Zoological Surrealism

James Leo Cahill is associate professor of cinema studies and French at the University of Toronto and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

• ContentsIntroduction: Cinema’s Copernican Vocation1. Neozoological Dramas: Comparative Anatomy by Other Means2. Metamorphoses: Crustaceans, the Coming of Sound, and Plasmatic Anthropomorphism3. Amour Flou: The Seahorse and the Blur of Sex4. Substitutes, Vectors, and the Circulatory Systems of Modernity: Dr. Normet’s Serum: Experimental Treatment of a Hemorrhage in a Dog and The Vampire5. Carnivorous Cinema: Freshwater Assassins and The Blood of the BeastsConclusion: Unfinished Revolutions, Untimely NatureAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

"Reading Jean PainlevÉ’s archive, James Leo Cahill excavates an urgent nonhuman ethics made possible through film. Each chapter of this lively, meticulously researched, and beautifully written book reveals a complex vision of animals-for-themselves and animals as figures for a fraught political culture. The ‘cinematic nature’ of PainlevÉ’s world, as theorized by Cahill, unsettles any presumed separateness of human- and animal-being, even as it offers a vision of animal existence that is beyond human existence altogether."-Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene"A remarkable study of Jean PainlevÉ’s cinematic attention to the marvels of animal life, James Leo Cahill’s study elegantly resolves the contradictions between intellectual biography and non-anthropocentric modes of inquiry. At once a focused critical biography and a wide-ranging study of organic systems thinking, Zoological Surrealism is alive with the intellectual ferment of the French 1930s. It is an essential text for any reader invested in the development of systems thinking, as well as in the history of experimental film, art, science, and thought."-Jonathan P. Eburne, author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas