Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death explores the representation of animal life and death in moving images, challenging viewers' perceptions and highlighting the connection between animal production and consumption.

Format: Hardback
Length: 210 pages
Publication date: 30 July 2023
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press

Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death is a comprehensive exploration of the representation of animal life and death in moving images across a predominantly Western history. It gathers pivotal and more mundane moments from movies and TV shows, ranging from iconic scenes of cattle slaughter in early Soviet montage to contemporary quandaries over hunting trophies in home-renovation reality TV series and the presence of animals in Black horror films. Sarah O'Brien carefully examines these fragments in dialogue with germinal texts at the intersection of animal studies, film and television studies, and cultural studies. Her aim is to uncover the capacity of moving images to unsettle the ways in which audiences have become habituated to viewing animal life and death on screens and to understand these images as more and less connected to the "production for consumption" of animals that is specific to modern industrialization. By looking back at films and TV series in which the places and practices of killing or keeping animals enter, occupy, or slip from the foreground, Bits and Pieces takes seriously the idea that cinema and television have the capacity not only to catch but to challenge and change viewers' regard for animals.

Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death

Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death is a comprehensive exploration of the representation of animal life and death in moving images across a predominantly Western history. It gathers pivotal and more mundane moments from movies and TV shows, ranging from iconic scenes of cattle slaughter in early Soviet montage to contemporary quandaries over hunting trophies in home-renovation reality TV series and the presence of animals in Black horror films. Sarah O'Brien carefully examines these fragments in dialogue with germinal texts at the intersection of animal studies, film and television studies, and cultural studies. Her aim is to uncover the capacity of moving images to unsettle the ways in which audiences have become habituated to viewing animal life and death on screens and to understand these images as more and less connected to the "production for consumption" of animals that is specific to modern industrialization. By looking back at films and TV series in which the places and practices of killing or keeping animals enter, occupy, or slip from the foreground, Bits and Pieces takes seriously the idea that cinema and television have the capacity not only to catch but to challenge and change viewers' regard for animals.

Weight: 272g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780472076253