Cinema has always posed a form of worldmaking, one predicated upon instrumentalising an inhuman mode of perception, that of the camera, to capture, preserve and variously come to terms with material reality, but thereby, unwittingly or by design, also conjuring another world altogether. From the interventions of montage, cinematography and sound emerges an anthropocentric viewpoint limited solely by the scale and scope of what the human can conceive. Simultaneously, lens-based media bear the potential to interrogate that self-same anthropocentricism, fulfilling what James Cahill coins ‘cinema's Copernican vocation’. Cahill's pronouncement is directed at the early work (1924–49) of French filmmaker Jean Painlevé, whose scientific training in comparative anatomy was shaped by childhood visits to the Normandy coast and is evidenced in documentaries with such titles as La pieuvre (The Octopus, 1928), Le Bernard – l’hermite (The Hermit Crab, 1929) and L’hippocampe (The Seahorse, 1934). These enact what Cahill describes as ‘the twinned capacities for potentially revolutionary scientific discovery and anthropocentric displacement’ and entail a ‘shift in attention – from self-regard to nonhuman other, and the ripples or impact that such a perceptual pivot may have on one's self-image’.

The sustained lure of ‘self-regard’ is confirmed in cinema's preoccupation with the human face throughout the medium's history, such that spectators seek in screen characters infused via close-up with moral, psychological or affectives qualities some form of narcissistic confirmation of their own respective experience. The human face also boasts a more extensive and variegated historical tradition of social coding than does the facialisation of non-human animals, with the latter seldom accorded the status of individual persona in visual media. When they are, this attribution is generally and perhaps unavoidably accompanied in both production and reception by varying degrees of anthropocentric bias and/or anthropomorphic indulgence. The cinema herein participates in ‘the anthropological machine’, the prevailing system of ideas that have generated the dichotomy between animals and ‘human’ via a mode of philosophical and ethical thinking that sorts everything into either bare life or the human. For early film theorists treating the face on screen as an aesthetic object imbued with moral potential, the assumed reference point was similarly the human, even as Béla Balázs also displayed enthusiasm for ‘the face of things’ and for non-human animals.