Luma and Gunda Stare Back: Integrating Nonhuman Perspectives in The Ecofeminist Documentary

Abstract

Documentaries about non-human animals abound, but how many of these films are truly attempting to narrate their perspective? Both blue-chip ‘nature’ documentaries narrated by David Attenborough and animal rights advocacy documentaries have an anthropocentric approach: either the non-human animal is turned into a spectacle for the human gaze, or into a helpless “victim in need for human mercy and rescue” (Freeman & Tulloch 2013, 6). The aim of this paper is to make a case for the potentiality of the documentary form as a means to find new, interspeciesist ways of representing non-human animal subjectivities. It also investigates some of the methodologies used to explore the possibility of integrating the non-human animal perspective in documentary. To do so, this paper looks into examples of recent documentaries Gunda (Kossakovsky 2020) and Cow (Arnold 2021), suggesting that these films are able to put critical ecofeminist thought into practice. Moreover, this paper argues that methods such as those invested in sensory ethnography can be useful to let the nonhuman animal ‘speak’ for him or herself, in line with the ecofeminist aim of exposing the underlying power structure resulting in all forms of oppression. Furthermore, this paper explores Anat Pick’s notion of vegan cinema (2018)