Faces, spaces, and touch : frames for being with and for animals in documentary film

Abstract

Randy Malamud, in An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture, studies how humans build frames to “place” animals within it for viewing (18-20). Animals that are filmed in documentaries, similarly, are made to exist within a frame or a boundary by the filmmaker. The frame constructs the space that forms the position of the viewer in relation to the animal on screen. From the analysis of how different spaces of the documented animal is constructed and approached or entered by the human, I examine how documentary films may interrupt the “authority of the frames and framers” (Malamud 20).