Episode 125: Tessa Laird's CINEMAL

Tessa Laird: Cinemal “All film is made out of hooves”. Mark Amery speaks to writer Tessa Laird about her new publication Cinemal: The Becoming-Animal of Experimental Film, and discusses the various animal qualities of cinema, like scratching and sniffing, vibrant colours, and voices. 00:00: Introduction 01.52: What is a Cinemal? On the hybrid of Cinema and Animal. Inspiration of films by Australian film-makers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. The idea of 'a cinematic animal...(while watching a film) the human viewer may also become animal...” The subtitle 'the becoming animal of experimental film', where does that come from? Tessa discusses the book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980) by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the French psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Tessa's resistance to reading it, discovery of the books assertion that “all art comes from the animal… when we are engaged in artistic production we are at our most animal”. Discusses our “current hyper separation from the natural world". 7.14: What is experimental film? Discusses non-narrative film, the work of Australian film-makers Arthur and Corinne Cantrill. 9.52: Meeting the Cantrills, following research into work by Nova Paul, discusses three colour separation, “the lingering of ghosts”. Seeing the Cantrill films in the original format, understanding the tactility of film. Understanding celluloid film as a dying medium, much as natural species were dying out. Mentions the Cantrills'film in new Zealand, 'Bubbling mud pools in Rotorua'. 15.29: Community of film-makers around the Cantrills from the 1960s onwards, the magazine Cantrills Fllm Notes, which included New Zealander Phil Dadson, Nam Jun Paik and others. “They were a network”. 16:40: In what way is film like animal? Discusses how celluloid includes a gelatin component. The book Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009), and how animal parts have furnished the rise of capitalism. “All film is made out of hooves”. “You can’t have a vegan cinema that’s made out of celluloid”. Film being full of toxic chemicals. The colour, grain and translucency of film. Question of whether the interest in film is just a nostalgic medium. “I think it’s more than that but I’m prepared to be challenged on that”. 20:15: Film being animal. Technological analogy between watching animal movement and media. Discusses the book The Squid Cinema From Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia (2020) and animals as screens. Animal attributes as technology. 23:00: The sixth sense and our bodily feel for cinema, the inexplicable - spirit, energy. The human and the non-human. 25:20 The eye of the camera. 25:50: On film programme accompanying the Cinemal book launch. The work of Nova Paul, and her phyto-filmic practice, working with trees. Vegan Cinema. On Sriwhana Spong working with film, realising the specificity of the medium in her practice, film as an entity.

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Episode 125: Tessa Laird's CINEMAL is an episode from CIRCUIT CAST by CIRCUIT CAST.

This episode is 00:30:54 long.

This episode was published on Feb 9, 2026.

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