Luke Kuplowsky - Encountering the Cat - Developing an Aesthetic of Coexistence and a Reading of Kazushiro Soda’s Peace (2010)

Oct 3, 2026

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This essay examines how Kazushiro Soda’s documentary style—quiet, observational, and attuned—enables an intersubjective encounter between humans and animals. It argues that aligning the camera’s gaze with the cat’s gaze produces shared defamiliarizing power, reorienting attention toward non-anthropocentric ways of seeing. The discussion is developed through cinematic scenes and theoretical traditions, connecting human–cat perception to coexistence, community, and critical rethinking of anthropocentric knowledge.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages9

Reading Time23 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

Cinematic Encounter Between Human and Cat

Alignment of gaze and defamiliarization

Theoretical Framework: Philosophy, Literature, and Interspecies Unease

Phenomenological gap and animal unknowability

Cinema’s Fascination With Cats

Directors and avant-garde approaches

Focus and Argument of the Paper

Cinematic apparatus and mutual alignment

Luke Kuplowsky Encountering the Cat: Developing an Aesthetic of Coexistence and a Reading of Kazushiro Soda’s Peace (2010) Abstract This essay examines the way in which Soda’s unobtrusive and observational documentary aesthetic facilitates an intersubjective encounter between man and animal, attuning one to non-anthropocentric forms of attention and gesturing towards modes of coexistence and community. The essay prepares this discussion by developing a mutual alignment between the gaze of the cat and the gaze of the camera, emphasizing their shared powers of defamiliarization and re-orientation. During a performance in Vojtěch Jasný’s 1963 film Cassandra’s Cat, a young woman, elevated by a swinging seat and holding a cat wearing dark spectacles, addresses an audience.1 As she removes the glasses from the cat, the room fades to dark, the camera holds on the cat’s wide-eyed stare, and a swirl of bright colors filter the image. The camera, adopting the gaze of the cat, punctures habituated reality with a synesthetic unveiling of the townspeople’s virtues and flaws: lovers glow in reddish hues, thieves turn a dull grey, hypocrites blush in shades of violet, and a brilliant blue emanates from the sincere and pure. Does this not resemble our own daily experience of looking a cat in the eyes? The gaze between human and cat can be understood in the tradition of thinkers such as Michel de Montaigne, Paul Valéry, and Jacques Derrida as a site of disquieting speculation and revelation, an interspecies encounter that foregrounds the phenomenological gap between human and non-human species. Furthermore, this interspecies encounter between and human and cat is recurrently framed as producing a peculiar unease. The peculiarity of this unease manifests in its capacity to turn introspective, forcing one to recognize him or herself as alien to what Valéry callsan “animal system of ideas,” and to re-evaluate an anthropocentric understanding of human being and knowing.2 The cat’s world or thoughts are often cast as isolated and unknowable, as Jorge Luis Borges describes in his ode,“To a Cat”: “More remote, even, than the Ganges of the setting sun / yours is the solitude, yours the secret.”3 Even in fictional worlds, like the phantasmagoria of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the cat does not answer questions; it only poses them.4 For artists and theorists alike, the cat is a totemic stalwart ofunreadability whose contemplative gaze produces a sense of existential angst and curiosity. However, what is disturbing about the cat’s frequent appearance in philosophy and literature is that, metaphorically and literally, we commonly turn away from that gaze, assign it a zone of privation, and deny the exchange asalience beyond angst and unknowing. Even if the philosophical and literary encounter with the cat provokes productive questions and lines of inquiry—animal rights, animal suffering, animal thought—the cat is rarely returned or engaged with on a direct, literal, concrete level. Instead, the cat is relegated to abstraction, a technology of contemplation rather than a responsive or enlightening being. As Donna Haraway so aptly questions in response to 40 The Wild Image Courtney E. White, editor, Spectator 36:2 (Fall 2016): 40-48. KuploWSKy Derrida’s encounter with his cat and his subsequent digression into discussion of animal suffering: “say the philosopher responded?”5 Just as philosophy and literature draw upon the cat as a figure for existential speculation, so does cinema share a persistent fascination with cats. It is not just that the cat remains a recurring presence throughout cinema and media history—most animals enjoy moments of celluloid immortality—but rather that its appearance is privileged frequently by directors as being loaded with an excess of meaning, untranslatable signifiers that ignite a line of desire and inquiry while resisting conclusive assertions within discourse. For directors like Agnès Varda,

FAQs

What does the essay argue about Soda’s documentary aesthetic?

Soda’s unobtrusive observational style facilitates an intersubjective encounter between humans and animals by attuning viewers to non-anthropocentric attention and gesture toward coexistence and community.

How does the paper connect the cat’s gaze with the camera’s gaze?

The essay develops a mutual alignment between the gaze of the cat and the gaze of the camera, emphasizing shared powers of defamiliarization and re-orientation.

Why is the human–cat encounter often framed as producing unease?

The paper describes unease as forcing reflection that reveals the alienness of human perspectives, challenging anthropocentric assumptions about being and knowing.

Oct 3, 2026

Upload by Noah