Animal Scales series: Scale Individual, documentary screening of Cow

A screening of the documentary film Cow (2021, UK, MUBI & US IFC films), and discussion with Director, Andrea Arnold. Respondent and chair: Anat Pick, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, London.

Filmed over four years, Cow documents the life cycle for Luma, a dairy cow.

BIOs

Andrea Arnold, OBE, is a filmmaker and former actor. She won an Academy Award for her short film Wasp in 2005. Her feature films include Red Road (2006), Fish Tank (2009), and American Honey (2016), all of which have won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. She directed four episodes of Amazon Prime Video series Transparent, as well as all seven episodes of the second season of the HBO series Big Little Lies. Her documentary Cow premiered at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and played at the 2021 Telluride Film Festival.

Anat Pick’s research centres on animals, the natural world, and moving images. She has published widely on animal cinema, vegan approaches to film, and non-anthropocentric film philosophy. Her book Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2011) develops a ‘creaturely’ approach to literature and film based on the shared bodily vulnerability of human and nonhuman beings. The book’s theoretical backbone is the thought of the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943), whose idiosyncratic body of work informs much of her current research. The coedited volume Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (Berghahn, 2013) intersects film studies and the fields of ecocriticism and critical animal studies.

This seminar is part of the Animal Scales series, co-hosted by UCL Anthropocene and the Centre for Critical Global Change, Goldsmiths.

Seminar series: Animal Scales

From Aristotle's scala naturae, to the vast scales of animal agriculture, to moral scales, determined by cognitive scales: animal lives have and continue to be shaped by different kinds of scales and their positions on them. Scales enact, authorise, and justify possible relations with animals, including deathly scales of comparison. But scales are neither fixed nor unchanging, and in the context of increasingly complex, multi-dimensional and multi-temporal analyses of environmental catastrophe, numerous, often novel, scales are proliferating. How do animal scales come into existence? Are animals themselves 'scale-makers' and, if so, can they disrupt the pre-scaled objects of knowledge that support the division of academic labour? If animals operate at scale (collective migration, collective thinking), how do they also resist it? This seminar series asks after the disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, empirical, political, ethical, and legal implications of thinking animals in and through scale.

Full series dates:

SCALE: METABOLIC

Maan Barua; Department of Geography, Cambridge
5.00-7.00 pm, 20 February
Location: UCL, IAS Forum, South Wing, Wilkins Building.
Register here

SCALE: GLOBAL

Dr. iur. Charlotte Blattner, LL.M. (Harvard); Institute of Public Law, University of Berne
5.00-7.00 pm, 21 March
Location: UCL, Room BO5, Darwin Building.
Register here

SCALE: INDIVIDUAL

Screening of the documentary film Cow (2021, UK, MUBI & US IFC films), and discussion with Director, Andrea Arnold. Respondent and chair: Anat Pick, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, London.
3.30-7.00 pm, 23 April
Location: Goldsmiths, Small Cinema, Richard Hoggart Building
Register here

SCALE: TEMPORAL

Éric Baratay; Department of History, Université Jean-Moulin, Lyon.
5.00-7.00pm, 24 May
Location TBA
Register here

SCALE: POLITICAL

Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson; Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Canada
5.00-7.00pm, 19 June
On-line (Zoom)
Register here

SCALE: MULTIPLE

Dinesh Wadiwel; School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney
10.00-12.00a.m., 8 July
On-line (Zoom)
Register here

For more information, please contact Mariam Motamedi Fraser (m.motamedi-fraser@gold.ac.uk)

Image: "Stray Cat 03" by Sami Ucan (@sami_ucan)