Katharina Swoboda’s framed animals – in comics?

In 2020, the same year when my article, “Formal Characteristics of Animal Liberation in Comics”, appeared in Closure, Katharina Swoboda completed her PhD thesis at HFBK Hamburg; it was published as a book last year under the title Gerahmte Tiere. Zoobauten als Sujets in Film und Video (“Framed animals. Zoo buildings as subjects in film and video”). This coincidental simultaneity is a bit unfortunate, given the similar subject matter of the two texts, as at least I would have benefitted from reading Swoboda’s book earlier, when working on my article. There seems to be no English edition of Gerahmte Tiere, but there is an English essay by Swoboda from 2022 (“Zoological Architecture and Empty Frames”) which looks like a condensed version of the book. In this blogpost I’ll refer to the German book though.

The first half of Gerahmte Tiere offers a thorough yet succinct (the whole book is just over 100 pages long) discussion of the theoretical literature relevant to the topic of zoo architecture on film, and develops a suitable theoretical framework (no pun intended). Swoboda’s main angle is that of a double framing: “Creating an image with a camera means to set a frame. Architecture frames animals – what happens when these architectural frames are superimposed with another frame, the filmic framing?” (p. 7; all translations mine).

There is a lot at stake in this framing, Swoboda claims: “Visual frames act as tools for the evaluation of what they contain. The way in which animals are presented in human culture has an effect on how they are treated sociopolitically. Zoos create and convey value concepts of animals, and zoo architecture, though mostly in the background of the field of vision, takes part in the construction of these concepts.” (p. 7). Thus, her central question is: “How are zoo buildings depicted in their role as display case, stage and prison in artistic video and film works?” (p. 8).

Even prior to being framed on film, though, animals are being subjected to a rather peculiar kind of framing in zoos: “In the zoo we find ways of staging that show animals from a specific point of view: the zoo structure represents a clear […] separation between human and animal. […] Biopolitically thinking, what is confined in the enclosure is perceived as ‘nature’, and what is outside of these frames – e.g. the visitor paths – belongs to the cultural, human domain. According to philosopher Brian Massumi [who in turn refers to Giorgio Agamben], the presentational design in the zoo subordinates the natural life (zoe) to the human life (bios). In this sense, zoo architecture forms a material barrier for the social value scale of living things. Animals in the enclosure are reduced to zoe, while human spectators remain in the frame of bios.” (p. 9-10).

Ultimately, both film and zoos are restricted to this presentational configuration: “According to Randy Malamud, […] every animal representation reduces animals to cultural allegories without reference to the real living being. […] Malamud separates animal representation from the actual (literal) animals: for him there is a cultural and a natural frame, without any overlap. As soon as animals are positioned within a cultural frame, they fall out of the natural frame. […] After Malamud, there is no ‘real’ animal inside the enclosure, but rather a ‘token’.” And according to John Berger, “In modern times, animals are gone from daily life, but all the more ubiquitous as symbols in culture. […] ‘Everywhere animals disappear. In zoos they constitute the living monument to their own disappearance.'” (p. 38-39).

This leads Swoboda to conclude that “[…] the sight of animals is limiting – no matter with which backdrops, information plates and educational services it is enriched. This gaze tells something about humans and their concepts of nature, but not about the animals.” (p. 43). Radically, her “ideal state of zoo architecture [would be] empty and no animals. For towards hollowing out is how zoos should develop in my opinion.” (p. 79).

All is not doom and gloom, however. In the examples that Swoboda discusses in the second half of the book, alternative, emancipatory takes are presented. For instance, László Moholy-Nagy’s documentary short film The New Architecture and the London Zoo (1936) “does its heterogeneous subjects justice and shows animals as living, feeling beings [….]. Anthropocentric and yet emancipating perspectives are those that establish animals as filmic figures. A single penguin, close up and shown from below, becomes a figure with agency. This perspective suggests that animals are also able to look at humans.” (p. 73).

A different device is used in another of the works analysed by Swoboda, Denis Côté’s documentary film Bestiaire (2012): “In Bestiaire it becomes obvious that this outside, the filmic off or hors-champ is part of the film and of reality. The world spreads outside of the image, and the animal goes where the spectators cannot follow. The static camera reduces the possible perspective for the audience, whose imagination constantly reaches out beyond the field of view.” This kind of pictorial concept “opens interstices that Laura McMahon identifies as non-anthropocentric markers in the film” (p. 93-94).

Two of the four comics I analyse in my aforementioned article are also set in zoos, at least partially. In Animal Man #3 by Grant Morrison and Chas Truog (1988), the ape Djuba is rescued from the laboratories in which she has been infected with a deadly virus, and taken to the San Diego Zoo where she dies. While not put in an enclosure there, she is basically taken from one animal prison to another. However, on the page with her final scene, the zoo architecture (which on the second panel still has a forbidding outlook, reminiscent of prison walls) disappears from the panel backgrounds entirely, her confinement thus rendered invisible, which is in line with the reading of Djuba’s death as her ‘ultimate freedom’.

The zoo setting plays a larger role in the other comic, Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon (2011). Here, the zoo architecture is more obtrusive, with cage bars superimposed on the lion figures to emphasise their captivity in almost every panel – until their accidental liberation, when an explosion destroys the zoo buildings. Both Animal Man and Pride of Baghdad anthropomorphise their animal characters, try to instil empathy in the readers, and criticise the treatment of animals in human society. At the same time, of course, the usually rectangular panels of comics evoke the concepts of the frame and framing just as strongly as the camera-recorded image and the movie screen. In the end, the emancipatory potential of comics is limited by their mode of framing the animals, which is just as anthropocentric as that of film.

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