Data used in the publication “American pet cemeteries in history and fiction: Remembering animals through film”

<p>Pet graves illuminate the continually transforming human-animal relationship, practices of pet-keeping and anthropocentric understanding of life and death, questioning the boundary between human and animal and highlighting the growing complexity of landscape design and symbolism of the pet cemetery. However, although burial grounds for animals are increasingly attracting scho- larship, very little is known about how they function in film. Bringing together history with film and animal studies, I discuss two experimental documentary films, Stephen Broomer’s Spirits in Season (2013) and Sam Green’s Julius Caesar Was Buried in a Pet Cemetery (2018). These films document animal tombstones in Lily Dale Assembly, New York, a center of the American Spiritualist move- ment, and Brown Pet Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio, through showcasing pet memorial designs and grave markers as a way of commemorating animals after death, which deepens our understanding of pet cemeteries as locations for symbols expressing human hopes for animal afterlife. Blurring the boundary between documentary and fiction through self-reflexive subjectivities and pro- posing new ways of remembering animals through film, the study sheds new light on pet cemeteries as a fundamental element of the mise-en-scène and the larger heritage of American Spiritualism and Columbus history.</p>