Cinematic slowness, political paralysis? Animal life in ‘Bovines’, with Deleuze and Guattari
Laura McMahon
Affiliations
Laura McMahon
Laura McMahon is a College Lecturer in French at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (Legenda, 2012), editor of the ‘Screen animals dossier’ (Screen, 2015) and co-editor, with Michael Lawrence, of Animal Life and the Moving Image (BFI, forthcoming). Her current research project explores representations of nonhuman life in contemporary film and philosophy. Related publications include ‘Beyond the Human Body: Claire Denis’s Ecologies’ (Alphaville, 2014), ‘Animal Worlds: Denis Côté’s Bestiaire (2012)’ (Studies in French Cinema, 2014), and ‘Animal Agency in Le Quattro Volte’ (Screen, 2015).
Deleuze elaborates accounts of cinematic time and of becoming-animal quite separately, without addressing potential links between these accounts. Drawing on a range of works by Deleuze and Guattari, this article allows these accounts to intersect through a reading of the aesthetics of slowness in the documentary art film Bovines ou la vraie vie des vaches (The True Life of Cows, Emmanuel Gras, 2012) and its generative focus on (de)territorialisation, becoming, and affect. In privileging what Peter Hallward calls ‘virtual creatings’ over ‘actual creatures’, Bovines implicitly proposes a celebration of biovitality rather than an interrogation of biopolitics, pointing to the possible political limitations of the film and of the Deleuzo-Guattarian framework deployed here.
