Animal Representation Steve Baker Essay

Steve Baker argues that animal could only be considered and understood through its representation. According to him, the question of representation is not to deny particular animal’s “reality,” in the sense of that animal’s actual experience or circumstances, instead, representations have a bearing on shaping that reality and this reality again can be addressed only by representation. Animal representations may indirectly reveal something about how a culture regards and treats animals (xvii). This is important, as in our study; we also believe that the point of view is an element of representation that is based on the cultural experiences of a director/filmmaker. Baker in this context says that “...it is (images of animals) reality constructed

By analysing the views of earlier film critics, Dirk Eitzen comments that documentary is a matter of perception and is a mode of reception. The interesting and important problem is not how to absolutely define what is actually is in the text, instead, for Eitzen, it is how the people make sense of a particular kind of discourse that they experience. Many documentaries are confusing in content. Sometimes people can hardly identify the thin boundaries between docu-drama and fiction films or a current affair programme. But it is always the mode of reception that work to establish a documentary (99). Arguing on the reality documentary film portrays, Trinh T. Minh-Ha states that documentary films has a reality of its own kind. Minh-Ha observes that although documentary films creates illusion, ‘such illusion is real; it has its own reality, one in which the subject of knwoledge, the subject of vision, or the subject of meaning, continues to deploy established power relations, assuming to be the basic reserve of reference in the totalising quest for the referent, the true referent that lies out there in nature, in dark, waiting potentially to be unveiled and deciphered correctly’