Screening Spaces

Screening Spaces Series Editor Pamela Robertson Wojcik Department of Film, Television, and Theatre University of Notre Dame Chicago , USA Screening Spaces is a series dedicated to showcasing interdisciplinary books that explore the multiple and various intersections of space, place, and screen cultures. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14491 Michael Lawrence • Karen Lury Editors The Zoo and Screen Media Images of Exhibition and Encounter Editors Michael Lawrence Karen Lury School of Media, Film and Music School of Culture and Creative Arts University of Sussex University of Glasgow Brighton , UK Glasgow , UK Screening Spaces ISBN 978-1-137-54342-4 ISBN 978-1-137-53561-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53561-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948111 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: Cover image © VPC Travel Photo / Alamy Stock Photo Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. New York INTRODUCTION: IMAGES OF E XHIBITION AND ENCOUNTER The zoo, like the cinema, is a space designed with exhibition in mind. 1 The history and the diversity of media images that exploit the zoo and its animals are unsurprisingly extensive—from the earliest fi lms of the Lumière brothers (such as Lion. London Zoological Garden , 1895) to the fi rst YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’ was uploaded at 8:27 p.m. on Saturday 23 April 2005 by the site’s cofounder Jawed Karim). 2 The zoo appears in over a century of audio-visual imagery, which continues into the twenty- fi rst century with 24-hour data streaming provided by ‘zoo-cams’ now a familiar aspect of many zoos’ on-going promotional activities. In ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (1977) John Berger reminds us: ‘Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals from daily life’. As Berger famously claims: ‘The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters’. The modern zoo, he argues, is ‘an epitaph to a relationship which was as old as man’ (2009: 30). Many authors in this volume share the sentiments of Berger’s polemical essay, but this anthology also tests this assumption, tracing different modes of exhibition (different zoos and the different modes of cinema and media through which these zoos are captured) whilst also refl ecting upon the possibility of encounter(s) between zoo animals and visitors to the zoo, between zoo animals and visitors and spectators in the cinema, or between individuals at their computer consoles and the often evasive animals under surveillance. While not a history of the zoo per se, this collection explores multiple intersections between zoological spaces and moving image media as both of these have changed over the v vi INTRODUCTION: IMAGES OF EXHIBITION AND ENCOUNTER last 120 years. 3 The essays collected here contribute to the growing interest in zoos within the academy, felt across the humanities and the social sciences, as well as to the recent explosion of interest in the non-human animal within philosophy, literary and cultural studies, and fi lm and media studies. 4 As the zoo itself is necessarily selective, this collection fails to provide a complete “taxonomy” of zoos and their media representation; nonethe- less, in this initial foray we cover a great deal of ground, with chapters examining the zoo as it is depicted, employed and imagined across a wide range of fi lm and media texts and technologies. 5 Across the four sections of this book—we hesitate to call these themes, to avoid mimicking the con- temporary ‘Disneyization’ of the zoo, in which animals and landscapes are arranged as if in the eponymous theme parks (Beardsworth and Bryman 2001)—particular ideas and fantasies inspired and staged by the zoo recur but the picture of zoos that emerges is necessarily contradictory: whilst the zoo is a convenient spectacle, apparently and inherently dramatic—even romantic—it is also troubling, despotic and dismal. Implicitly or explicitly we are certainly now— more often than not—conscious that in nearly all instances the non-human animals at the zoo suffer—they are incarcerated and incapacitated, enraged or comatose. As Raph R. Acampora argues: ‘From empire to circus to museum or ark, the zoo has been organized according to anthropocentrist and arguably androcentrist hierarchies and designs’ (2005: 70, following Mullan and Marvin 1987). Even human animals, confi ned mostly (but not always) to the role of visitors or spectators, are often subject to confl icting emotions at the zoo—to wonder, pity, amusement and disgust. In the following chapters, all of these emotions are revealed and the ambivalence this provokes exposed. In the fi rst section, Archives, we explore the zoo as it is depicted in fi lms, photography and digital media catalogued and recorded for various zoo, fi lm and photographic archives. In ‘“A Constellation of Incongruities”: The Amateur Film and the Trip to the Zoo’, Karen Lury examines a range of amateur fi lms made at Edinburgh Zoo and considers in particular rep- resentations of chimpanzees’ tea parties, in order to explore how amateur fi lms stage fantasies of civilisation and models of evolution, and refl ect the zoo’s shifting concerns, from the display of civic pride and colonial supe- riority to an emphasis on families and conservation. Drawing on the work of Anat Pick, Lury argues that anthropocentric hierarchies are dissolved in this rawest mode of fi lm production: amateur fi lms, she suggests, empha- sise the creaturely being shared by human and non-human animals alike. INTRODUCTION: IMAGES OF EXHIBITION AND ENCOUNTER vii In his chapter, ‘Capturing the Beasts: Zoo Film and Interspecies Pasts’, Andrew J. P. Flack looks to archival footage from Bristol Zoo Gardens to trace histories of human-animal entanglements associated with captive animal life. For Flack, such footage is of signifi cant value due to its depiction of the liveliness of the zoo animals and the varieties of captive behaviour and interactions with visitors, and the legacy or the memorialisation of species and individuals that fi lm permits. Katherine Groo, in ‘The Human Zoo and Its Double’, considers the relationship between photography and fi lm by looking at the still and moving images of the 1931 Exposition Coloniale in Paris (including its human zoo) that were produced for the Archives de Planete. Groo argues that the rigid hierarchies of difference subtending both projects— and the colonial epistemologies structuring their displays of human subjects—are productively dismantled via the pro- cesses of repetition, reiteration and re-presentation she tracks through the archival images. In ‘ZooTube: Streaming Animal Life’, Andrew Burke considers how and why the zoo-cam has emerged as a pedagogical and promotional tool for zoological institutions. Burke argues that while the zoo-cam may draw on established modes of representing animals, such as wildlife documentaries, it nevertheless constitutes a profound transforma- tion of the way zoo animals are depicted on screens and offers novel and unexpectedly innovative ways of looking at (zoo) animals. In Hollywood we explore ways in which the zoo and its “wild” animals have been used and pictured in the commercial cinema industry. In a chapter exploring the cinema industry’s employment of the zoo as part of its production process—‘Animal Empire: Thrill and Legitimation at William Selig’s Zoo and Jungle Pictures’—Sabine Haenni discusses Selig’s operations in Los Angeles in the 1910s and specifi cally the production of ‘wild animal pictures’ made possible by the Selig Zoo. Selig’s animal fi lms present the human-animal encounter as malleable and unstable, and yet serve an American cinematic empire grounded in the rhetoric of legitimacy and imperialism, an empire whose power, Haenni argues, depends on its capacity to incorporate such instability. Explicitly addressing this collection’s interest with relations of space, Jacob Smith’s ‘A Tour of Zoo in Budapest ’ focuses on the 1933 fi lm Zoo in Budapest (Rowland V. Lee) to explore the synergy between Hollywood fi lm production and zoological exhibition and refl ect upon the intertwined history of Hollywood cinema and the zoological garden. Smith teases out the three-way relationship between the fi lm’s set, the design of modern zoos and the cartography of the fi lm itself, spaces linked by a geometry of social relations best described viii INTRODUCTION: IMAGES OF EXHIBITION AND ENCOUNTER through reference to Erving Goffman’s study of ‘total institutions’, and focuses on the cross-species sociality and collaborative performances that take place in both zoos and fi lm studios.

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