Mia Parnall, “Intimate Alienations: The Octopus Body as Cinematic Écriture,” The Neutral, no. 3 (2024): The Unhuman.
Abstract
For theorists from Donna Haraway to Hélène Cixous, the octopus is often evoked as a figure of a subject emancipated from the vertebraic structures that contain and define the human: from its anatomy, its lawless habitat, to its existence as at the limits of language itself. Through a study of two poetic marine documentaries that take the octopus as their focus, the paper examines the interpretive channels that the body of the octopus opens within cinema, and the unique challenge it poses to studies of the animal in film. In both films, which investigate through the octopus the viability of nonhuman languages, a creaturely language of embodied gesture generates an impure realm within cinema, encouraging the acknowledgement of the processes of both reading and looking at work in the experience of spectatorship, and what happens when they fail in constructing a bedrock of human identity separate from the animal.