Abstract

The 2015 film Lost and Beautiful, directed by Pietro Marcello, en­deavors in aesthetically compelling ways to decenter the human in the frame and engage viewers in what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari term becoming animals. Part documentary film, part fairytale, this film tells the story in the nonhuman first person, of the life and journey of a water buffalo calf in the south of Italy and his relationship with the shepherd who saved him from pre­mature death, and later, with Pulcinella, a mythological figure from Neapol­itan folklore, who accompanies him in a journey north. Adopting ecocritical and posthuman perspective and providing elements of environmental cultural history, this article analyses the aesthetic and narrative strategies the film em­ploys to grant subjectivity to a nonhuman protagonist and, in turn, address the viewers. Advocating for the conservation of human artifacts while also posing the question of animal rights and agency, Lost and Beautiful powerfully gestures toward a non-anthropocentric cinema.