Ambivalent Entanglements: Horse-human encounters in Benedikt Erlingsson's film "Hross í oss" (2013)

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37536/ECOZONA.2024.15.2.5367

Keywords:

animal ethics, ecocriticism, interspecies communication, film narratology, horses, Iceland

Abstract

For over a millennium, Icelandic horses have occupied a position between (semi-)wild animal, livestock and companion species. The film Hross í oss (2013) by director Benedikt Erlingsson explores these ambivalent entanglements. In my contribution, I show that Erlingsson's forms of visualisation correspond to the way horses communicate. He succeeds not only in assigning horses an active role within the diegetic world, but also in aligning the narrative structures of the film with them.

Horses often function as a metaphor for human conflicts simply through the practice of riding. There is a danger of reducing the existence of horses to externally determined practices of domination. Inspired by Donna Haraway's The Companion Species Manifesto and Ann-Sofie Lönngren's work on animals in literature, I address this problem by reading with care. My analysis of interspecies communication, taking into account film narratological elements, shows horse-human encounters in a different light.

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Author Biography

Judith Meurer-Bongardt, Universität Bonn und Universität zu Köln

Judith Meurer-Bongardt is a researcher and lecturer at the Unit for Scandinavian Studies at the University of Bonn, Germany and an adjunct professor for comparative Nordic literature at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. She received her PhD with a dissertation on utopian thinking in Finlandswedish modernist Hagar Olsson’s work and has published works on Nordic literature in the Anthropocene with focus on genre, spatiality and temporalities, on plants and animals and on writing and reading as sustainable practices. Currently, she is working on a study with the working title “Under aggravated conditions. Of powerful women, wild men and strange relatives: (Gender) struggles and collaborations in nordic weird fiction”.

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Published

2024-10-30

Issue

Vol. 15 No. 2 (2024): Disruptive Encounters. Concepts of Care and Contamination out of Control

Section

Articles:Disruptive Encounters.Concepts of care and Contamination out of Control

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