Animals Continue to Fascinate Humans Telefilm Canada A scene from Denis Côté"s "Bestiaire," recently shown at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals. IT'S unclear if humans are any more fascinated with animals than they ever have been, but it's safe to say that the visual manifestations of this fascination are on the rise. Blue-chip wildlife documentaries like "Planet Earth" and the current "Frozen Planet," feats of extreme-condition, high-definition shooting, are blockbuster events. On the lowbrow end of the spectrum animal attacks and rogue pets are staples of cable television, and YouTube is an infinite virtual menagerie of cat videos and creature memes. Along with the explosion in animal imagery there has been an uptick of interest within academia, spurred by the growing field of animal studies, in the relations and interactions between humans and animals. As it happens, these are matters that come into instructive and sometimes disconcerting focus when we consider how humans film animals. A series at the 92Y Tribeca called The Lives of Animals, which continues weekly through April 11, attests to the myriad ways animals have appeared on screen. A presentation of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, the program was organized by Kathy High, an artist and a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and Jim Supanick, a filmmaker who teaches at City College of New York. The curators sampled from the animal movies that lie between the sentimentality of Hollywood family fare and the studied neutrality of science films. The series has presented classic nature films, like the 1948 short "A Divided World" by the Swedish documentarian Arne Sucksdorff, alongside more experimental works, like the animator Jim Trainor's mordant hand-drawn inquiries into the inner lives of animals and Shelly Silver's "Small Lies, Big Truth," which pairs recited fragments from the Starr Report with images of zoo animals. This Wednesday's program features two alternative approaches to the wildlife documentary: Sam Easterson's "animal-cam" videos, shot with cameras affixed to its subjects (a bewildered sheep, a falcon in flight), and selections from the "Green Porno" and "Seduce Me" series by Isabella Rossellini, the director-actress, in which she describes and avidly re-enacts the mating and reproductive habits of insects and marine animals. One of the most influential pieces of writing on how we view animals is John Berger's 1977 essay "Why Look at Animals?," which connects the disappearance of animals from daily life with the spread of animal imagery, and attributes both to capitalist industrialization. While Mr. Berger's essay concerns the emergence of zoos, pet-keeping, and animal toys, a signal achievement of the period of modernization that he describes was the birth of cinema. In a sense animals are encoded in the DNA of the cinema. Eadweard Muybridge's and Étienne-Jules Marey's early experiments in moving images were also to a large extent studies in animal locomotion. Animals figured prominently in early films: the Lumière brothers documented horses and cats, and in "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903), Thomas Edison went so far as to execute his subject, a condemned beast that had killed a trainer. Need it even be said that images of animals - whether real or simulated, in documentary or fictional contexts - can exert an uncanny power? Ask anyone who has recoiled at the abbatoir butchery in Georges Franju's "Blood of the Beasts," wept at the death of Robert Bresson's saintlike donkey Balthazar (or Bambi's mother, for that matter) or paused to ponder the fate of the ox in "Apocalypse Now," the horse in "Andrei Rublev" or the dogs in "Amores Perros." In his 2002 book "Animals in Film" Jonathan Burt makes a case for the animal as a special kind of screen image, with the potential to elicit a highly emotional response. Citing the example of a controversy over fox-hunting scenes in the 1950 film "Gone to Earth" Mr. Burt describes the "rupturing effect" of the animal on screen, its tendency to break the spell of cinematic illusion. This effect is especially pronounced in matters of animal welfare, which can lead to the suspicion that "what is happening on screen is really happening to animals being filmed." In the history of animal films - of humans looking at animals, one might say - the central mystery and obstacle is subjectivity. Or, as the philosopher Thomas Nagel wondered in the title of a well-known essay: "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" Many forms of wildlife filmmaking have grappled with some version of this question, sometimes through techniques that minimize the distance between viewer and subject and, more often, by anthropomorphizing the animals. The few existing historical studies of the genre, like Derek Bousé"s "Wildlife Films" (2000) and Cynthia Chris's "Watching Wildlife" (2006), double as studies of evolving ideas about human and animal behavior. In her book Ms. Chris, a professor at the College of Staten Island, describes the shift in recent decades from an anthropomorphic framework, where animals in wildlife films are ascribed human traits, to a zoomorphic one, where we apply our understanding of animals to humans. "We look not only at animals to learn about them," she writes, "but we also look through animals for ourselves." Ms. Chris will give a talk as part of the 92Y program on Wednesday. Nature films have functioned as a vehicle for social and cultural norms, thanks to the genre's potential for "naturalizing ideological values," as Mr. Bousé put it. While humans were the co-stars of early animal films, which often took the form of hunting expeditions ("Roosevelt in Africa"), the human presence receded in the 1940s with Disney's hugely popular "True-Life Adventures" films, visually sumptuous documents in which the animal behavior on view generally conforms to the family values and gender roles of the time. Despite the presence of narrative arcs, these films, which created the template for the educational nature film, maintained an aura of scientific objectivity, which might explain the palpable disappointment when behind-the-scenes trickery is exposed. A minor furor erupted in Britain last year when it was revealed that a polar bear birth in "Frozen Planet" was shot in a zoo, not the Arctic wilds. "Shooting in the Wild," a recent book by Chris Palmer, a nature film producer, is in part a catalog of the reconstructions and manipulations that have always been part of the genre. Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misattributed an opinion about the birth of cinema to the essayist John Berger.