Description
Many films have depicted human-horse bonds, which may be based on mutual respect but also on asymmetries of power. This paper focuses on The Silver Brumby (1993) film adaptation, which tells the story of a wild brumby stallion living in the Australian mountains and coping both with horse and human rivals. This case study is part of my ongoing research that investigates the aesthetic, theoretical and material implications of the representation of horse characters’ point of view in live-action film adaptations. The combination of Film Analysis, Human Animal Studies and Critical Animal Studies will allow me to discuss how factual horses and human-horse relationships have been relevant to produce this film. In a live-action film like The Silver Brumby where horses freely move and act with no visible human coercion, it becomes fundamental to reflect on real horses involved in the film production. I argue that considering real horses’ agency allows us to further reflect on human control and its unsteadiness. My analysis will consider the link between the film thematisation of the failure of human dominance and the problematic human-brumbies relationship in contemporary Australia, and the role of real horse actors, whose involvement requires a degree of human mastery through training practices. However, seeing horses as social agents (Birke and Thompson 2018) allows for an ethical consideration of their influence, if not control, on the achievement of the representation itself.| Period | 29 Nov 2023 → 1 Dec 2023 |
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| Event title | The Factual Animal: Audiovisual Representations of Real Other-than-Human Animals |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Valencia, SpainShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Research Centres
- Centre for Human Animal Studies