Animals, Film, Audiences
Regulating Cruelty and Morality through Science and Law in Interwar Britain
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3566191 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Anin Luo (Princeton University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 114 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 490-512 |
| Publication date | 2023-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Isis (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-1753 • E-ISSN: 1545-6994 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/726206 |
| OpenAlex | W4385865319 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 31 |
In 1937 the British Parliament passed the Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act, prohibiting the exhibition and distribution of films in which suffering might have been caused to animals. “Cruel animal films,” especially those depicting violent combat, captured the nationalistic anxieties of interwar British animal protectionists, social moralists, animal behavior experts, and legislators. The act symbolically resolved their worries, all of which centered on the morality of British audiences. Attempts to regulate cruel animal films also illuminated contemporary ambiguities about representation in film. Film separated what was being filmed in production from what was shown in the film product, so that the two no longer needed to correspond, while simultaneously maintaining an illusion of direct representation. Critics thus found it difficult to pinpoint whether their concern was with “real” cruelty to animals in production or with the effects of “representations” of cruelty on audiences. Animal behavior experts reframed this problem of ambiguous representation as one they could solve: they assessed the behavior of animals in cruel animal films, using science to evaluate film’s claim of realism. This essay argues that these experts used science to manage film’s simultaneous cleavage and coupling of reality and representation and, in doing so, regulated elites’ anxieties about the degradation of British audiences
Aesthetics · Animal welfare · Art · Art history · Criminology · Cruelty · Environmental ethics · Exhibition · Media studies · Morality · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Sociology · Ecology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law · Philosophy · Visual Culture and Art Theory
Wildlife Films
The Animal Estate
The International Educational Cinematograph Institute, Reactionary Modernism, and The Formation of Film Studies
Interspecies Labor in Early Cinema
Cinematic Nature
BBC Wildlife Documentaries in the Age of Attenborough
Accustomed to Female Domination”
Beasts in the jungle (or wherever)
The ciné-biologists
Lions loose on a gentleman's lawn
Children, 'Horrific' Films, and Censorship in 1930s Britain
A Drama Unites Them in a Fight to the Death
Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science
From Kearton to Attenborough
Seeing and Believing Science
Introduction
Teddy Bear Patriarchy
Making Males Aggressive and Females Coy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |