Anat Pick | Queen Mary, University of London (original) (raw)
Books by Anat Pick
Creaturely Poetics argues for a radical rethinking of humans’ relationship to animals, based on o... more Creaturely Poetics argues for a radical rethinking of humans’ relationship to animals, based on our shared existence as vulnerable living bodies. Through an examination of the philosophical-theological writings of Simone Weil (1909-1943), and exploring a range of literary, filmic and cultural texts, the book revisits and revises some of the principal assumptions of literary, film, and ethical theory from a non-anthropocentric, “creaturely” perspective, to reshape critical practice in the humanities.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14786-6/creaturely-poetics
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creaturely-Poetics-Anat-Pick/dp/0231147872
"SCREENING NATURE integrates historical, theoretical and cultural approaches to cinema for the st... more "SCREENING NATURE integrates historical, theoretical and cultural approaches to cinema for the study of filmic representations of the natural environment and animals. The collection comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of first nature to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. It offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as a principal register in many filmic texts. The volume addresses aspects of nature, such as landscape, weather, animals, and forms of human habitation (and conquest) of space from Hollywood to non-Western cinemas, experimental and art-house, and the recent large-scale wildlife documentaries popular on both the big and the small screen. A number of the essays moreover consider the material relationship of the filmmaker to first nature through the practice and discourses surrounding filmmaking itself.
CONTRIBUTORS: Kay Armatage, Chia-Ju Chang, Steven Eastwood, Elana Gomel, May Ingawanij, David Ingram, Elizabeth Leane, Sophie Mayer, Patrick Murphy, Guinevere Narraway, Steve Nicol, Silke Panse,
Anat Pick, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes.
"
Papers by Anat Pick
Journal of Animal Ethics, 2012
This study constitutes an attempt to isolate and elucidate the event of personal relations in th... more This study constitutes an attempt to isolate and elucidate the event of personal relations in the later writings of Henry James. I argue that James' singularity rests on his treatment of personal relations in a radical and unfamiliar way. The main goal of this piece is, then, to trace the workings of personal relations, and to understand the peculiar way in which they figure and unfold in the later narratives. By reading James through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I wish to reconstruct James' major phase as primarily "ethical." Levinasian ethics differs from the branches of moral philosophy in its insistence on the absolute priority and exteriority of the ethical relation between persons: its disengagement from the realms of psychology and consciousness. The ethical relation is envisioned as flourishing precisely in the absence of cognition and thought. Rather than relating to one another as potentially knowable beings, then, persons in James and Levinas relate to one another as mutually unfathomable others. I maintain that this breaching of cognition and knowledge essentially characterizes Jamesian sociality. Read through ethics, as divorced from ideas of consciousness, James' major phase finds its meaning outside the traditional reign of James studies, which takes James as the master of complex elaborations on modes of consciousness. Not consciousness but alterity is James' defining feature, and it is through the readings of alterity that the fundamental event of Jamesian sociality emerges as both primary and unique. "Ethics" thus opens up a new horizon in which the Jamesian is no longer synonymous with consciousness, a horizon which transforms the understanding, not only of James in particular, but of literature in general.
Philosophies, 2022
This article charts the contiguity of farming and film, blending permaculture and cinema to advan... more This article charts the contiguity of farming and film, blending permaculture and cinema to advance a modality of sustainable film theory and practice we call “permacinema.” As an alternative approach to looking and labour, permaculture exhibits a suite of cinematic concerns, and offers a model for cinematic creativity that is environmentally accountable and sensitive to multispecies entanglements. Through the peaceable gestures of cultivation and restraint, permacinema proposes an ecologically attentive philosophy of moving images in accordance with permaculture’s three ethics: care of earth, care of people, and fair share. We focus on work by Indigenous artists in which plants are encountered not only as raw material or as aesthetic resource but as ingenious agents and insightful teachers whose pedagogical and creative inputs are welcomed into the filmmaking process. By integrating Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies we hope to situate permacinema in the wider project of cinema’s decolonization and rewilding.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Pre... more Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 120 pp. ISBN 0804747377
The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
Susan McHugh, Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction ... more Susan McHugh, Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2019), 240pp., $32.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9780271083704.
Screening Nature
The current version is not the final one (pagination is likely to change).The current version is ... more The current version is not the final one (pagination is likely to change).The current version is not the final one (pagination is likely to change)."Three Worlds" explores three alternatives of cinematic worldhood in popular films that foreground the environment. If the images of the BBC’s recent wave of natural history productions tend towards ocular inflation, Werner Herzog’s ‘wildlife fantasies' offer counter-examples that reflect on humanity’s placement in the world. Yet Herzog’s critique of the commercial natural history film betrays its own Romantic conceit, positing man and nature in stark opposition. A third conception of worldhood is found in Earthlings (2005), an activist animal rights film. Unlike David Attenborough’s ethically neutral work that underplays issues of anthropogenic ecological pressure, and against Herzog’s reactionary tales that cast nature and man in a state of inevitable conflict, Earthlings’ graphic exposure of human violence against animals seeks to overcome the human-animal binary. Each alternative at once registers and transcends a concrete worldview, and signals the (pre-ontological) notion of worldhood. And each raises questions about the ways in which the relationship between images, nature, and worldhood is articulated. In these films, ‘nature’ is both scientifically and aesthetically knowable, and the mode of dwelling Heidegger described as our 'being-in-the-world.' Finally, these cinematic configurations of nature recall the André Bazin theory of realism as a nonanthropocentric appreciation of cinematic worldhood. At its most distilled, Bazin envisions cinematic realism as ‘the world in its own image.’ Each of the films discussed contains intimations of worldhood through the filming of nature and animals or via the image of Earth seen from space. This essay proceeds from nature as a finite terrain, to worldhood as a non-spatial mode of involvement, and back to nature again
Animalities
Pick traces the ambiguous and problematic history of electricity in relation not only to early ci... more Pick traces the ambiguous and problematic history of electricity in relation not only to early cinema in the U.S., but also to its use in electrocution as capital punishment, in the torture of vulnerable bodies, and in electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in psychiatric institutions. Focusing primarily on the film that Thomas Edison made depicting the electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903, as well as Sylvia Plath’s work in The Bell Jar and other poems, Pick follows the development of electricity as a less visible instrument of control in democracies supposedly committed to human rights and the monitoring of punishment and interrogation methods, up through and including the current use of Tasers by police targeting communities of color. But there are surprising inconsistencies and ambiguities in these histories as well, such as constructions of nonhuman agency in which an elephant can be judged culpable and therefore deserving of capital punishment, while Sylvia Plat...
Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screenin... more Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.
Animal Life and the Moving Image, 2015
This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature ent... more This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.Film theory and film studies have only recently rediscovered what is surely most visible about film: its entanglement in the world it shoots, edits, and projects. As a representational art, film ‘screens’ nonhuman nature as both revelation and concealment. The ambivalence of the screen and of the act of screening, whether as projecting and exhibiting or as filtering and veiling, comes to define film’s relationship to its materiality: its locations, onscreen lives, mise-en-scène, narrative structures, spectators, exhibition spaces, its carbon footprint and chemical building blocks, from celluloid to silicon. All of these are part of cinema’s diverse ecologies. Accordingly, the present study does not focus only on nature and animal films. We take as a point of departure films that foreground ecology in the wider sense of the word. The essays in this book are primarily interested in how something that figures as ‘nature’ becomes entangled and enmeshed in everything else. Many of the concerns Morton mentions are found here: ideology, race, class, gender, and sexuality, interspecies relations, questions of justice, politics, and aesthetics. We hope the collection offers a well-rounded demonstration of cinematic ecology in action. This introductory essay inscribes ecology and nature back into film studies, back to where nature always already is, in the hope of encouraging to ‘normalise,’ even institutionalise, a more ecocentric attention to cinema—attention to the interconnectedness of the natural world and humans within it as integral parts of the study and practice of film
Film and Philosophy, 2003
Film and Philosophy, 2001
Creaturely Poetics argues for a radical rethinking of humans’ relationship to animals, based on o... more Creaturely Poetics argues for a radical rethinking of humans’ relationship to animals, based on our shared existence as vulnerable living bodies. Through an examination of the philosophical-theological writings of Simone Weil (1909-1943), and exploring a range of literary, filmic and cultural texts, the book revisits and revises some of the principal assumptions of literary, film, and ethical theory from a non-anthropocentric, “creaturely” perspective, to reshape critical practice in the humanities.
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14786-6/creaturely-poetics
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Creaturely-Poetics-Anat-Pick/dp/0231147872
"SCREENING NATURE integrates historical, theoretical and cultural approaches to cinema for the st... more "SCREENING NATURE integrates historical, theoretical and cultural approaches to cinema for the study of filmic representations of the natural environment and animals. The collection comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of first nature to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. It offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as a principal register in many filmic texts. The volume addresses aspects of nature, such as landscape, weather, animals, and forms of human habitation (and conquest) of space from Hollywood to non-Western cinemas, experimental and art-house, and the recent large-scale wildlife documentaries popular on both the big and the small screen. A number of the essays moreover consider the material relationship of the filmmaker to first nature through the practice and discourses surrounding filmmaking itself.
CONTRIBUTORS: Kay Armatage, Chia-Ju Chang, Steven Eastwood, Elana Gomel, May Ingawanij, David Ingram, Elizabeth Leane, Sophie Mayer, Patrick Murphy, Guinevere Narraway, Steve Nicol, Silke Panse,
Anat Pick, Geoffrey Alan Rhodes.
"
Journal of Animal Ethics, 2012
This study constitutes an attempt to isolate and elucidate the event of personal relations in th... more This study constitutes an attempt to isolate and elucidate the event of personal relations in the later writings of Henry James. I argue that James' singularity rests on his treatment of personal relations in a radical and unfamiliar way. The main goal of this piece is, then, to trace the workings of personal relations, and to understand the peculiar way in which they figure and unfold in the later narratives. By reading James through the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, I wish to reconstruct James' major phase as primarily "ethical." Levinasian ethics differs from the branches of moral philosophy in its insistence on the absolute priority and exteriority of the ethical relation between persons: its disengagement from the realms of psychology and consciousness. The ethical relation is envisioned as flourishing precisely in the absence of cognition and thought. Rather than relating to one another as potentially knowable beings, then, persons in James and Levinas relate to one another as mutually unfathomable others. I maintain that this breaching of cognition and knowledge essentially characterizes Jamesian sociality. Read through ethics, as divorced from ideas of consciousness, James' major phase finds its meaning outside the traditional reign of James studies, which takes James as the master of complex elaborations on modes of consciousness. Not consciousness but alterity is James' defining feature, and it is through the readings of alterity that the fundamental event of Jamesian sociality emerges as both primary and unique. "Ethics" thus opens up a new horizon in which the Jamesian is no longer synonymous with consciousness, a horizon which transforms the understanding, not only of James in particular, but of literature in general.
Philosophies, 2022
This article charts the contiguity of farming and film, blending permaculture and cinema to advan... more This article charts the contiguity of farming and film, blending permaculture and cinema to advance a modality of sustainable film theory and practice we call “permacinema.” As an alternative approach to looking and labour, permaculture exhibits a suite of cinematic concerns, and offers a model for cinematic creativity that is environmentally accountable and sensitive to multispecies entanglements. Through the peaceable gestures of cultivation and restraint, permacinema proposes an ecologically attentive philosophy of moving images in accordance with permaculture’s three ethics: care of earth, care of people, and fair share. We focus on work by Indigenous artists in which plants are encountered not only as raw material or as aesthetic resource but as ingenious agents and insightful teachers whose pedagogical and creative inputs are welcomed into the filmmaking process. By integrating Indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies we hope to situate permacinema in the wider project of cinema’s decolonization and rewilding.
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Pre... more Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 120 pp. ISBN 0804747377
The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television
Berghahn Books, Dec 31, 2022
Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
Susan McHugh, Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction ... more Susan McHugh, Love in a Time of Slaughters: Human-Animal Stories Against Genocide and Extinction (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2019), 240pp., $32.95 (pbk), ISBN: 9780271083704.
Screening Nature
The current version is not the final one (pagination is likely to change).The current version is ... more The current version is not the final one (pagination is likely to change).The current version is not the final one (pagination is likely to change)."Three Worlds" explores three alternatives of cinematic worldhood in popular films that foreground the environment. If the images of the BBC’s recent wave of natural history productions tend towards ocular inflation, Werner Herzog’s ‘wildlife fantasies' offer counter-examples that reflect on humanity’s placement in the world. Yet Herzog’s critique of the commercial natural history film betrays its own Romantic conceit, positing man and nature in stark opposition. A third conception of worldhood is found in Earthlings (2005), an activist animal rights film. Unlike David Attenborough’s ethically neutral work that underplays issues of anthropogenic ecological pressure, and against Herzog’s reactionary tales that cast nature and man in a state of inevitable conflict, Earthlings’ graphic exposure of human violence against animals seeks to overcome the human-animal binary. Each alternative at once registers and transcends a concrete worldview, and signals the (pre-ontological) notion of worldhood. And each raises questions about the ways in which the relationship between images, nature, and worldhood is articulated. In these films, ‘nature’ is both scientifically and aesthetically knowable, and the mode of dwelling Heidegger described as our 'being-in-the-world.' Finally, these cinematic configurations of nature recall the André Bazin theory of realism as a nonanthropocentric appreciation of cinematic worldhood. At its most distilled, Bazin envisions cinematic realism as ‘the world in its own image.’ Each of the films discussed contains intimations of worldhood through the filming of nature and animals or via the image of Earth seen from space. This essay proceeds from nature as a finite terrain, to worldhood as a non-spatial mode of involvement, and back to nature again
Animalities
Pick traces the ambiguous and problematic history of electricity in relation not only to early ci... more Pick traces the ambiguous and problematic history of electricity in relation not only to early cinema in the U.S., but also to its use in electrocution as capital punishment, in the torture of vulnerable bodies, and in electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in psychiatric institutions. Focusing primarily on the film that Thomas Edison made depicting the electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903, as well as Sylvia Plath’s work in The Bell Jar and other poems, Pick follows the development of electricity as a less visible instrument of control in democracies supposedly committed to human rights and the monitoring of punishment and interrogation methods, up through and including the current use of Tasers by police targeting communities of color. But there are surprising inconsistencies and ambiguities in these histories as well, such as constructions of nonhuman agency in which an elephant can be judged culpable and therefore deserving of capital punishment, while Sylvia Plat...
Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screenin... more Environmentalism and ecology are areas of rapid growth in academia and society at large. Screening Nature is the first comprehensive work that groups together the wide range of concerns in the field of cinema and the environment, and what could be termed “posthuman cinema.” It comprises key readings that highlight the centrality of nature and nonhuman animals to the cinematic medium, and to the language and institution of film. The book offers a fresh and timely intervention into contemporary film theory through a focus on the nonhuman environment as principal register in many filmic texts. Screening Nature offers an extensive resource for teachers, undergraduate students, and more advanced scholars on the intersections between the natural world and the worlds of film. It emphasizes the cross-cultural and geographically diverse relevance of the topic of cinema ecology.
Animal Life and the Moving Image, 2015
This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature ent... more This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.This item is part 2 of the Screening Nature entry.Film theory and film studies have only recently rediscovered what is surely most visible about film: its entanglement in the world it shoots, edits, and projects. As a representational art, film ‘screens’ nonhuman nature as both revelation and concealment. The ambivalence of the screen and of the act of screening, whether as projecting and exhibiting or as filtering and veiling, comes to define film’s relationship to its materiality: its locations, onscreen lives, mise-en-scène, narrative structures, spectators, exhibition spaces, its carbon footprint and chemical building blocks, from celluloid to silicon. All of these are part of cinema’s diverse ecologies. Accordingly, the present study does not focus only on nature and animal films. We take as a point of departure films that foreground ecology in the wider sense of the word. The essays in this book are primarily interested in how something that figures as ‘nature’ becomes entangled and enmeshed in everything else. Many of the concerns Morton mentions are found here: ideology, race, class, gender, and sexuality, interspecies relations, questions of justice, politics, and aesthetics. We hope the collection offers a well-rounded demonstration of cinematic ecology in action. This introductory essay inscribes ecology and nature back into film studies, back to where nature always already is, in the hope of encouraging to ‘normalise,’ even institutionalise, a more ecocentric attention to cinema—attention to the interconnectedness of the natural world and humans within it as integral parts of the study and practice of film
Film and Philosophy, 2003
Film and Philosophy, 2001
NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, 2015
The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television, 2015
Cinema has never been human. The central place of animals in the emergence and development of the... more 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.
A response to "Calling All Carnivores," a contest from The Ethicist, a feature in the New York T... more A response to "Calling All Carnivores," a contest from The Ethicist, a feature in the New York Times Magazine. The judges for the contest—Peter Singer, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman, Jonathan Safran Foer and Andrew Light—will select the best essay on why it is ethical to eat meat.
Maureen is a resident at a nursing home in a Tel Aviv suburb. She is one of countless elderly pat... more Maureen is a resident at a nursing home in a Tel Aviv suburb. She is one of countless elderly patients in their final months and weeks of life. In this semi-fictional piece, Anat Pick tells the story of her chance meeting with Maureen and the reflections it triggered on the shared vulnerability of institutionalized humans and animals in a society intent on keeping both out of sight and out of mind.