Playing with Animals: CMS Graduate Student Conference

Animals are a perennial fixation for the moving image. From Muybridge’s motion studies to pet videos on social media, animals continually provide us with inspiration, intrigue, or just plain amusement. This program showcases a range of playful film and video works underscoring the complex relationships humans have with our fellow living beings. 

William Wegman’s Dog Baseball (1986) and Trevor Shimizu’s The First Cat Obstacle (2005) offer lighthearted video works of domestic pets playing. Bruce and Norman Yonemoto’s Blinky (1988) documents Jeffrey Vallance’s burial of a frozen supermarket chicken. Two Terrytoon cartoons, Popcorn (1931) and The Mechanical Cow (1937), are lesser-seen examples of animals in animation that are also reflections on play and labor. Out of the Melting Pot (1927) links animals with the photochemical material of film, while the Dogville Comedies short The Big Dog House (1930) parodies Hollywood prison films with an all-dog cast. Lastly, Barbara Loden’s The Boy Who Liked Deer (1975) uses a boy’s playful relationship with deer as a childhood lesson in respect. Together, the shorts challenge notions of what “play” entails, prompting us to consider the stakes of playing with animals in our everyday lives. (various directors, 79 min., 16mm and digital video) 

Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of The Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, the Department of Germanic Studies, the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and the Department of Anthropology.