‘“If a horse may have an opinion”: horse perspective across ‘Black Beauty’ film adaptations’

Description

As Anna Sewell states about Black Beauty in one of her letters, the novel aims to “induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses”. Indeed, her exploration of a range of very different human-horse relationships, horse living conditions and their personal experiences, relies on the ability of internal focalization to trigger readers’ empathy. The original novel directly establishes a connection between nonhuman animal perspective storytelling, empathy, and issues of care. Therefore, given the success of the novel and the noticeable number of adaptations, it becomes relevant to investigate how different film adaptations have engaged with the core scope of Sewell’s novel. In this paper I will employ approaches from film studies and human animal studies to focus on three adaptations of Black Beauty, namely James Hill’s (1973), Caroline Thompson’s (1994) and Ashley Avis’ (2020). While contextualising them within my research on the representation of horse characters point of view in live-action films, I intend to explore how these three film adaptations of Black Beauty employ the medium-specific means to explore the perspective of the horse protagonist. My idea is that these films all share commonalities with the novel as they all explore the questions of nonhuman animal agency and labour but they channel the viewer’s empathy through different technical choices and narrative strategies, which are likely to be influenced by their historical context and cultural environment. In testing this hypothesis, I will reflect on the unavoidability of anthropomorphism, risks of oversimplification and possibility of empathetic sites.

Period	16 Jun 2023
Event title	NECS 2023 Conference ‘Care’
Event type	Conference
Location	Oslo, NorwayShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International