Zoological Surrealism

"Reading Jean Painleve's 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 Painleve's 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 Painleve's cinematic attention to the marvels of animal life, James Leo Cahill's 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

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.

Contents Introduction: Cinema's Copernican Vocation 1. Neozoological Dramas: Comparative Anatomy by Other Means 2. Metamorphoses: Crustaceans, the Coming of Sound, and Plasmatic Anthropomorphism 3. Amour Flou: The Seahorse and the Blur of Sex 4. Substitutes, Vectors, and the Circulatory Systems of Modernity: Dr. Normet's Serum: Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog and The Vampire 5. Carnivorous Cinema: Freshwater Assassins and The Blood of the Beasts Conclusion: Unfinished Revolutions, Untimely Nature Acknowledgments Notes Index