This seminar takes place in contemporary Turkey, where recent amendments to the Animal Protection Law have left free-roaming dogs even more vulnerable to violence, while mainstream media representations continue to be dominated by the image of the demonized dog. Amid these “times of trouble” (Haraway), the talk will focus not only on cinema’s archive of violence but also on its potential for public mourning and for worlding—the making of multispecies worlds. It will explore cinematic animals beyond the reproduction of human exceptionalism: films that look compassionately into the eyes of those cast as monsters, that attempt to move closer to them, and that imagine forms of multispecies companionship. Through the representations opened up by the screen, the seminar will follow the inspiration and possibilities of a horizon of life that is not exclusively human. Drawing on the profound transformation of the image of thought brought about by the “posthuman turn” in the social sciences and humanities, as well as on the concepts, modes of attention, and debates emerging from the “animal turn” in film studies, the seminar will examine diverse examples that seek to invent and explore alternative ways of seeing, storytelling, and spectatorial positions. In doing so, it will open up discussion on the possibility of an “elsewhere” (Haraway), where cinema is understood to be intimately connected not only to ways of seeing but also to ways of living (Pick).
Özlem Güçlü is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. She received her BA from the same department, an MA in Gender Studies from Central European University, and a PhD from the Centre for Media and Film Studies at SOAS, University of London. She teaches and researches in the fields of film and media studies, critical posthuman theory, and critical animal studies. Alongside her work on Turkish cinema, the politics of representation in film, and feminist and queer film criticism, she has a particular passion for the intersection of film studies and animal studies. She has published widely in journals and edited volumes in Turkey and internationally, and has given numerous talks and seminars on these subjects. She is the author of Female Silences, Turkey’s Crises: Gender, Nation and Past in the New Cinema of Turkey (2016), a contributing author to Mustang: Translating Willful Youth, and co-editor of Queer Tahayyül (2013). She is also a volunteer with Dört Ayaklı Şehir (Four Paws City) and hosts the radio programs Film Animals and A Letter to My Companion Animal on Dört Ayaklı Şehir Radio. She lives with Dodi, Limon, and Koko.
