Returning the Look: Emotion, Encounter and Inter-subjectivity in Wildlife Films

It has been argued that a contemporary penchant for wildlife images serves to cloak the various destructive impacts human actions have on nonhuman animals, as well as to distract us from our ever-decreasing direct encounters with them. However, this form of media has also demonstrated its effectiveness as a method for communicating conservation messages to the wider public. This paper seeks to examine this tension through an analysis of a famous reunion clip from the documentary Christian the Lion (1971), exploring how audiences have reacted to this clip through a selection of YouTube comments and asking what these comments can tell us about contemporary ideas relating to human/animal inter-subjectivity.