ABSTRACT
This chapter explores both the visual poetics and the cultural politics of transcultural affect in recent European and Hollywood cinema dealing with the representation of human-horse relations. As early as at the beginning of the twentieth century the Russian film maker-cum-theorist Sergei Eisenstein championed emotions as a key concern in cinema. In his early texts he described the power of the 'cinema as a factor for exercising emotional influence over the masses'. While Eisenstein emphasized the importance of the contemporary conglomeration of emotions, movement, and film making, more than half a century had to go by until cultural and literary theorists re-discovered affect and emotional registers as analytical categories in their deductions of our world of high modernity. In a recent article the psychological constructivists William A. Cunningham, Kristen A. Dunfield, and Paul E. Stillman add a fresh perspective as they argue 'that the distinction between "emotion" and "cognition" is a false dichotomy'.
