ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the depiction of cats’ proliferation in the urban environment in Ceyda Torun’s Kedi (2016) as indicative of the increasing effects of anthropogenic climate change. I argue that Kedi’s fluid representation of felines as simultaneously individual cats with unique personalities and as swarming clowders driven by physiological needs conflates and confuses interpersonal and population-wide interactions between humans and animals, the divisions between which are currently being destabilized. John Berger suggests that as animals began to disappear from daily life throughout the 19th century, representations of them multiplied to make up for their absence. Akira Lippit further elaborates that film accelerated this process, rapidly transferring animal life from living bodies to onscreen images. This chapter proposes that we are living through a similar moment now. As species go extinct at unprecedented rates, large portions of animal life are no longer just disappearing from human surroundings but threatening to vanish from the planet itself. And yet, their images multiply onscreen as never before. An explosion of internationally acclaimed animal documentaries has occurred in the last ten years, including Illisa Barbash and Lucian Casting Taylor’s Sweetgrass (2009), Nicolas Philbert’s Nénette (2010), Casting-Taylor and Verena Paravel’s Leviathan (2012), Denis Côté’s Bestiaire (2012), and Kedi, among others. Practicing what Jennifer Peterson and Graig Uhlin describe as the “reverse-zoom” method for studying Anthropocene history, this chapter closely analyzes Kedi’s multifaceted representations of cats—whose ballooning population worldwide and in Istanbul is tied to urbanization and human expansion—as symptomatic of broader anxieties expressed in these films over the planet-wide erasure of many other animals. Part of a frenzy to capture animal specificity, Kedi depicts cats as subjects of capitalist power and as symbols of ahistorical nature, as alien beings outside human history and as redemptive or condemning mirrors of humanity. “From Cat to Clowder” concludes that the film functions less as a particular statement about human/animal relations than as a document of the relationships, fantasies, and desires of a world on the precipice of massive ecological calamity.
