This article engages with French filmmaker Jean Painlevé’s experimental shorts on the physiognomy and behavior of marine animals. The article argues that Painlevé’s films establish a corporeal and nonlinguistic mode of interspecies communication that draws upon the spectators’ immediate emphatic and empathetic reactions to the animal creatures on-screen. By evoking affective responses below the visible and audible registers, the films place the human animal body both in proximity to and at a distance from the nonhuman animal, revealing ontological ties as well as uncanny encounters with other ways of living. In doing so, the films inspire a plurality of ethico-political perspectives on species entanglement that all propose distinct responsibilities without making any organism the center of agentic events. To illuminate those perspectives, the article brings Painlevé’s films into conversation with Massumi’s animal politics, Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming-animal, and neuroscientific research. It thus shows how the cinematic medium can make palpable debates in environmental studies and political theory and installs communication as an interspecies phenomenon that involves human and nonhuman bodies in a shared affective space. Last, the article reclaims Painlevé for contemporary concerns, linking aesthetics to ethics and politics and bodily movement to care for the world.
Generating a conversation between nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman and contemporary composer John Luther Adams, this article offers a sonic-elemental account of American geography and community. It argues that Adams and Whitman treat America as a constellation of elemental relations between bodies and materialities, and that sound helps to discern and describe those relations. In doing so, the article outlines initial parameters of an elemental politics that relates political actions to their surrounding soundscapes, thus emphasizing communality while rebuffing nationalism and spanning across multiple times and places while remaining rooted in specific present situations. To make this argument, the article draws upon scholarship in elemental media studies, new materialism, and soundscape theory. It treats both poetry and music as types of elemental sound art, appreciating that sonic vibrations affect bodies below the level of consciousness even when finding expression in perceivable language or music.
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