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1981
Cinezoonosis
  • ISSN: 2632-2463
  • E-ISSN: 2632-2471

Abstract

This essay theorizes the cinematic experience of apprehension accompanying representations of multispecies relations in the age of global pandemics. Globally synchronous experiences of cascading epidemics in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries have made spectators aware of the microbes that inhabit ‘us’, the animals that carry ‘them’ and the mediums (water, air, soils) that sustain all these forms of life. In this historical situation, cinematic zoonoses generate fear, anxiety and foreboding alongside creative prehensions of living as multispecies: this is the ‘pandemic viewing condition’. I elaborate the claim in three films – Prateek Vats’s first fiction film (2020), Amit Datta’s artistic () (2013) and Shaunak Sen’s documentary (2023) – that articulate multispecies encounters as spatial experiences. On the one hand, aesthetic compositions of cinematic zoonoses lure spectators into textured of multispecies encounters, even as the protective cinematic frame provides the comfort of distance; on the other, the historical contingencies of spectatorship induce projections of where the multispecies continuum surfaces sensorily, affectively and intuitively. Together the cinematic milieu and cinematic surrounds orient spectators towards their actual living milieu, an unsettling space where neither bodily integrities nor species distinctions hold any longer.

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2024-04-22
2026-04-17

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/content/journals/10.1386/jem_00108_1
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A multispecies cinema of apprehension
Journal of Environmental Media 4, 167 (2023); https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00108_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jem_00108_1
/content/journals/10.1386/jem_00108_1
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  • Article Type: Article
Keyword(s): cinematic milieu; cinematic surrounds; creative speculation; living milieu; pandemic viewing condition; spectation; zoonotic imaginaries

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