is article recasts the subject of John Berger's Why Look at Animals?, an essay that, for over three decades, has shaped the discussion of in visual culture. e short answer Berger gives to his titular question is that we look at because that is the only relationship late capitalism aff ords us; more to the point, we look at compensatory images of (stuff ed animals, cartoon animals, on display at zoos) because we no longer live with them. As a result of the profound social and material ruptures introduced by modernity, the beings that once constituted the fi rst circle of what surrounded man now linger in a state of perpetual vanishing.2 And as recede into images, they can no longer return our gaze: Th erein lies the ultimate consequence of their marginalization. at look between and man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and with which, in any case, all men had always lived until less than a century ago, has been extinguished.3What about dead and images of dead and dying? Do we look or should we look at them any more or any less-or any diff erently? In quantitative terms, the elimination of from Western everyday life that Berger mourns can only indicate a commensurate increase in dead animals; in fact, the industrialization [. . .] of the production for consumption of and related practices means that in the twentieth and twenty-fi rst centuries has proliferated on a scale that is unfathomable.4 ese shift s have coincided with the development of cinema, a medium deeply bound up with movement and the cessation of movement. is article considers why and how cinema turns, if with consistent frequency than with remarkable intensity, to the extinguishment of life. It asks whether cinema, in documenting death, tamps out the look between humans and animals.Indexical images of slaughter appear in a small yet oft en important corpus of (mostly) documentary fi lms set in and around slaughterhouses.5 e most notable examples include Le sang des betes/Blood of the Beasts (Georges Franju, FR, 1949); Meat (Frederic Wiseman, US, 1976); Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, US, 1977); American Dream (Barbara Koppel, US, 1990); and Unser taglich Brot/Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter, DE/AT, 2005).6 Sponsored fi lms-institutional or industrial fi lms that speak on behalf of a corporate interest-also use images of slaughter for purposes such as educating consumers, training workers, and encouraging reform or abolition.7 Images of slaughter are to be expected in documentaries and even in dramas about meat production; aft er all, they defi ne the mise en scene. In a more perplexing phenomenon, images documenting the slaughter of crop up in fi lms that oft en have very little to do, subject-wise, with slaughter. Among the most oft -remarked of these fi lms are Stachka/Strike (Sergei Eisenstein, RU, 1925); La Regle du jeu/Th e Rules of the Game ( Jean Renoir, FR, 1939); Unsere Afr ikareise/ Our Trip to Afr ica (Peter Kubelka, AT, 1966); Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, RU, 1966); Week-end ( Jean-Luc Godard, FR, 1967); Touki Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambety, SN, 1973); Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, US, 1979); Cannibal Holocaust (Ruggero Deodato, US, 1980); Sans soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, FR, 1983); Los muertos/Th e Dead (Lisandro Alonso, AR/FR/NL/CH, 2004); and Cache/Hidden (Michael Haneke, FR/AT/DE/IT/US, 2005).8 ese fi lms leverage the metaphoric weight of slaughtered animals, compelling them to stand in for analogous images of dead and dying humans.My primary aim in this article is to explain why the medium calls on bodies to evidence death, and then to consider how these reasons inform the ethics and politics of viewing violent on screen. Before undertaking my account of cinema's recurrent documentation of death, it bears noting that, just as animals constitute a category so large as to be meaningless (beyond not human), the categories animal death and animal in fi lm risk smoothing over many important diff erences. …