Capturing spectral beasts : marsupial performances of the cinematic undead

The ‘double movement of animal (dis)appearance’ has been a long standing and defining trope of the critical literature on the exhibition of animals in zoos and cinema (McMahon and Lawrence 9). This movement rests on the paradox that modern technologies of vision and exhibition have spectacularly increased the visibility of animals in a period in which they have dramatically vanished from the wild and from everyday life. John Berger is no doubt the most well-known and influential critic to elaborate this paradox. For Berger, the proliferation of animal representations coincided with the advent of a modernity that not only increasingly encroached on wildlife but also disembedded agrarian populations, dislodging the everyday animal-human relations of rural life. In this context Berger contends: ‘Public zoos came into existence at the beginning of the period which was to see the disappearance of animals’ (Berger 30). Zoo animals, he continues, ‘constitute the living monument to their own disappearance’