. Her eye, in close-up on the TV monitor, waters
from either displeasure or effort, begging the question: Do elephants cry?
The interspecies space opened up between the film and the viewer is held in the
tension between anthropomorphic projection that perceives the elephant’s tears
as a sign of distress, and the sensation of otherness generated by the simulated
proximity to the animal. Play Dead; Real Time operates along a series of displacements and transgressions: the supposedly wild animal who is no longer wild in the
supposedly civilized space of a New York art gallery; the encounter with a life-size
elephant that is but a projected encounter, which blurs the line between proximity
and distance, safety and risk; or the sequence of ‘unnatural’ movements performed
in response to the unseen presence of the human trainer. There is little room for
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contingency in the highly contrived spectacle, making the almost imperceptible
movement of the flapping trunk all the more fascinating because it is unplanned.
Like Topsy’s shuffling feet and her quiet (resigned? unsuspecting?) walk to her
death, the visual apparatus records every movement. But unlike the real and performed death, these unscripted responses are singular, not standardized. In their
uncanniness, they question the species divide that distinguishes artistic subject
from object and the power of the apparatus.
Conclusion: The elephant in the room
The examples in this chapter illustrate the special place of elephants in particular,
and of animals more generally, in the medium of moving images. Elephants have
consistently occupied cinema’s biocultural space, which produces the ‘attraction’
of the vulnerable animal body. Early film’s connection to the fairground, the zoo,
as well as to the industrial production of electricity, reveal cinema as one modern
apparatus among others that makes use of animals as a complex economic, scientific and symbolic resource. Pointing to the ‘elephant in the room’ in two key
examples, as bookends to a century of moving image work, I drew attention to acts
of animal framing and taming that convert ‘wildness’ into cultural currency. The
enduring question of posthuman cinema is thus whether interspecies relations can
be forged and made visible in ways that transcend the power dynamics that have
thus far reproduced the animal as a distinctly vulnerable and violable spectacle, in
a manner that is descriptively posthuman yet normatively anthropocentric.
Notes
1. See Lippit (2000) and Burt (2002). I discuss the topic in Pick (2011, 104–130).
2. For a discussion of Bazin’s ‘flat ontology’ and the cinematic equality among humans,
animals and things, see Mullarkey (2012).
3. A so-called broiler chicken (bred for meat), for example, is unlike an egg-laying hen that
has not been intensively reared to pile on body mass, peaking at 48 days when meat
chickens are commonly slaughtered. In biomedical research, transgenic or knockout
mice are similarly bred for purpose. Whether or not we consider them ‘natural’, these
organisms come into being as forms of life made possible by the technologies that render
them vulnerable. A similar case can be made for the cinema.
4. Edison: The Invention of the Movies: 1891–1918. Kino Lorber Films, 2005. DVD. Notes by
Charles Musser. , accessed 2 November
2014.
5. See Gunning (1993, 2006). The concept’s enduring appeal and its critical afterlives are
the subject of The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded.
6. Since performing elephants are regularly female, this form of control is not only a matter
of class but also of gender. Other famous cases of (female) elephant executions include
the 1916 hanging of circus elephant Mary, in Erwin, Tennessee, after she killed a trainer
called Walter ‘Red’ Eldridge.
7. See, for example, Gunning (2009, 112–132).
8. The space between observation and the object is understood by Michel Foucault as the
result of the modern fragmentation of reality, or the breakdown of the totality of nature.
Thus objects and their representation were no longer continuous.
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9. For the MoMA re-exhibiting of the work in 2006, Gordon added a second monitor, turning the work into a four-channel installation. For detailed information on Douglas’ piece
and its various incarnations, see A. Noël de Tilly’s ‘Making/Displaying Douglas Gordon’s
Play Dead; Real Time’, in Scripting Artworks: Studying the Socialization of Editioned Video
and Film, , accessed 2 November 2014. On this
work and others, see Rankin 2006.
10. A filmed interview with Gordon, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art (SFMOMA), , accessed
16 October 2014.
11. On the long history of live animals in the art gallery see Alloi 2012.
12. Artist Rooms: Douglas Gordon: Play Dead; Real Time, Tate Britain, 6 May–29 September 2013, , accessed 16 October.
13. Chris writes that ‘Muybridge’s work signaled a shift in the range of conceived uses of
photography, toward creating images of moving as well as still subjects, but Muybridge
sought most vigorously to stop, not simulate motion.’
14. From the Edison Company catalogue, ,
accessed 2 November 2014.
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QUERIES TO BE ANSWERED BY AUTHOR (SEE MARGINAL MARKS)
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please mark your corrections and answer to these queries
directly onto the proof at the relevant place. Do NOT mark your corrections on
this query sheet.
Chapter 31
Query No.
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Query
We have shortened the running head. kindly
check
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PROOF
Part VII
Us and Them: Posthuman
Relationships
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Executing Species: Animal Attractions
in Thomas Edison and Douglas Gordon
Anat Pick
How you glow, noble beast, in the infinite moment before your own
death!
Lydia Millet
Cinema has never been human. The central place of animals in the emergence
and development of the cinematic medium is by now well established.1 Yet, if
there has been a recent ‘animal turn’ in film studies, it has focused less on animals
themselves than on how animals are symbolically produced in representation.
Animals remain cinema’s ‘elephant in the room’: the medium’s unacknowledged
presence but also its potential for seeing the world, and animals, differently.
As Jonathan Burt has consistently argued, screen animals exceed their symbolic
value as representation and are located on the threshold between the figurative
and the metaphorical. Despite their excessive use as mirrors of human concerns
and as repositories of human attributes, the appearance of animals in moving
images is always also concrete, and affects us as such.
The ‘reality effect’ of film animals is partly achieved by the constant threat of
real violence commanded by the animal image (like the portentous appearance of
a gun in the first act of a stage play). Violence is sometimes realized (it is a regular
feature in ‘serious’ European and world art cinema, for example), and sometimes
disclaimed (in the feel-good adage of the American Humane Association’s ‘No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of this Film’). The permanent exposure of the
cinematic animal to onscreen violation signals its reality, and lends the medium its
realism. This exposure and this threat open up the screen as a zoomorphic space –
a space inhabited by more-than-human lives.
As a technology and a mode of encountering, the cinema captures and projects
human and non-human beings in their materiality, their contingency and finitude, namely, in their precariousness and vulnerability. At its best, cinema can
be attentive to modes of existence that are not limited to our own. It can also
reveal our own existence to us as something unknown or disavowed – as animal. As assemblages, in the Deleuzian or Latourian sense, images are not mere
copies, but instances of relations between objects, materials and bodies in a morethan-human world: each image contains elements, and is itself part of complex
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interfaces that include not only the image interior, but also the camera, the space
around the camera and the relations between them.
André Bazin’s cinematic realism imagined the cinema as offering an immanent,
non-hierarchal, lateral view of reality, composed of multiple beings and things
whose connection to one another is of equivalent force, beauty and wonder.2
There is much to seduce (and alarm) us in this posthumanist view of cinema that
regards living beings and things as interchangeable: drawing out the aliveness of
things, and the thingness of the living. For John Mullarkey, such radical equality
can trigger fear:
The horror of encountering unexpected alterity – from animals no longer taken as
mere objects (and perhaps from objects no longer regarded as mere ‘objects’ either) –
doubtless stems from fear: what will become of ‘us’ in a democracy of all the living?
(2012, 54)
While cinema’s ‘flat ontology’ (Mullarkey 2012, 40) proposes a view of the world
as radically equal, what should we make of the unequal distribution of power, and
vulnerability, between different agents or ‘actants’? For cinema is also an institution and a manifestation of particular economic, political and moral milieus,
bound not only to dominant ways of seeing, but to dominant ways of living
as well.
Film, perhaps more than any other art, is closely related to other modern industrial institutions, from the science laboratory to the factory farm. As posthumanist
theorists like Donna Haraway have shown, these are relational sites in which
human and non-human entities meet and comingle, ‘flatly’ as Mullarkey would
have it. But these are also, significantly, sites of political, or biopolitical, power.
Cinema’s real and symbolic instrumentalization of animals means that – like the
laboratory and the slaughterhouse, as well as the circus and the zoo – the power
exercised over non-human animals as the dominant mode of interspecies relations
is on display. The two examples below, Thomas Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant
(1903), and Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (2003), exactly one hundred
years apart, reveal the intersection of humans, animals and technology that gives
rise to a peculiar and precarious form of life: the cinematic animal.
Cinema is a key modern relational site of encounter between technology,
humans and animals, an encounter that gives rise to a new form of life: the cinematic animal. Like farmed animals, modified by the industrial apparatuses in
which they live and die, cinematic animals are a new kind of being.3 Cinematic
animals are living commodities whose very ‘aliveness’ is probed and made visible. As a cinematic attraction, combining entertainment and instruction, animal
vulnerability is generated as a source of knowledge about animals’ bodies, and as
cultural and aesthetic currency. Cinematic animals, then, are not simply animals
captured on film. They are ontologically, ethically and even biologically distinct,
a creature that is, almost without exception, constituted as vulnerable.
In opening up the world as more-than-human, cinema blurs the boundary
between humans and animals, but normatively, it tends to reinforce species
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distinction. This ambiguity resonates in cinema’s twofold ‘inhumanity’: ontologically, the inhumanity of film frees cinema’s potential to eschew a strictly
human perspective and attests to the interdependence of humans, animals and
the cinematic apparatus. Ethically, the inhumanity of film reminds us that cinema continues to be politically and culturally wedded to forms of human power
over non-human life that are, quite literally, spectacularly cruel.
The examples I have chosen trace early film’s complex relations to animals as
a particular type of cinematic ‘attraction’. They render cinema as an interspecies
space in which other lives unfold (reveal themselves or come undone) spectacularly. These unfolding relations are not always benign. Electrocuting an Elephant
and Play Dead; Real Time encapsulate the contradictory attitudes to animals in the
field of vision and point to cinema’s inhumanity, in the double inflection of ontology and ethics. If, ontologically, the cinema is not simply reducible to a human
perspective, history or concerns, morally, cinema participates in the disciplining
(and violating) of bodies, whose vitality and vulnerability it explores and often
exploits.
Electrocuting an Elephant (1903)
Edison’s Electrocuting an Elephant (1903) is a haunting example of early actuality
to which scholars of film, and of animal film, repeatedly return, perhaps because
the film crystalizes the basic components of the cinema: living bodies (material,
temporal, fragile), technology and spectacle. The Edison Manufacturing Company
arranged for, carried out and filmed the execution of Topsy, a wild-caught African
elephant brought to Coney Island, who reportedly killed three handlers, the last
one after he fed her a lit cigarette. A crowd of 1,500 gathered to watch Topsy die,
a finale performance ending some 20 years of captivity.
The film’s grainy, degraded footage contains two shots: a capped man leads
Topsy to the site of her execution where she is strapped into place. Three other
men are walking behind her, and a couple wander across the front of the frame.
Coney Island’s Luna Park is seen at the background. In the second shot, Topsy is
standing, her front leg restlessly shuffling, she suddenly stiffens and smoke billows from her feet and fills the frame. She collapses onto her side. The shot is
held until the smoke clears, revealing Topsy’s body (or is it the film’s?) in its final
convulsions.
Electrocuting an Elephant is a literal example of early cinema’s carnivalesque roots
in the fairground. By 1903, following the upholding of Edison’s motion picture
patent in 1901, the Edison company had established itself as a major force in
the motion picture market. Although, according to Charles Musser, 1903 was ‘the
year in which the story film came to prominence, beginning with the completion of Life of An American Fireman and culminating with the incredible success of
The Great Train Robbery, quite possibly the most successful American film before
Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)’,4 Electrocuting an Elephant is an example of
what Tom Gunning called the ‘cinema of attractions’; that is, films made between
1895 and 1906, in which narrative and storytelling are secondary to the display of
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spectacular action and the foregrounding of technology – in Edison’s case these are
the two interlinked technologies of electricity and film. The cinema of attractions
belongs to vaudeville and the fairground, where films were first shown alongside
other attractions, and it suggests the primacy of exhibitionism, novelty, surprise
and affect, over the more cerebral, and one might argue humanistic, conventions
of narrative film.5 If the ‘relation between films and the emergence of the great
amusement parks, such as Coney Island, at the turn of the century provides rich
ground for rethinking the roots of early cinema’ (Gunning 2006, 383), Electrocuting an Elephant is both concretely and symbolically significant since it takes place
onsite at cinema’s historical birthplace.
The film’s inhumanity, in the twofold sense described, occurs at a number of levels. First, as Michael Lundblad explains, Topsy’s execution ‘might suggest that an
elephant could be required to take responsibility for criminal acts: that an animal
could possess the agency of a human being. It could thus be read as an example of resisting distinctions between human and nonhuman agency’ (Lundblad
2013, 94). But the distinctly disciplinary flavour of this public display concerns
the association between animality and violence, and the subsequent need to bring
animality under control. Topsy’s animality extends to other forms of savagery and
unruliness, and her execution is a warning of sorts to the unwashed masses –
both the spectators and the target of this show of force. In this sense, Lundblad
claims, ‘Topsy’s physical body . . . can be seen as representative of the working
class’, whose disruptive potential at the turn of the 20th century (demands for
humane treatment and labour reform) was a threat to the burgeoning market
economy.6
Edison’s motivation was partly commercial: he was promoting DC (direct current) in a bid against AC (alternating current) of his rival, George Westinghouse.
But the film is more than a chapter in the so-called ‘war of the currents’
between rival industrialists.7 Electrocuting an Elephant is an illustration of cinematic
biopower. In her study of early medical imagery, Lisa Cartwright claims that the
film:
Documents ( . . . ) public fascination with scientific technology and its capacity to determine the course of life and death in living beings ( . . . ). The film ( . . . ) is evidence of
a widespread popular interest in the power of technology to regulate and discipline
bodies.
(1995, 18)
Edison’s film is pivotal because it exemplifies the convergence of science, technology and spectacle in the production of the attraction of the vulnerable animal
body, the DNA of the cinematic animal as a hybrid organism manufactured by
photographic motion pictures. In addition to being ‘a ceremony of corporal punishment’ (Cartwright 1995, 42) that asserts human dominance over non-human
animals, the film renders Topsy’s body as the site at which something called ‘life’
is – and yet is not – visualized through the joint rituals of cinematography and
science, whose subject is the condemned animal body. The animal here is not just
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raw material, but the site of extraction. What the camera seeks to powerfully wrest
from Topsy is her very vitality, the invisible secret of life, of animation, which the
animal’s body at once displays and obscures.
With their common interest in bodies in motion at the turn of the 20th century,
film and the life sciences, especially physiology, inaugurated what Cartwright calls
‘biological modes of representation’ (Cartwright 1995, 10). The ‘biological gaze’,
to borrow Laura Mulvey’s phrase, seeks the elusive and invisible object of ‘life’.
But biological modes of representation also announce a break between observation and the object of knowledge, ‘a break in which the visualization of “life”
becomes all the more seductive to the scientific eye even as the limitations of representation are made plain’ (Cartwright 1995, 10)8 Animal vulnerability in early
film is produced and controlled by the technological and institutional apparatus of
film, whose historical ties to the science laboratory, and specifically to vivisection,
reveal cinema as one modern system among others that looks to extract from bodies their ‘aliveness’. As such, cinema is both progressive and ‘primitive’: it deploys
technological rationalism to interrogate, decipher and extract from living beings
the enigma of animation – their biological life, and maybe even their soul.
Bodies, their manipulation, and sometimes their destruction, offer cinema an
object of study and an object of beauty. Capturing bodies in motion in early film
suggest that cinema – like science – sought to extract from bodies what the camera
could and could not make visible: the secret of their vitality, revealed as the limits of vitality and the laws governing those limits. In so doing, cinema becomes
an apparatus for the disciplining of bodies, but it is also a space in which these
disciplinary practices are publicly negotiated and so potentially resisted. Both Electrocuting an Elephant and Play Dead; Real Time deploy the biological gaze in the
course of producing the attraction of the vulnerable animal body.
Play Dead; Real Time (2003)
As narrative cinema slowly gained prominence, the cinema of attractions disseminated across a variety of film practices. From about 1907, most notably in the
films of D. W. Griffith, a fascination with multi-reel story films takes hold, obscuring the pre-continuity origins of cinema. For a time, film history succumbed to
an evolutionary model, tracing the gradual maturation into classical narrative.
But narrative and attraction are not incompatible. ‘In fact,’ writes Gunning, ‘the
cinema of attraction[s] does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but
rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films’ (2006, 382). New expressions of the cinema of attractions
arguably flourish today in action and special effects mainstream cinema, and in
the art gallery.
A recent example of what I am calling interspecies attraction is Play Dead; Real
Time (2003), by the artist Douglas Gordon. This three-channel video installation is a revisiting of Edison’s film, exactly one hundred years later. It features
Minnie, a circus elephant, transported to New York’s Gagosian Gallery to perform
a series of movements, including lying down and ‘playing dead’. The sequences
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of movements are projected on two large screens, completed by a small monitor,
placed on the floor.9 Each of the three projections shows three different versions of
the same sequence of commands. Gordon says the idea came to him one morning
when he realized he had never seen an elephant lying down, and he wanted to
see what happens when the animal was made to perform an uncomfortable movement. In the piece, shot on 16 mm then transferred to video, the camera circles
Minnie, filming her as she lies down and stumbles awkwardly back to her feet.10
Play Dead; Real Time alludes to previous works that placed live animals in the
art gallery (from Joseph Beuys and William Wegman to Damien Hirst), but the
connection to Edison seems to me the most pertinent.11 Gordon described Play
Dead; Real Time as something between ‘a nature film and a medical documentary’,
allowing us to ‘observe the subject in a way that could be used for a practical
purpose but also had a very certain aesthetic’.12 The description invokes the main
registers of the cinematic animal established from animals’ earliest appearances in
and as moving images: science, hunting and spectacle. Each register highlights a
different kind of ‘capital’ accrued from animals: scientific knowledge, trophies and
visual pleasure.
In the second half of the 19th century, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge
and the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey conducted photographic studies of animal motion, which are considered the precursors of the moving pictures of the
cinema. As Cynthia Chris suggests, pre-cinematic motion studies are contradictory
in conveying the illusion of continuous motion yet also fragmenting motion into
its composite gestures (Chris 2006, 8).13 The duality of stillness and motion is, of
course, a central feature of film, and with better – faster – technology, movement
could be more efficiently captured, fragmented and reassembled.
Like Muybridge’s animal motion studies, Gordon’s piece offers visual scrutiny
in the contrived, laboratory-like, conditions of the art gallery. The segmentation
and abstraction of motion by photographic technology have been replaced, in
the work’s final form, by video technology. But the camera’s circling motion in
the ‘white cube’ of the Gagosian Gallery expresses the desire for unlimited optical
access. In both Edison and Gordon, the impetus is to render visible the living
animal as knowable, controllable and sensational.
Beyond its knowing ironies and its institutional critique of the art gallery, Play
Dead; Real Time’s relation to Edison’s seemingly straightforward elephant execution is telling. The two works explore elephant bodies as a source of information
and titillation. Edison’s film conflates the scientific and disciplinary functions of
cinema: the desire to control life by capturing the precise moment of death. And,
like early executions, it is public, ritualistic and punitive. The punitive element
in Edison’s film is central. As the historians Hilda Kean (1998) and Jonathan Burt
(2001) have shown, there is a strong link between animal visibility and public
morality:
One of the inspirations behind the formation of the RSPCA in 1824 was the sight of
animals being driven to Smithfields Market in London. The issue of visual order was
an important factor in increasing control exercised over all sorts of different domains of
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animal-related practice – including bear baiting, vivisection, slaughter, or the clearing
of the city streets of strays.
(Burt 2001, 208)
Modern codes of civility and civilization are inseparable from interspecies relations, and the appearance of these relations in the public sphere. It is no wonder,
therefore, that Topsy’s electrocution was couched in moral, even legalistic terms
as the execution of a criminal. This logic is far from archaic. In our own time,
such killings have been reframed by the joint rhetoric of security and humaneness, renamed as either ‘euthanasia’ or ‘culling’: the putting down of dangerous
animals. In 1903, retributive logic, however thinly underpinning Topsy’s killing,
was partly intended to reconcile the violent spectacle with public concerns over
humane and inhumane treatment, and not only of animals. Seen as a ‘cleaner’
method of execution, electrocution was to replace less humane methods of killing,
specifically hanging. As with the cinema, Thomas Edison – and animals – played
a crucial part in the development of execution by electrocution and the electric
chair (Burt 2001, 215–216). In 1888, Edison conducted animal electrocutions in
his New Jersey laboratory, using dogs, calves and horses, experiments that contributed to the first human execution by electric chair in the United States, in
August 1890.
Lundblad points out that the ‘claim of a “painless” death was emphasized in various newspaper accounts’ of Topsy’s killing (Lundblad 2013, 94). Nonetheless, the
public spectacle of animal death, in reality and in film, speaks to the ‘combination
of repulsion and fascination that marks a response to certain kinds of animal representation and relates, in turn, to the problematic negotiation between co-existing
humane and cruel impulses’ (Burt 2001, 212). In a feat of technological, scientific,
commercial and moral prowess, then, Topsy’s unruly body (doubly unruly in its
opacity as a living body and in its active retaliation against human authority) was
to be brought under control via film.
Electrocution is ‘a method of execution that is virtually isomorphic with cinema’s invention’, writes Alison Griffiths (2014, 1). Electrocuting an Elephant is one
of a number of execution films, including the Execution of Czolgosz, with Panorama
of Auburn Prison (1901), shot by Edison two years earlier. There is no essential
difference in Griffiths’ account between Electrocuting an Elephant and Execution of
Czolgosz; there is no species bias, as it were, in thinking of both in the context
of execution films that ‘derive meaning as [sic] “as ceremonials of punishment”,
Michel Foucault’s term for all manner of staged public punishments and macabre
visual spectacles that exploited the idea of the uncanny, of being copresent with
the dead’ (Griffiths 2014, 5). Indeed, Edison sought permission to film the real
execution of Czolgosz but his request was denied. He therefore had to make do
with shooting on location outside Auburn prison, and film a ‘detailed reproduction of the execution of the assassin of President McKinley faithfully carried out
from the description of an eye witness’.14 Electrocution films are situated ‘within a
rich field of pre-cinematic entertainments’ as one type of cinematic attraction. In a
footnote, Griffiths adds that: ‘Electrocuting an Elephant is a relic of the pride of place
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afforded elephants as prized taxidermy specimens in museums of natural history
and of eighteenth-century experiments with animals conducted in London’s galleries of practical science such as the Electrical Society and the Royal Institution’
(Griffiths 2014, 6). The link between early cinema and science, all the way to the
museum and the contemporary art gallery, is thus uninterrupted.
Play Dead; Real Time is an ironic updating of the tradition. Minnie, the circus
elephant, is subjected to ceremonial procedures whose sanitized nature simultaneously conceals and invokes the fascination with public execution. Made to
play, rather than become, dead, Minnie calls forth animals’ permanent exposure
to violence. The currency has shifted somewhat – a real execution is replaced by
a mock one. But in Edison and Gordon alike, the use of the elephant as physical and symbolic trope remains intact, as does the interplay of experimentalism,
technology and visual pleasure, whose object is the attraction of the vulnerable
but recalcitrant animal body.
Gordon’s is an uncanny corollary to Edison’s own uncanny film. Real animal
death is substituted for a more benign form of bodily discipline, and the rowdy
fairground is replaced by the clinical and bourgeois space of the gallery. ‘Execution’ is reversed: Topsy is executed (for disobedience), while Minnie dutifully
(if unhappily) executes her trainer’s commands. In the latter, visitors watch the
coordinated movements performed on cue, supplemented by the camera’s circumnavigation of the elephant’s body. The camera orbits the room close to the floor,
capturing Minnie from below. Minnie’s eye, in extreme close-up, appears at the
start of the third version of movements (titled Other Way), shown on the small
monitor.
More overtly than Electrocuting an Elephant, Play Dead; Real Time features gestures in excess of the disciplining gaze. These fleeting moments are traces of animal
agency and resistance that suggest not only the existence of an autonomous being,
but her subjection to the interlocking technological and institutional apparatuses
of the camera, the art gallery and the ‘institution of speciesism’ (Wolfe 2003,
6). Minnie lies down and rolls on her side on demand, she struggles back to her
feet with some difficulty, and paces. While on her side, she flaps her trunk lightly
on the floor in what could be agitation, or perhaps stress relief. The gesture is
unscripted and so its effect on the visitor is different: it is an expression that belies
the controlling gaze of the camera in tension with the piece’s scripted movements
that Minnie is made to perform. Her eye, in close-up on the TV monitor, waters
from either displeasure or effort, begging the question: Do elephants cry?
The interspecies space opened up between the film and the viewer is held in the
tension between anthropomorphic projection that perceives the elephant’s tears
as a sign of distress, and the sensation of otherness generated by the simulated
proximity to the animal. Play Dead; Real Time operates along a series of displacements and transgressions: the supposedly wild animal who is no longer wild in the
supposedly civilized space of a New York art gallery; the encounter with a life-size
elephant that is but a projected encounter, which blurs the line between proximity
and distance, safety and risk; or the sequence of ‘unnatural’ movements performed
in response to the unseen presence of the human trainer. There is little room for
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contingency in the highly contrived spectacle, making the almost imperceptible
movement of the flapping trunk all the more fascinating because it is unplanned.
Like Topsy’s shuffling feet and her quiet (resigned? unsuspecting?) walk to her
death, the visual apparatus records every movement. But unlike the real and performed death, these unscripted responses are singular, not standardized. In their
uncanniness, they question the species divide that distinguishes artistic subject
from object and the power of the apparatus.
Conclusion: The elephant in the room
The examples in this chapter illustrate the special place of elephants in particular,
and of animals more generally, in the medium of moving images. Elephants have
consistently occupied cinema’s biocultural space, which produces the ‘attraction’
of the vulnerable animal body. Early film’s connection to the fairground, the zoo,
as well as to the industrial production of electricity, reveal cinema as one modern
apparatus among others that makes use of animals as a complex economic, scientific and symbolic resource. Pointing to the ‘elephant in the room’ in two key
examples, as bookends to a century of moving image work, I drew attention to acts
of animal framing and taming that convert ‘wildness’ into cultural currency. The
enduring question of posthuman cinema is thus whether interspecies relations can
be forged and made visible in ways that transcend the power dynamics that have
thus far reproduced the animal as a distinctly vulnerable and violable spectacle, in
a manner that is descriptively posthuman yet normatively anthropocentric.
Notes
1. See Lippit (2000) and Burt (2002). I discuss the topic in Pick (2011, 104–130).
2. For a discussion of Bazin’s ‘flat ontology’ and the cinematic equality among humans,
animals and things, see Mullarkey (2012).
3. A so-called broiler chicken (bred for meat), for example, is unlike an egg-laying hen that
has not been intensively reared to pile on body mass, peaking at 48 days when meat
chickens are commonly slaughtered. In biomedical research, transgenic or knockout
mice are similarly bred for purpose. Whether or not we consider them ‘natural’, these
organisms come into being as forms of life made possible by the technologies that render
them vulnerable. A similar case can be made for the cinema.
4. Edison: The Invention of the Movies: 1891–1918. Kino Lorber Films, 2005. DVD. Notes by
Charles Musser. , accessed 2 November
2014.
5. See Gunning (1993, 2006). The concept’s enduring appeal and its critical afterlives are
the subject of The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded.
6. Since performing elephants are regularly female, this form of control is not only a matter
of class but also of gender. Other famous cases of (female) elephant executions include
the 1916 hanging of circus elephant Mary, in Erwin, Tennessee, after she killed a trainer
called Walter ‘Red’ Eldridge.
7. See, for example, Gunning (2009, 112–132).
8. The space between observation and the object is understood by Michel Foucault as the
result of the modern fragmentation of reality, or the breakdown of the totality of nature.
Thus objects and their representation were no longer continuous.
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9. For the MoMA re-exhibiting of the work in 2006, Gordon added a second monitor, turning the work into a four-channel installation. For detailed information on Douglas’ piece
and its various incarnations, see A. Noël de Tilly’s ‘Making/Displaying Douglas Gordon’s
Play Dead; Real Time’, in Scripting Artworks: Studying the Socialization of Editioned Video
and Film, , accessed 2 November 2014. On this
work and others, see Rankin 2006.
10. A filmed interview with Gordon, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art (SFMOMA), , accessed
16 October 2014.
11. On the long history of live animals in the art gallery see Alloi 2012.
12. Artist Rooms: Douglas Gordon: Play Dead; Real Time, Tate Britain, 6 May–29 September 2013, , accessed 16 October.
13. Chris writes that ‘Muybridge’s work signaled a shift in the range of conceived uses of
photography, toward creating images of moving as well as still subjects, but Muybridge
sought most vigorously to stop, not simulate motion.’
14. From the Edison Company catalogue, ,
accessed 2 November 2014.
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QUERIES TO BE ANSWERED BY AUTHOR (SEE MARGINAL MARKS)
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please mark your corrections and answer to these queries
directly onto the proof at the relevant place. Do NOT mark your corrections on
this query sheet.
Chapter 31
Query No.
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Query
We have shortened the running head. kindly
check
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