Experiential Empathy through Feminist Observation: The Bond between Women and Animals in the Ecocinema of Andrea Arnold and Kelly Reichardt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Andrea Arnold and Kelly Reichardt are two of the most successful and critically acclaimed female filmmakers working today, each possessing a distinctive directorial style that has endeared them to a wide range of film audiences. Arnold has long been preoccupied with social realist character studies focused on working-class citizens of the United Kingdom, while Reichardt has spent her career crafting slow cinema set in the American Pacific Northwest. An essential theme unites these directors’ filmographies: their interest in relationships between women and animals as human women try – and generally fail – to supplement their unsatisfying human connections with a love for animals. This article examines this theme through a feminist eco-critical lens, considering how these representations of human-animal bonds might relate to real-life ecological concerns. I argue that these filmmakers awaken new social and political understandings in their viewers through employing a form of experiential empathy via feminist ecocinematic observation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".