engleski

Blood of the Beasts, or the Representation of Evil in Documentary Films on Animal Rights i.e. Liberation, or the Ways in Which Culture Slaughters Nature: The „Problem of Evil“ in Coetzee’s Novel on Elizabeth Costello

As the title suggests, in this article I seek to document the representation of evil in documentary films on animal rights, based on the ethical statement by film director Shaun Monson (Earthlings, 2005) with which he posed the need to behold the evilness of the industrial concentration camps of death. Thereby I „shed light“ on the aforementioned evil with the chapter The Problem of Evil from the academic novel Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons (2003) by J. M. Coetzee, in which Elizabeth Costello was invited to the conference in Amsterdam to address the age-old, as she herself put it, problem of evil – i.e. to try to elaborate as to „why there is evil in the world, what if anything can be done about it“. In documentaries on animal rights, animals figure in the double ontological optics ; as the subject of the „reality“ of documentaries, but over himself/herself (to avoid a linguistic speciesism, I do not use the pronoun it for animal) as an object in the reality in which it has been reduced on machina animata. Alongside, I address the short (20’) documentary film Le sang des bêtes (The Blood of Animals, 1949) by Georges Franju, which has a cult status in cinematic history (cf. Pick 2011:132) of the shokumentaries genre.

animal rights, animal liberation, J. M. Cooetzee, Elizabeth Costello ; Georges Franju, Blood of the Beast ; Shaun Monson, Earthlings ; shokumentaries

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