Animals in Film

This little book presents a broad overview of the history and role of animals in film, from the early experiments of Muybridge and Marey in capturing animal motion to recent releases like Amores Perros and A Time for Drunken Horses.

In certain respects the study it reminds me most of is Tom Dewe Matthews's Censored. But each time I find I prefer the approach Dewe Matthews took to be preferable to the one taken by author Jonathan Burt here.

Where Dewe Matthews took a basically empirical approach to the history of film censorship and concentrated exclusively on the UK, Burt seeks to deploy theory and to produce a more comparative study.

The result, unfortunately, is a book which, while packed with fascinating ideas and details, is also far too scattershot to do its subject – or subjects – real justice.

The films and incidents discussed seem almost random at times. Avant-garde and experimental works sit uneasily side by side with Disney [though the house of the mouse had its own artsy formalist side, to be sure] but the likes of the Italian mondo film are never mentioned. And, while the focus shifts from the UK to the USA, there's never enough contrast of or between the two societies, or with other cultures – in Southern Europe or Asia perhaps – for it to really qualify as a comparative study.

Where Animals in Film does succeed is in highlighting a number of topics for further research and in demonstrating what many will have long suspected: that people's attitudes to animals in cinema, as in life more generally, are marked by contradiction and apparent hypocrisy and frequently say more about 'us' than 'them'.