Susan McHugh discusses animals in film at 25th annual Screen Studies Conference in Scotland

Susan McHugh, Ph.D., professor and chair of UNE’s Department of English, delivered the closing keynote address at “Screening Animals and the Inhuman,” the 25th annual Screen Studies Conference, held at the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland, on June 28, 2015.

McHugh engaged an audience of more than 100 scholars with her interactive talk, “One or Several Dogs? Filming Multispecies Multitudes.” In her lecture, she discussed the problems associated with filming the dog packs featured in Kornél Mundruczó’s new film, White God.

Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival, White God elicits deep discomfort among audience members, raising questions about what its central image of a revolutionary uprising of street dogs means:

• Is the uprising metaphorical, like a canine Spartacus?
• Is it more evidence of the impossibility of animal revolutions?
• Does the uncertainty itself flag an even more revolutionary shift taking place for animals in film, a change that is captured in viewers’ shifting perceptions of humans together with one or several dogs at the center of the story?

Drawing comparisons with two contemporary films that link canines to historical acts of mass killing, The Last Dogs of Winter (2011), and Qimmit: A Clash of Two Truths (2010), her talk in Glasgow explored the similarities in content between all three films, identifying how the human-animal connections portrayed in each represent a political trend that is emerging in film.

McHugh is presently researching stories of biological and cultural extinction.