Heads Up, Ears Down

This blog accurately identifies depictions of violence and cruelty toward animals in films. The purpose is to provide viewers with a reliable guide so that such depictions do not come as unwelcome surprises. Films will be accurately notated, providing a time cue for each incident along with a concise description of the scene and perhaps relevant context surrounding the incident. In order to serve as a useful reference tool, films having no depictions of violence to animals will be included, with an indication that there are no such scenes. This is confirmation that the films have been watched with the stated purpose in mind.


Note that the word depictions figures prominently in the objective. It is a travesty that discussions about cruelty in film usually are derailed by the largely unrelated assertion that no animals really were hurt (true only in some films, dependent upon many factors), and that all this concern is just over a simulation. Not the point, whether true or false. We do not smugly dismiss depictions of five-year-olds being raped because those scenes are only simulations. No, we are appalled that such images are even staged, and we are appropriately horrified that the notion now has been planted into the minds of the weak and cruel.


Depictions of violence or harm to animals are assessed in keeping with our dominant culture, with physical abuse, harmful neglect, and similar mistreatment serving as a base line. This blog does not address extended issues of animal welfare, and as such does not identify scenes of people eating meat or mules pulling plows. The goal is to itemize images that might cause a disturbance in a compassionate household.


These notes provide a heads-up but do not necessarily discourage watching a film because of depicted cruelty. Consuming a piece of art does not make you a supporter of the ideas presented. Your ethical self is created by your public rhetoric and your private actions, not by your willingness to sit through a filmed act of violence.

The Blood of a Poet

The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un poete). Jean Cocteau, 1930.
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Edition screened: Criterion DVD #67, included in Criterion set #66 The Orphic Trilogy, released 2000. French language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 50 minutes.

Summary: No particular depictions of violence toward animals.

In his introductory comments to Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, Peter Bogdanovich notes the comparative sophistication of film audiences of the early 1930s, and the disheartening distance we have fallen since then. Bogdanovich is speaking of an audience’s sense of wit and a willingness to observe irony and comedic subtlety, long since shown the door in favor of juvenile wisecracks and crotch kicking. Equally, original audiences for The Blood of a Poet were able to follow a narrative that deviated from conflict/resolution structure, and were willing to empathize with mythic and symbolic content that allow an artful filmmaker to work with the language of dreams and classicism, rather than the outbursts of music videos and narcissism.

The Blood of a Poet stands with Buñuel’s L'Age d'Or among early films that reveled in the artistic potentials of a new cinematic medium. But while Buñuel’s acerbic intellect and antiestablishment politics gave his early films wild sharp edges, Cocteau’s gentle poeticism provides sweeping washes of painterly beauty.
















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