Ann McKinnon | Okanagan College (original) (raw)
Papers by Ann McKinnon
Humanimalia, Sep 10, 2020
Cinema produces an equalizing vision of the world in which human beings do not have preferential ... more Cinema produces an equalizing vision of the world in which human beings do not have preferential status over beasts or forests.-Andre Bazin, "Death Every Afternoon." "Grána's Eye" [Still from Of Horses and Men] Introduction. Benedikt Erlingsson's film Of Horses and Men was released in 2013, was nominated for Best Foreign Film for the 86th Academy Awards, and won the 2014 Nordic Film Award. It is structured around a series of episodes reflecting Scandinavian sagas, or traditional oral stories that Simon Halink calls "sagascapes." Halink argues that sagascapes are stories that are historically entangled with the landscapes of Iceland and, in the case of this film, include the Icelandic horses that are entangled with human animals and landscape forming community. 1 The film does not have a conventional plot; rather, the episodes or sagas are linked together by each character's connection to their horses and, in what follows, because there is not a plot per se that describes the action of the film, I will consider each scene in the order that it appears in the timeline of the film to illustrate my claims. Each new scene is introduced with a shot of the horse's body or eye, and usually ends in a death or accident of either a horse or human. The action is inaugurated by the farmer Kolbeinn (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) and the widow Solveig (Charlotte Bøving), whose courtship is the principal thread that takes us to the end of the film. The other important through line is of a Spanish tourist, Juan, who meets each of the villagers and their horses on his bicycle and horse tours of
EVEN MUD HAS THE ILLUSION OF DEPTH: A MCLUHANESQUE READING OF SARAH PALIN
Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture, 2008
Sandy Wilson: First features, Canadian wives, American cousins, An interview
Morality Destabilized: Reading Emma Lee Warrior's Compatriots , 1998
Can-Con vs Neo Con: television studies in Canada, 2001
Satire on Canadian television is part of a long-standing tradition in Canadian literature and rad... more Satire on Canadian television is part of a long-standing tradition in Canadian literature and radio, and as such can be said to be an example of programming that is geographically and historically specific to this national space. Satire aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offers one pedagogical model for reading the non-hegemonic television text, for unlike market-driven television programming, satire on public broadcasting as produced by the CBC does not so much produce consumers as destabilize identities. Arguably, CBC's programming offers what David Harvey calls a "spatial fix" to the "present mindedness," as Harold Innis termed it, of new technologies (Innis, Bias 62), (1) and that the satirical text on television is one way to read and represent a radically democratic Canadian national space.
Humanimalia, 2020
The Icelandic horse in the film Of Horses and Men is an individual understood on the basis of wha... more The Icelandic horse in the film Of Horses and Men is an individual understood on the basis of what it does, a biosocial becoming in a specific geography, society, and historical moment. The horse is a film actor and an agent and, seen through the visual repetition of the gaze of the horse in the film, offers a clear example of entangled agencies -- a herd of human and non-human animals -- that co-create their Icelandic home. This creaturely gaze emphasizes the relations between human and animal, undoes the conventional anthropocentric bias of the gaze in cinema, and informs an ethics that relies on the materiality and vulnerability of all living bodies.
Humanimalia, Sep 10, 2020
Cinema produces an equalizing vision of the world in which human beings do not have preferential ... more Cinema produces an equalizing vision of the world in which human beings do not have preferential status over beasts or forests.-Andre Bazin, "Death Every Afternoon." "Grána's Eye" [Still from Of Horses and Men] Introduction. Benedikt Erlingsson's film Of Horses and Men was released in 2013, was nominated for Best Foreign Film for the 86th Academy Awards, and won the 2014 Nordic Film Award. It is structured around a series of episodes reflecting Scandinavian sagas, or traditional oral stories that Simon Halink calls "sagascapes." Halink argues that sagascapes are stories that are historically entangled with the landscapes of Iceland and, in the case of this film, include the Icelandic horses that are entangled with human animals and landscape forming community. 1 The film does not have a conventional plot; rather, the episodes or sagas are linked together by each character's connection to their horses and, in what follows, because there is not a plot per se that describes the action of the film, I will consider each scene in the order that it appears in the timeline of the film to illustrate my claims. Each new scene is introduced with a shot of the horse's body or eye, and usually ends in a death or accident of either a horse or human. The action is inaugurated by the farmer Kolbeinn (Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson) and the widow Solveig (Charlotte Bøving), whose courtship is the principal thread that takes us to the end of the film. The other important through line is of a Spanish tourist, Juan, who meets each of the villagers and their horses on his bicycle and horse tours of
EVEN MUD HAS THE ILLUSION OF DEPTH: A MCLUHANESQUE READING OF SARAH PALIN
Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture, 2008
Sandy Wilson: First features, Canadian wives, American cousins, An interview
Morality Destabilized: Reading Emma Lee Warrior's Compatriots , 1998
Can-Con vs Neo Con: television studies in Canada, 2001
Satire on Canadian television is part of a long-standing tradition in Canadian literature and rad... more Satire on Canadian television is part of a long-standing tradition in Canadian literature and radio, and as such can be said to be an example of programming that is geographically and historically specific to this national space. Satire aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offers one pedagogical model for reading the non-hegemonic television text, for unlike market-driven television programming, satire on public broadcasting as produced by the CBC does not so much produce consumers as destabilize identities. Arguably, CBC's programming offers what David Harvey calls a "spatial fix" to the "present mindedness," as Harold Innis termed it, of new technologies (Innis, Bias 62), (1) and that the satirical text on television is one way to read and represent a radically democratic Canadian national space.
Humanimalia, 2020
The Icelandic horse in the film Of Horses and Men is an individual understood on the basis of wha... more The Icelandic horse in the film Of Horses and Men is an individual understood on the basis of what it does, a biosocial becoming in a specific geography, society, and historical moment. The horse is a film actor and an agent and, seen through the visual repetition of the gaze of the horse in the film, offers a clear example of entangled agencies -- a herd of human and non-human animals -- that co-create their Icelandic home. This creaturely gaze emphasizes the relations between human and animal, undoes the conventional anthropocentric bias of the gaze in cinema, and informs an ethics that relies on the materiality and vulnerability of all living bodies.