"Reading Jean Painlevé's archive, James Leo Cahill excavates an urgent nonhuman ethics made possible through film. Each chapter of this lively, meticulously researched, and beautifully written book reveals a complex vision of animals-for-themselves and animals as figures for a fraught political culture. The 'cinematic nature' of Painlevé's world, as theorized by Cahill, unsettles any presumed separateness of human- and animal-being, even as it offers a vision of animal existence that is beyond human existence altogether."--Jennifer Fay, author of Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene " A remarkable study of Jean Painlevé's cinematic attention to the marvels of animal life, James Leo Cahill's study elegantly resolves the contradictions between intellectual biography and non-anthropocentric modes of inquiry. At once a focused critical biography and a wide-ranging study of organic systems thinking, Zoological Surrealism is alive with the intellectual ferment of the French 1930s. It is an essential text for any reader invested in the development of systems thinking, as well as in the history of experimental film, art, science, and thought."--Jonathan P. Eburne, author of Outsider Theory: Intellectual Histories of Unorthodox Ideas "The bridge thus established between comparative anatomy, Surrealism, and cinema is the subject of this intriguing study that James Leo Cahill, its author, an expert in cinema studies and French cultural history, presents with clarity and depth.
It is a study that scientists, poets, artists, and their allies will benefit from, especially in charting the differences between anthropomorphic and anthropocentric perspectives that modern ecology and environmental science also use to effect."-- Leonardo Reviews "Zoological Surrealism's approach encourages a salutary provincializing of cinema studies, prompting further investigation into how cinema, science, and the avant-garde intersect."-- Film Quarterly "This book should expand the ranks of the convinced by leaps and bounds. Zoological Surrealism is a major work."-- H-France Reviews "His new study of the filmmaker's work from writer James Leo Cahill is a dense, thought provoking work that attempts to re-contextualize Painleve's work within the larger conversations surrounding non-fiction."-- Criterioncast "This book is a formidable piece of research and a strong contribution to an ecological turn in film scholarship and practice."-- Cinephiliacs "An emotionally challenging, theoretically stimulating, and historically rigorous read, this book ultimately offers timely new perspectives on an important historical figure and the legacy of his works, and it challenges us to develop new and creative approaches to de-anthropocentric praxis, with the overarching urge for increased care and attention to nonhuman animal life."-- Synoptique "Cahill's prose is, once again, as playful and evocative as his subject matter, dipping frequently into metaphor and association.
"-- Cultural Critique.