Abstract
Kornél Mundruczó’s film Fehér isten/White God (2014) portrays the human decreed options of mixed breed, abandoned dogs in the streets of Budapest in order to encourage its viewers to rethink their relationship with dogs particularly and animals in general in their own lives. By defamiliarizing the familiar ways humans gaze at dogs, White God models the empathetic gaze between species as a potential way out of the dead end of indifference and the impasse of anthropocentric sympathy toward less hierarchical, co-created urban animal publics.
Highlights
Fehér isten/White God (2014) is not the first film use mixed breed canine actors who were saved from shelters1
In a fable that is no longer fabulous, human being constitutes itself through a definite violence against the animal”. This scene is often carried out behind closed doors—whether in the slaughterhouse, the pound, and illegal spaces like dogfights—and it is this scene in its variations that the film White Dog focuses upon, albeit with dogs and cows, not chickens
The narrator presents a pessimistic view of current animal-human relations, it does offer the possibility of an alternative scene, one in which non-human animals and human animals redefine this relationship together
Summary
Fehér isten/White God (2014) is not the first film use mixed breed canine actors who were saved from shelters. The Benji films starred mixed breed rescued shelter dogs By making the effort to see the dogs as animals, as intelligent, communicative, individual non-human beings in a specific context, by destabilizing the normative animal categories, the narrator shows the inadequacy and unsuitability of the current normalized terms and images in which humans try to confine animals as pets, as consumable and disposable objects, as dangerous and killable threats, and as metaphors for human characteristics. By pushing us to imagine a non human-centric urban space we could co-create with dogs outside of the film, it reminds us, that “dogs have been watching human beings for a long time”(Williams 2007, p. It emphatically concludes that it is time for us to pay attention
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