The Academy has spoken, and now it’s official – animals can’t act. Uggie and Joey can hang up their bow-ties and stop rehearsing their teary acceptance speeches, because no animals will be receiving Oscars at this year’s awards. For one, I’m relieved, as hopefully this will end the recent slew of reductive articles questioning the performative capacity of dogs and horses (“Can they act? Can’t they act? Whatever, here are some pictures of Lassie!”), and allow the discussion of animal performance to be pushed in more interesting and nuanced directions, exploring how animals perform, what their appearances signify, accommodate and reveal, and how they inform our understanding of the directors with whom they work.

To demonstrate how even a cursory analysis of animal performance can illuminate a filmmakers style, let’s take as our examples Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang, two directors between whom the equation has always been easy — whatever is true for one, the opposite will be the case for the other. If in Renoir’s films we find day, in Lang’s we find night; if in Renoir we find rivers, in Lang we find flames; if in Renoir ‘everyone has his reasons’, in Lang there is no escaping fate. While it may seem a gratuitous extension of this useful formula to suggest that the distinction between these filmmakers is that of a respective cat and dog cinema, (not least because, as we all know, cats aren’t the opposite of dogs), it’s perhaps not as trivial a distinction as it may first appear.

This isn’t simply a question of quantitative analysis, as my intention isn’t to prove that there are more cats in Renoir’s films than there are in Lang’s (although there definitely are), or that there are more dogs in Lang’s films than there are in Renoir’s (I’m pretty sure there aren’t). Instead I hope to show that the appearances made by these animals (or lack thereof), offer an insightful model for exploring the differences between these two directors’ styles.

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