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Filmmaking practice and animals’ geographies: attunement, perspective, narration

Turnbull, Jonathon; Searle, Adam

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Authors

Jonathon Turnbull



Abstract

After being captured from the streets of Moscow, Laika was the first living creature to be sent into Earth’s orbit by the USSR in 1957. The 2019 film, Space Dogs, tells the story of Laika’s spectral return to Moscow, and searches for her ghosts in the city’s street dogs 60 years later. Combining archival material with contemporary documentary footage ‘filmed at dog’s level’, the film reanimates Laika’s spectral afterlives. Drawing on a series of in-depth conversations with the film’s directors, writers, and director of photography, we provide critical reflections on filmmaking practice for animals’ geographies. We offer a three-part typology which frames these contributions: attunement, which focuses on the affordances of filmmaking practice for attuning to the lives of nonhuman lifeworlds; perspective, which documents how filmmaking practice allows for more-than-human urban space to be viewed from alternative vantage points; and narration, which enables filmmakers to experiment with affective modes of representing animals’ lives, offering audiences alternative spatiotemporal experiences. Finally, we reflect on the potentials of filmmaking as a fruitful practice, method, and output for animals’ geographers.

Citation

Turnbull, J., & Searle, A. (2022). Filmmaking practice and animals’ geographies: attunement, perspective, narration. cultural geographies, 29(3), 453-464. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211035471

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 1, 2021
Online Publication Date Jul 26, 2021
Publication Date 2022-07
Deposit Date Jul 15, 2023
Publicly Available Date Jul 17, 2023
Journal cultural geographies
Print ISSN 1474-4740
Electronic ISSN 1477-0881
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 29
Issue 3
Pages 453-464
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211035471
Keywords Animals’ geographies, cinema, filmic geographies, ghosts, Laika, methods, more-than-human, Space Dogs, spectral geographies
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/23005054
Publisher URL https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14744740211035471

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