Experiential Empathy through Feminist Observation: The Bond between Women and Animals in the Ecocinema of Andrea Arnold and Kelly Reichardt

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.