FOLLOWING MATERIALITY169radio. During this period, the status of the animal itself began to change
at the very point that animals began to vanish from the empirical world.”^15
Reading animals’ presence in film as a spectral phenomenon and thus
extending John Berger’s original argument on mourning and loss, Lippit
is primarily concerned with the conception of cinema as “a vast mauso-
leum for animal beings,” a concept resonating in Poliquin’s connotation
of taxidermy as a practice of longing.^16 But this romanticized conception
of animals’ disappearance from the natural world and their simultaneous,
spectral appearance in film and photography is essentially limited, for
it excludes painting from the economies of animal visibilities and in-
visibilities that governed image consumption during the first half of the
twentieth century. Lippit and Berger somehow failed to acknowledge that
the relationship between photography and painting, and therefore between
mechanized vision and human vision, was indeed an interrelated one
throughout the nineteenth century.
For instance, photography constructed new registers of representa-
tional realism. The belief that the mechanical nature of photography
would restrict intellectual creativity in painting was widespread among
artists and theorists alike. Cézanne, unlike some other impressionist
painters, positioned his painterly practice within a constrictive, skeptic
attitude toward photography. As Steven Platzman, scholar of Cézanne’s
body of work, argued, “For Cézanne, only the painted or drawn image,
based on observation, rather than photographically generated, could serve
to define and build his ever evolving identity.”^17 Likewise, cubist artists’
incorporation and problematization of Cézanne’s mu lt i foc a l persp e c t ive
have been largely understood to constitute a project diametrically op-
posed to the mechanization of vision proposed by the photographic and
the filmic lenses. As seen, Cézanne’s ea rly moder n pa i nt i ngs, a nd subse-
quently those of cubism, proposed radically nonaffirmative representa-
tional strategies in which the viewer’s body was physically mobilized and
engaged in an active process of mediation and resolution, a process de-
signed to explore individual perception—an interiorized world. In opposi-
tion, the cinematic apparatus and the photograph looked outward, and
in so doing, these media reproposed panoptic spatial relationships between
viewer and image. The cinematic apparatus, especially, positioned
the spectator as a transcendent subject upon which specific ontological