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Bits and Pieces: Screening Animal Life and Death gathers pivotal and more mundane moments, dispersed across a predominantly Western history of moving images, in which animals materialize in movies and TV shows, from iconic scenes of cattle slaughter in early Soviet montage to quandaries over hunting trophies in recent home-renovation reality TV series, to animals in Black horror films. Sarah O'Brien carefully views these fragments in dialogue with germinal texts at the intersection of animal studies, film and television studies, and cultural studies. She explores the capacity of moving images to unsettle the ways in which audiences have become habituated to viewing animal life and death on screens, and, more importantly, to understanding these images as more and less connected to the “production for consumption” of animals that is specific to modern industrialization. By looking back at films and TV series in which the places and practices of killing or keeping animals enter, occupy, or slip from the foreground, Bits and Pieces takes seriously the idea that cinema and television have the capacity not only to catch but to challenge and change viewers'regard for animals.

It's always been a wild world, with humans telling stories of killer animals as soon as they could tell stories at all. Movies are an especially popular vehicle for our fascination with fierce creatures. In Brute Force, Dominic Lennard takes a close look at a range of cinematic animal attackers, including killer gorillas, sharks, snakes, bears, wolves, spiders, and even a few dinosaurs. Lennard argues that animal horror is not so much a focused genre as it is an impulse, tapping into age-old fears of becoming prey. At the same time, these films expose conflicts and uncertainties in our current relationship with animals. Movies considered include King Kong, Jaws, The Grey, Them!, Arachnophobia, Jurassic Park, Snakes on a Plane, An American Werewolf in London, and many more. Drawing on insights from film studies, art history, cognitive science, and evolutionary psychology, Brute Force is an engaging critical exploration—and appreciation—of cinema's many bad beasts.

This first full-length scholarly study about animal horror cinema defines the popular subgenre and describes its origin and history in the West. The chapters explore a variety of animal horror films from a number of different perspectives. This is an indispensable study for students and scholars of cinema, horror and animal studies.

Whether embodied in literature, theater, or film, an enduring theme of many artistic works has been the protagonist's search for identity. Such quests are typically psychological or spiritual journeys and depicted on the screen in a variety of manifestations—endeavors embarked upon to address an emotional trauma or to overcome an obstacle in the hero's life. Using Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête as a leitmotif, these pursuits are discussed by author Maria Garcia as encounters with the “Beast.” At the end of their quests, heroes are reborn into their new identities, while the Beast disappears, transforms, or dies.In Cinematic Quests for Identity: The Hero's Encounter with the Beast, Garcia examines the cinematic conventions of the male and female search for individuation across several genres. After discussing La Belle et La Bête, the author looks at a number of films including three iconic male journeys—The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Searchers, and The Deer Hunter. Additional chapters focus on The Silence of the Lambs, Bringing Up Baby, The Lady Eve, The Secret of Roan Inish, The Natural, and Moneyball. The book concludes with a consideration of the three fairy tale films by Catherine Breillat—Fat Girl, Bluebeard, and The Sleeping Beauty—and the female characters in several Robert Bresson films, including The Trial of Joan of Arc. Providing a unique and original perspective on films throughout the world, this provocative book draws upon Jungian thought, as well as several literary traditions including fairy tales, epic poetry, and Greek and Celtic mythology. Aimed at scholars of film and film theory, Cinematic Quests for Identity will also appeal to movie fans interested in a deeper understanding of films that explore a character's struggle to live a conscious life.

One in the series of Human-Animal Studies ebooks produced as a result of the (printed) publication of the definitive HAS handbook, Teaching the Animal: Human–Animal Studies across the Disciplines. This chapter focuses on cultural studies, includes two course syllabi, and has a full resources section covering all disciplines. Includes chapter'Teaching Animal Movies'by Pete Porter.

From Salvador Dalí to Walt Disney, animals have been a constant yet little-considered presence in film. Indeed, it may come as a surprise to learn that animals were a central inspiration to the development of moving pictures themselves. In Animals in Film, Jonathan Burt points out that the mobility of animals presented technical and conceptual challenges to early film-makers, the solutions of which were an important factor in advancing photographic technology, accelerating the speed of both film and camera. The early filming of animals also marked one of the most significant and far-reaching changes in the history of animal representation, and has largely determined the way animals have been visualized in the twentieth century. Burt looks at the extraordinary relation-ship between animals, cinema and photography (including the pioneering work of Eadweard Muybridge and Jules-Etienne Marey) and the technological developments and challenges posed by the animal as a specific kind of moving object. Animals in Film is a shrewd account of the politics of animals in cinema, of how movies and video have developed as weapons for animal rights activists, and of the roles that animals have played in film, from the avant-garde to Hollywood.