Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlev

(Paperback)

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Zoological Surrealism draws from French scientific and nature filmmaker Jean Painlev's early oeuvre to rethink the entangled histories of cinema, Surrealism, and scientific research in interwar France. Delving deeply into Painlev's archive, James Leo Cahill develops an account of "cinema's Copernican vocation" how it was used to forge new scientific discoveries while also displacing and critiquing anthropocentric viewpoints.

Reviews

"Reading Jean Painlevs archive, James Leo Cahill excavates an urgent nonhuman ethics made possible through film. Each chapter of this lively, meticulously researched, and beautifully written book reveals a complex vision of animals-for-themselves and animals as figures for a fraught political culture. The cinematic nature of Painlevs world, as theorized by Cahill, unsettles any presumed separateness of human- and animal-being, even as it offers a vision of animal existence that is beyond human existence altogether."Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene

"A remarkable study of Jean Painlevs cinematic attention to the marvels of animal life, James Leo Cahills study elegantly resolves the contradictions between intellectual biography and non-anthropocentric modes of inquiry. At once a focused critical biography and a wide-ranging study of organic systems thinking, Zoological Surrealism is alive with the intellectual ferment of the French 1930s. It is an essential text for any reader invested in the development of systems thinking, as well as in the history of experimental film, art, science, and thought."Jonathan P. Eburne, author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas

Author Bio

James Leo Cahill is associate professor of cinema studies and French at the University of Toronto and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.