Written by Australian artist (and lecturer in critical and theoretical studies) Tessa Laird, Cinemal forms part of the “Art After Nature” series, edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard. The series locates itself at “the intersection of art, science, and philosophy” and explores perspectives that seek to challenge and problematise established anthropocentric practices within a range of disciplines. It does this through multidisciplinary, accessible and diverse approaches that centre marginalised and more-than-human experiences. In Cinemal, Laird combines critical and sensorily attuned visual analysis of experimental film work with a deep understanding of film philosophy and, thus, succeeds in opening spaces for intersectional and non-normative thinking. The case studies are a range of vastly different experimental and extended film works, which to Laird read as “animal” (used here as adjective). She attends to them with much care, at times spinning a tight net around them with the delicate precision of a spider that wants to view its catch in detail before devouring it. Then she also weaves outward to draw connections across the cobweb and locate them within the larger discussion of experimental film practice, philosophy, climate and ecology, justice, and (representation) politics.

With a third of the book being taken up by filmography, notes and references, Cinemal provides a short read overall, made all the more effortless by the clarity of its structure. Every chapter is subdivided into shorter chunks of text, each dedicated to one train of thought at a time. This makes for an overall enjoyable reading experience, which resembles the feeling of taking one short excursion after another. The ideas itself are far from simplistic, diving into complex and uncomfortable societal issues and philosophical theories. Laird however, takes the reader by the hand and remains purposeful and percise at all times, thus leading over vast distances (both space and time), without anyone getting lost. One goal of the book is to evoke and inspire the “animal qualities of the child”, which Laird postulates are at sleep in every spectator but can be “mobilised by the cinematic encounter” through its “expressive use of colo[u]r; movement; olfactory, tactile, and haptic sensations; sound and voice; the ‘sixth sense’; and the patterns that connect us all” (p.15). All of these elements are explored one after another throughout the Cinemal’s five chapters as it follows its main question. This concerns the issue of “sight” as possibly the “most anthropocentric of the senses” and being completely intwined with western supremacy and forces of control. How then can a “primarily visual medium” like experimental film be used as a tool to challenge, undercut and “trouble dominant modes of visuality” (p.30).

Laird provides a range of possible routes to achieve this, such as “colour” in the first chapter. Here, colour is seen in action as an element of the revolutionary and non-binary and a potential tool for the “queering” of norms and boundaries. Thus colour becomes a lens to explore perspectives that are non-linear, non-dominant, non-neurotypical, non-white, non-human etc. Laird also conveys the excitement of it all, the potential for a caleidoscopic richness of colour and “shimmer”. She achieves this through “thinking beyond outmoded constructs of fear and control” and provoking an audience to see otherwise, “pivoting away from heteropatriachy, whiteness, and neuronormativity toward decolonial praxis” (p.27).

In chapter two, Laird invites us to not just consider non-normative ways of seeing, but also of “moving through the world”. Thinking through terms like dilation and exposure, we can begin to understand the abstract “time” as an endless string of subjective experiences (p.61). Laird uses this to explore different planes of existence beyond merely “human time”, like the unperceivable speed of the hummingbird or the painful slowness of the sloth. In Laird’s mind these modes of time are not just separate entities, but interact and respond to each other. For example, the sudden movement of an unexpected reptile can heighten “human perception through surprise” and therefore posses the power to “warp” the very “fabric of time” (p.45). These altered perceptions are like new “sensory landscapes” which are explored particularly through the olfactory and haptic senses throuout the third chapter. This includes Laura U. Marks’ familiar theories of “haptic visuality” and “eyes as organs of touch”. These relationships between spectator and skin surface are explored by Laird through “scratch and sniff” film, as in the literal and figurative scratching of “the skin of the film” (p.75). In Laird’s understanding, all animals inhabit different sensory worlds and her investigations into the sensoriums of cats, dogs, and even ticks, serve to disrupt and challenge “habitual ways of seeing” (p.67) and in so doing, “reintroduce us to our own world” (p.89).

Chapter four is dedicated to the rich theme of sound, which is here explored through the multiplicity of animal howls, cries, growls, squeaks and more. Including those beyond the limited human sensoria, such as echolocation. Crucially her attention includes the pre- and non-verbal, or the so-termed-voiceless, a characterisation often used to “dehumanise” the animal. In her consideration of the live-giving “breath” she gives room not just to the loud, impressive animal roar, but also the quieter forms of sounding. “Breath” is visible, or rather visibly strained, in the “silent screams” of suffocation. Such as the unheard, yet ear-splitting screams that emanate the desperately gasping mouths of flailing, wide-eyed fish, torn out of their atmosphere and left to suffocate in the fresh air. Laird shows great insistence and rigor in querying the acceptable norms of so called “Western Enlightenment” causally used to justify the eradication of the lesser- and less-than-human.

As such, Cinemal is also an appeal to the “anaesticised” human animal, which too often overlooks the “iridescent vibration” or “shimmer” that connects all beings on this earth and beyond. She identifies this, as the cause of living beings becoming reduced to products and “commodities” (p.101). In a capitalist system it is more profitable for the human to not feel, but tear apart and sever any connection to the natural world and our fellow animals. Laird allows herself to challenge the supposed “impossibility of interspecies communication” (p.97), instead encouraging artists and experimental filmmakers specifically, to take up the “beautiful challenge” of exploring the “untranslatable”. For “interspecies communication is not only possible”, but necessary and can happen in and through, many different senses (p.101). Laird advocates for the becoming animal of experimental film, because to follow anthropocentric norms or “human exceptionism” leads to a cinema that is self-constraint and lackluster. Or at least she argues, work that is much “less interesting” and “certainly less relevant art” (p.15). One of her aims is for the book itself to become “cinematic expression, by other means” (p.138) and indeed Cinemal is effective in creating a reading experience that conveys a sense of the cinematic. I identified this, in its circulating, widening and closing view, which resembles a camera’s shifting focus. In Laird’s eyes the Cinemal is its own species, a vivid, fantastical creature made of thought and word and paper. If you stroke its pages, her arguments appear compellingly expressed through language that is equal parts purposeful, political and poetic - all throughout the body of this engaging and thought-provoking Cinemal.