humanities Article Seeing Beings: “Dog” Looks Back at “God”: Unfixing Canis familiaris in Kornél Mundruczó’s † Film Fehér isten/White God (2014) Lesley C. Pleasant Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures, University of Evansville, Evansville, IN 47714, USA;
[email protected] † I have had to rely on the English subtitles of this film, since I do not speak Hungarian. I quote from the film in English, since the version to which I have had access does not give the option of Hungarian subtitles. Received: 6 July 2017; Accepted: 13 October 2017; Published: 1 November 2017 Abstract: Kornél Mundruczó’s film Fehér isten/White God (2014) portrays the human decreed options of mixed breed, abandoned dogs in the streets of Budapest in order to encourage its viewers to rethink their relationship with dogs particularly and animals in general in their own lives. By defamiliarizing the familiar ways humans gaze at dogs, White God models the empathetic gaze between species as a potential way out of the dead end of indifference and the impasse of anthropocentric sympathy toward less hierarchical, co-created urban animal publics. Keywords: animality; dogs; film; White God; empathy 1. Introduction Fehér isten/White God (2014) is not the first film use mixed breed canine actors who were saved from shelters1. The Benji films starred mixed breed rescued shelter dogs (McLean 2014, p. 7). Nor is it unique in using 250 real screen dogs instead of computer generated canines. Disney’s 1996 101 Dalmations starred around 230 Dalmation puppies and 20 adult Dalmations (McLean 2014, p. 20). It is also certainly not the only film with animal protagonists to highlight Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody # 2 in its soundtrack.