Phantosomeikón: The Ghostly Corporealities of Urban Strays in Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s Space Dogs

This article offers a more hopeful approach to thinking about film animals than the theories stressing the erasure of actual animals in cinema. Relying on corrective arguments to the spectral economy of the (post)modern animal, it uses Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter’s Space Dogs (2019) as an example to argue that recent documentaries not only foreground the concrete, corporeal, and creaturely experiences of urban strays, but also emphasize the mysteriousness that, from a human perspective, often accompanies other animals’ lives. Rather than spectral animals, the documentary summons phantosomeikón: creatures whose phenomenal worlds elude human understanding, thereby haunting the anthropocentric gaze with the presence of wholly other ways of being.