Stray aesthetic in the cinema of Andrea Arnold

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to contribute to the scholarly examination of the nonhuman in the cinema of Andrea Arnold by reading her work through the figure of the “stray”, proposed by Julia Kristeva and developed by Barbara Creed in her exploration of “stray ethics” in the Anthropocene. Through a close analysis of Arnold’s three films, Dog (2001), Wasp (2003) and Fish Tank (2009), I argue that Arnold’s sensory-driven cinema transcends the focus on the human body and its phenomenological rhythms through which it is commonly read by offering instances of what I dub non-anthropocentric “stray visuality”, realised through her treatment of the environment (both “built” and “natural”) and the nonhuman beings that inhabit it. I assert that Arnold’s filmmaking confounds these overlapping binary oppositions in complex ways that are deeply implicated in current philosophical debates about the ecological.

Keywords

• stray visuality
• ecology
• aesthetics
• Andrea Arnold
• animals
• non-anthropocentric cinema