Animal films reveal the cinema to us. -André Bazin

The essence of cinema becomes a story about animals. -Serge Daney

Even before the so-called "animal turn" in critical theory and the humanities more broadly, exemplified by Jacques Derrida's presentation of "L'animal que donc je suis" at Cerisy in 1997, moving image media, in practice and theory, has been deeply enmeshed in thinking with and about animals. From the animorphic paintings of creatures on the walls of the Lascaux caves to the role of animals as raw material for filmic emulsions, to the centrality of animal research to the development of the technologies and techniques of cinema (in the laboratories of Étienne-Jules Marey and other physiologists), to the fascination with animal life at the level of content, animals have been of primary concern for media. This joint French Literature and Film (JFF) seminar will examine key approaches to thinking about media through animals and animals through media, with special attention to the French and Francophone traditions of thought. Our enquiries will be organized around three key themes — animages (or animal images and questions of their epistemic and magical properties), animots (Derrida's term for animal-words and the enframing of animal life within anthropocentric representational systems, as well as broader inquiries into the animations of language, metaphor, and figuration), an animotions (or the forms of movement, emotion, and affect expressed by or invested in animals and media). Through these terms we will ask what media can teach us about animals (why and how we look at animals on screen, how we represent and understand animals, what lessons or pleasures we gain or hope to gain from watching them)? What can animal media reveal or teach us about any given medium and forms of mediation? What are the aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and political stakes of encounters between animals and media?