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PROOF
Part VII
31
Executing Species: Animal Attractions
in Thomas Edison and Douglas Gordon
Anat Pick
How you glow, noble beast, in the infinite moment before your own death!
Lydia Millet 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.
The ‘reality effect’ of film animals is partly achieved by the constant threat of real violence commanded by the animal image (like the portentous appearance of a gun in the first act of a stage play). Violence is sometimes realized (it is a regular feature in ‘serious’ European and world art cinema, for example), and sometimes disclaimed (in the feel-good adage of the American Humane Association’s ‘No Ani-mals Were Harmed in the Making of this Film’). The permanent exposure of the cinematic animal to onscreen violation signals its reality, and lends the medium its realism. This exposure and this threat open up the screen as a zoomorphic space – a space inhabited by more-than-human lives.
interfaces that include not only the image interior, but also the camera, the space around the camera and the relations between them.
André Bazin’s cinematic realism imagined the cinema as offeringan immanent, non-hierarchal, lateral view of reality, composed of multiple beings and things whose connection to one another is of equivalent force, beauty and wonder.2
There is much to seduce (and alarm) us in this posthumanist view of cinema that regards living beings and things as interchangeable: drawing out the aliveness of things, and the thingness of the living. For John Mullarkey, such radical equality can trigger fear:
The horror of encountering unexpected alterity – from animals no longer taken as mere objects (and perhaps from objects no longer regarded as mere ‘objects’ either) – doubtless stems from fear: what will become of ‘us’ in a democracy of all the living?
(2012, 54) While cinema’s ‘flat ontology’ (Mullarkey 2012, 40) proposes a view of the world as radically equal, what should we make of the unequal distribution of power, and vulnerability, between different agents or ‘actants’? For cinema is also an insti-tution and a manifestation of particular economic, political and moral milieus, bound not only to dominant ways of seeing, but to dominant ways of living as well.
Film, perhaps more than any other art, is closely related to other modern indus-trial institutions, from the science laboratory to the factory farm. As posthumanist theorists like Donna Haraway have shown, these are relational sites in which human and non-human entities meet and comingle, ‘flatly’ as Mullarkey would have it. But these are also, significantly, sites of political, or biopolitical, power. Cinema’s real and symbolic instrumentalization of animals means that – like the laboratory and the slaughterhouse, as well as the circus and the zoo – the power exercised over non-human animals as the dominant mode of interspecies relations is on display. The two examples below, Thomas Edison’sElectrocuting an Elephant
(1903), and Douglas Gordon’sPlay Dead; Real Time(2003), exactly one hundred years apart, reveal the intersection of humans, animals and technology that gives rise to a peculiar and precarious form of life: the cinematic animal.
Cinema is a key modern relational site of encounter between technology, humans and animals, an encounter that gives rise to a new form of life: the cin-ematic animal. Like farmed animals, modified by the industrial apparatuses in which they live and die, cinematic animals are a new kind of being.3Cinematic
animals are living commodities whose very ‘aliveness’ is probed and made visi-ble. As a cinematic attraction, combining entertainment and instruction, animal vulnerability is generated as a source of knowledge about animals’ bodies, and as cultural and aesthetic currency. Cinematic animals, then, are not simply animals captured on film. They are ontologically, ethically and even biologically distinct, a creature that is, almost without exception, constituted as vulnerable.
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distinction. This ambiguity resonates in cinema’s twofold ‘inhumanity’: onto-logically, the inhumanity of film frees cinema’s potential to eschew a strictly human perspective and attests to the interdependence of humans, animals and the cinematic apparatus. Ethically, the inhumanity of film reminds us that cin-ema continues to be politically and culturally wedded to forms of human power over non-human life that are, quite literally, spectacularly cruel.
The examples I have chosen trace early film’s complex relations to animals as a particular type of cinematic ‘attraction’. They render cinema as an interspecies space in which other lives unfold (reveal themselves or come undone) spectac-ularly. These unfolding relations are not always benign.Electrocuting an Elephant
andPlay Dead; Real Timeencapsulate the contradictory attitudes to animals in the
field of vision and point to cinema’s inhumanity, in the double inflection of ontol-ogy and ethics. If, ontologically, the cinema is not simply reducible to a human perspective, history or concerns, morally, cinema participates in the disciplining (and violating) of bodies, whose vitality and vulnerability it explores and often exploits.
Electrocuting an Elephant(1903)
Edison’sElectrocuting an Elephant(1903) is a haunting example of early actuality to which scholars of film, and of animal film, repeatedly return, perhaps because the film crystalizes the basic components of the cinema: living bodies (material, temporal, fragile), technology and spectacle. The Edison Manufacturing Company arranged for, carried out and filmed the execution of Topsy, a wild-caught African elephant brought to Coney Island, who reportedly killed three handlers, the last one after he fed her a lit cigarette. A crowd of 1,500 gathered to watch Topsy die, a finale performance ending some 20 years of captivity.
The film’s grainy, degraded footage contains two shots: a capped man leads Topsy to the site of her execution where she is strapped into place. Three other men are walking behind her, and a couple wander across the front of the frame. Coney Island’s Luna Park is seen at the background. In the second shot, Topsy is standing, her front leg restlessly shuffling, she suddenly stiffens and smoke bil-lows from her feet and fills the frame. She collapses onto her side. The shot is held until the smoke clears, revealing Topsy’s body (or is it the film’s?) in its final convulsions.
Electrocuting an Elephantis a literal example of early cinema’s carnivalesque roots
in the fairground. By 1903, following the upholding of Edison’s motion picture patent in 1901, the Edison company had established itself as a major force in the motion picture market. Although, according to Charles Musser, 1903 was ‘the year in which the story film came to prominence, beginning with the comple-tion ofLife of An American Firemanand culminating with the incredible success of
The Great Train Robbery, quite possibly the most successful American film before
Griffith’sThe Birth of a Nation(1915)’,4Electrocuting an Elephantis an example of
spectacular action and the foregrounding of technology – in Edison’s case these are the two interlinked technologies of electricity and film. The cinema of attractions belongs to vaudeville and the fairground, where films were first shown alongside other attractions, and it suggests the primacy of exhibitionism, novelty, surprise and affect, over the more cerebral, and one might argue humanistic, conventions of narrative film.5 If the ‘relation between films and the emergence of the great
amusement parks, such as Coney Island, at the turn of the century provides rich ground for rethinking the roots of early cinema’ (Gunning 2006, 383),
Electrocut-ing an Elephantis both concretely and symbolically significant since it takes place
onsite at cinema’s historical birthplace.
The film’s inhumanity, in the twofold sense described, occurs at a number of lev-els. First, as Michael Lundblad explains, Topsy’s execution ‘might suggest that an elephant could be required to take responsibility for criminal acts: that an animal could possess the agency of a human being. It could thus be read as an exam-ple of resisting distinctions between human and nonhuman agency’ (Lundblad 2013, 94). But the distinctly disciplinary flavour of this public display concerns the association between animality and violence, and the subsequent need to bring animality under control. Topsy’s animality extends to other forms of savagery and unruliness, and her execution is a warning of sorts to the unwashed masses – both the spectators and the target of this show of force. In this sense, Lundblad claims, ‘Topsy’s physical body. . .can be seen as representative of the working
class’, whose disruptive potential at the turn of the 20th century (demands for humane treatment and labour reform) was a threat to the burgeoning market economy.6
Edison’s motivation was partly commercial: he was promoting DC (direct cur-rent) in a bid against AC (alternating curcur-rent) of his rival, George Westinghouse. But the film is more than a chapter in the so-called ‘war of the currents’ between rival industrialists.7Electrocuting an Elephantis an illustration of cinematic
biopower. In her study of early medical imagery, Lisa Cartwright claims that the film:
Documents (. . .) public fascination with scientific technology and its capacity to
deter-mine the course of life and death in living beings (. . .). The film (. . .) is evidence of
a widespread popular interest in the power of technology to regulate and discipline bodies.
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raw material, but the site ofextraction. What the camera seeks to powerfully wrest from Topsy is her very vitality, the invisible secret of life, of animation, which the animal’s body at once displays and obscures.
With their common interest in bodies in motion at the turn of the 20th century, film and the life sciences, especially physiology, inaugurated what Cartwright calls ‘biological modes of representation’ (Cartwright 1995, 10). The ‘biological gaze’, to borrow Laura Mulvey’s phrase, seeks the elusive and invisible object of ‘life’. But biological modes of representation also announce a break between observa-tion and the object of knowledge, ‘a break in which the visualizaobserva-tion of “life” becomes all the more seductive to the scientific eye even as the limitations of rep-resentation are made plain’ (Cartwright 1995, 10)8Animal vulnerability in early
film is produced and controlled by the technological and institutional apparatus of film, whose historical ties to the science laboratory, and specifically to vivisection, reveal cinema as one modern system among others that looks to extract from bod-ies their ‘aliveness’. As such, cinema is both progressive and ‘primitive’: it deploys technological rationalism to interrogate, decipher and extract from living beings the enigma of animation – their biological life, and maybe even their soul.
Bodies, their manipulation, and sometimes their destruction, offer cinema an object of study and an object of beauty. Capturing bodies in motion in early film suggest that cinema – like science – sought to extract from bodies what the camera could and could not make visible: the secret of their vitality, revealed as the lim-its of vitality and the laws governing those limlim-its. In so doing, cinema becomes an apparatus for the disciplining of bodies, but it is also a space in which these disciplinary practices are publicly negotiated and so potentially resisted. Both
Elec-trocuting an Elephant andPlay Dead; Real Timedeploy the biological gaze in the
course of producing the attraction of the vulnerable animal body.
Play Dead; Real Time(2003)
As narrative cinema slowly gained prominence, the cinema of attractions dissem-inated across a variety of film practices. From about 1907, most notably in the films of D. W. Griffith, a fascination with multi-reel story films takes hold, obscur-ing the pre-continuity origins of cinema. For a time, film history succumbed to an evolutionary model, tracing the gradual maturation into classical narrative. But narrative and attraction are not incompatible. ‘In fact,’ writes Gunning, ‘the cinema of attraction[s] does not disappear with the dominance of narrative, but rather goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a compo-nent of narrative films’ (2006, 382). New expressions of the cinema of attractions arguably flourish today in action and special effects mainstream cinema, and in the art gallery.
of movements are projected on two large screens, completed by a small monitor, placed on the floor.9Each of the three projections shows three different versions of
the same sequence of commands. Gordon says the idea came to him one morning when he realized he had never seen an elephant lying down, and he wanted to see what happens when the animal was made to perform an uncomfortable move-ment. In the piece, shot on 16 mm then transferred to video, the camera circles Minnie, filming her as she lies down and stumbles awkwardly back to her feet.10
Play Dead; Real Timealludes to previous works that placed live animals in the
art gallery (from Joseph Beuys and William Wegman to Damien Hirst), but the connection to Edison seems to me the most pertinent.11 Gordon described Play
Dead; Real Timeas something between ‘a nature film and a medical documentary’,
allowing us to ‘observe the subject in a way that could be used for a practical purpose but also had a very certain aesthetic’.12The description invokes the main
registers of the cinematic animal established from animals’ earliest appearances in and as moving images: science, hunting and spectacle. Each register highlights a different kind of ‘capital’ accrued from animals: scientific knowledge, trophies and visual pleasure.
In the second half of the 19th century, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge and the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey conducted photographic studies of ani-mal motion, which are considered the precursors of the moving pictures of the cinema. As Cynthia Chris suggests, pre-cinematic motion studies are contradictory in conveying the illusion of continuous motion yet also fragmenting motion into its composite gestures (Chris 2006, 8).13The duality of stillness and motion is, of
course, a central feature of film, and with better – faster – technology, movement could be more efficiently captured, fragmented and reassembled.
Like Muybridge’s animal motion studies, Gordon’s piece offers visual scrutiny in the contrived, laboratory-like, conditions of the art gallery. The segmentation and abstraction of motion by photographic technology have been replaced, in the work’s final form, by video technology. But the camera’s circling motion in the ‘white cube’ of the Gagosian Gallery expresses the desire for unlimited optical access. In both Edison and Gordon, the impetus is to render visible the living animal as knowable, controllable and sensational.
Beyond its knowing ironies and its institutional critique of the art gallery,Play
Dead; Real Time’s relation to Edison’s seemingly straightforward elephant
execu-tion is telling. The two works explore elephant bodies as a source of informaexecu-tion and titillation. Edison’s film conflates the scientific and disciplinary functions of cinema: the desire to control life by capturing the precise moment of death. And, like early executions, it is public, ritualistic and punitive. The punitive element in Edison’s film is central. As the historians Hilda Kean (1998) and Jonathan Burt (2001) have shown, there is a strong link between animal visibility and public morality:
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animal-related practice – including bear baiting, vivisection, slaughter, or the clearing of the city streets of strays.
(Burt 2001, 208) Modern codes of civility and civilization are inseparable from interspecies rela-tions, and the appearance of these relations in the public sphere. It is no wonder, therefore, that Topsy’s electrocution was couched in moral, even legalistic terms as the execution of a criminal. This logic is far from archaic. In our own time, such killings have been reframed by the joint rhetoric of security and humane-ness, renamed as either ‘euthanasia’ or ‘culling’: the putting down of dangerous animals. In 1903, retributive logic, however thinly underpinning Topsy’s killing, was partly intended to reconcile the violent spectacle with public concerns over humane and inhumane treatment, and not only of animals. Seen as a ‘cleaner’ method of execution, electrocution was to replace less humane methods of killing, specifically hanging. As with the cinema, Thomas Edison – and animals – played a crucial part in the development of execution by electrocution and the electric chair (Burt 2001, 215–216). In 1888, Edison conducted animal electrocutions in his New Jersey laboratory, using dogs, calves and horses, experiments that con-tributed to the first human execution by electric chair in the United States, in August 1890.
Lundblad points out that the ‘claim of a “painless” death was emphasized in var-ious newspaper accounts’ of Topsy’s killing (Lundblad 2013, 94). Nonetheless, the public spectacle of animal death, in reality and in film, speaks to the ‘combination of repulsion and fascination that marks a response to certain kinds of animal repre-sentation and relates, in turn, to the problematic negotiation between co-existing humane and cruel impulses’ (Burt 2001, 212). In a feat of technological, scientific, commercial and moral prowess, then, Topsy’s unruly body (doubly unruly in its opacity as a living body and in its active retaliation against human authority) was to be brought under control via film.
Electrocution is ‘a method of execution that is virtually isomorphic with cin-ema’s invention’, writes Alison Griffiths (2014, 1).Electrocuting an Elephant is one of a number of execution films, including theExecution of Czolgosz, with Panorama
of Auburn Prison (1901), shot by Edison two years earlier. There is no essential
difference in Griffiths’ account betweenElectrocuting an ElephantandExecution of
Czolgosz; there is no species bias, as it were, in thinking of both in the context
of execution films that ‘derive meaning as [sic] “as ceremonials of punishment”, Michel Foucault’s term for all manner of staged public punishments and macabre visual spectacles that exploited the idea of the uncanny, of being copresent with the dead’ (Griffiths 2014, 5). Indeed, Edison sought permission to film the real execution of Czolgosz but his request was denied. He therefore had to make do with shooting on location outside Auburn prison, and film a ‘detailed reproduc-tion of the execureproduc-tion of the assassin of President McKinley faithfully carried out from the description of an eye witness’.14Electrocution films are situated ‘within a
afforded elephants as prized taxidermy specimens in museums of natural history and of eighteenth-century experiments with animals conducted in London’s gal-leries of practical science such as the Electrical Society and the Royal Institution’ (Griffiths 2014, 6). The link between early cinema and science, all the way to the museum and the contemporary art gallery, is thus uninterrupted.
Play Dead; Real Timeis an ironic updating of the tradition. Minnie, the circus
elephant, is subjected to ceremonial procedures whose sanitized nature simul-taneously conceals and invokes the fascination with public execution. Made to play, rather than become, dead, Minnie calls forth animals’ permanent exposure to violence. The currency has shifted somewhat – a real execution is replaced by a mock one. But in Edison and Gordon alike, the use of the elephant as physi-cal and symbolic trope remains intact, as does the interplay of experimentalism, technology and visual pleasure, whose object is the attraction of the vulnerable but recalcitrant animal body.
Gordon’s is an uncanny corollary to Edison’s own uncanny film. Real animal death is substituted for a more benign form of bodily discipline, and the rowdy fairground is replaced by the clinical and bourgeois space of the gallery. ‘Exe-cution’ is reversed: Topsy is executed (for disobedience), while Minnie dutifully (if unhappily) executes her trainer’s commands. In the latter, visitors watch the coordinated movements performed on cue, supplemented by the camera’s circum-navigation of the elephant’s body. The camera orbits the room close to the floor, capturing Minnie from below. Minnie’s eye, in extreme close-up, appears at the start of the third version of movements (titledOther Way), shown on the small monitor.
More overtly thanElectrocuting an Elephant,Play Dead; Real Timefeatures ges-tures in excess of the disciplining gaze. These fleeting moments are traces of animal agency and resistance that suggest not only the existence of an autonomous being, but her subjection to the interlocking technological and institutional apparatuses of the camera, the art gallery and the ‘institution of speciesism’ (Wolfe 2003, 6). Minnie lies down and rolls on her side on demand, she struggles back to her feet with some difficulty, and paces. While on her side, she flaps her trunk lightly on the floor in what could be agitation, or perhaps stress relief. The gesture is unscripted and so its effect on the visitor is different: it is an expression that belies the controlling gaze of the camera in tension with the piece’s scripted movements that Minnie is made to perform. Her eye, in close-up on the TV monitor, waters from either displeasure or effort, begging the question: Do elephants cry?
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contingency in the highly contrived spectacle, making the almost imperceptible movement of the flapping trunk all the more fascinating because it is unplanned. Like Topsy’s shuffling feet and her quiet (resigned? unsuspecting?) walk to her death, the visual apparatus records every movement. But unlike the real and per-formed death, these unscripted responses are singular, not standardized. In their uncanniness, they question the species divide that distinguishes artistic subject from object and the power of the apparatus.
Conclusion: The elephant in the room
The examples in this chapter illustrate the special place of elephants in particular, and of animals more generally, in the medium of moving images. Elephants have consistently occupied cinema’s biocultural space, which produces the ‘attraction’ of the vulnerable animal body. Early film’s connection to the fairground, the zoo, as well as to the industrial production of electricity, reveal cinema as one modern apparatus among others that makes use of animals as a complex economic, sci-entific and symbolic resource. Pointing to the ‘elephant in the room’ in two key examples, as bookends to a century of moving image work, I drew attention to acts of animal framing and taming that convert ‘wildness’ into cultural currency. The enduring question of posthuman cinema is thus whether interspecies relations can be forged and made visible in ways that transcend the power dynamics that have thus far reproduced the animal as a distinctly vulnerable and violable spectacle, in a manner that is descriptively posthuman yet normatively anthropocentric.
Notes
1. See Lippit (2000) and Burt (2002). I discuss the topic in Pick (2011, 104–130).
2. For a discussion of Bazin’s ‘flat ontology’ and the cinematic equality among humans, animals and things, see Mullarkey (2012).
3. A so-called broiler chicken (bred for meat), for example, is unlike an egg-laying hen that has not been intensively reared to pile on body mass, peaking at 48 days when meat chickens are commonly slaughtered. In biomedical research, transgenic or knockout mice are similarly bred for purpose. Whether or not we consider them ‘natural’, these organisms come into being as forms of life made possible by the technologies that render them vulnerable. A similar case can be made for the cinema.
4. Edison: The Invention of the Movies: 1891–1918. Kino Lorber Films, 2005. DVD. Notes by Charles Musser.<http://www.kinolorber.com/edison/d1.html>, accessed 2 November
2014.
5. See Gunning (1993, 2006). The concept’s enduring appeal and its critical afterlives are the subject ofThe Cinema of Attractions Reloaded.
6. Since performing elephants are regularly female, this form of control is not only a matter of class but also of gender. Other famous cases of (female) elephant executions include the 1916 hanging of circus elephant Mary, in Erwin, Tennessee, after she killed a trainer called Walter ‘Red’ Eldridge.
7. See, for example, Gunning (2009, 112–132).
9. For the MoMA re-exhibiting of the work in 2006, Gordon added a second monitor, turn-ing the work into a four-channel installation. For detailed information on Douglas’ piece and its various incarnations, see A. Noël de Tilly’s ‘Making/Displaying Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time’, inScripting Artworks: Studying the Socialization of Editioned Video and Film,<http://dare.uva.nl/document/2/99400>, accessed 2 November 2014. On this
work and others, see Rankin 2006.
10. A filmed interview with Gordon, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), <http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/546>, accessed
16 October 2014.
11. On the long history of live animals in the art gallery see Alloi 2012.
12. Artist Rooms: Douglas Gordon:Play Dead; Real Time, Tate Britain, 6 May–29 Septem-ber 2013,<
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/artist-rooms-douglas-gordon-play-dead-real-time>, accessed 16 October.
13. Chris writes that ‘Muybridge’s work signaled a shift in the range of conceived uses of photography, toward creating images of moving as well as still subjects, but Muybridge sought most vigorously to stop, not simulate motion.’
14. From the Edison Company catalogue, <http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query>,
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Chapter 31
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