The film’s horrific analogy between human and animal slaughter visualizes rhetorical devices used by animal rights scholars such as Peter Singer, which ask readers to imagine humans being put to the uses to which we conventionally put animals. Animal imagery literalizes The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s central metaphor of worker dispossession and its aftermath, redoubling the film’s horrifying effects. The book’s first chapter, “Indexical Violence, Transmodal Horror: Screening the Slaughterhouse,” examines indexically-charged imagery of animals and slaughter and places the influential horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974) in dialogue with food politics documentaries, animal-rights activist videos, the documentary film Earthlings (Shaun Monson, 2005) that catalogs forms of animal abuse, and internet “reaction videos” to Earthlings. In doing so, the project contributes a new analytic model that extends beyond the fields of film and visual culture and enters into dialogue with bioethics, health care politics, radical activism, and environmental studies. Examining the interventionist work of nonfiction media not simply in the conventional terms of rhetoric and persuasion but as a sensory and embodied site of transformation allows me to develop new approaches to longstanding questions in documentary studies about the relationship among media, activism, and social change. Through a transmodal analysis that draws in a range of more peripheral media forms, this project argues that the mobile affects associated with visceral bodily imagery open up new possibilities for ethical engagement and political praxis. These various nonfiction forms are in turn formally and affectively imbricated with experimental media and narrative genre films.Ĭonventional documentary and narrative fiction films considered discreetly subject indexical imagery of bodily processes to visual elision, rhetorical containment, and metaphorical displacement. By “transmodal,” I mean that what I term “instructional aesthetics” emerge from the transversal relations among a range of nonfiction media forms: feature-length documentary, activist video, home movies, and self-help and instructional videos. A critical examination of the distinct and forceful modalities of feeling produced in and by these media motivates my book project, “Documentary’s Body: Instructional Aesthetics and Transmodal Affects.” It examines film and media objects whose intimate pedagogies of bodily transformation operate through their transmodal properties. Rather, through their production of affective intensities between bodies on and off the screen, they engender continuous processes of individual and collective realignment and becoming. ![]() But what can we learn, and how are we changed, by seeing images that “cannot be unseen” (to use the popular idiom)? Documentary media that engage these events produce an experience of spectatorship that does not end when the film or video ends. Childbirth, aging, dying, and animal slaughter: these events that entail the passage or transformation of matter from one state into another have conventionally troubled documentary representation, evoking longstanding cultural taboos against their visualization.
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