Taking up Jennifer Fay’s call to apprehend film as a “technology of the Anthropocene,” this panel investigates how modernists took advantage of film’s ability to capture motion to envision and to reimagine the limits of life, broadly defined. We invite papers that explore how early twentieth-century film experimented with cinematic form to depict movement and vitality as a phenomenon located beyond or in distinction to the human.

Possible lines of inquiry include: representations of plants, animals, and microorganisms in popular, experimental, and scientific films; matter, movement, and mechanical reproduction; spectacles of metamorphosis, reproduction, death, and disease; the racial dimensions of in/animacy; the camera’s inhuman gaze; anthropocentrism, ecological thought, and early cinema.

Please send 250 word abstracts and a short bio to eridder@g.ucla.edu by Friday, March 29.