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.

As Long as You've Got Your Health

As Long as You've Got Your Health (Tant qu'on a la santé). Pierre Étaix and Jean-Claude Carrière, 1966.
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Edition screened: Included in Criterion 2-Blu-ray set #655 Pierre Étaix, released 2013. French language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 77 minutes.

Summary: No particular depictions of violence toward animals.

As Long as You've Got Your Health is an assemblage of four comedy shorts unified by general Goshwhatisthismodernworldcomingto head shaking. In Part I Insomnia, Étaix’s late-night reading of a vampire novel cross-references coincidental occurrences in his bedroom. Part II The Movies is an extended ticket please/pardon me/excuse me/quiet please routine. Part III As Long as You've Got Your Health lampoons the prescriptions, patients, and practitioners of the medical industry. Part IV Into the Woods No More depicts an urban couple’s inept attempt to picnic in the woods.

This is one of those unsettling instances in which a film and its easily-identified inspiration seem to come in the wrong order. There are plenty of funny sight gags in this Étaix feature, but you’ve seen them all before in Warner Brothers cartoons made at least a decade earlier. Porky and Daffy shaking under the sheets in a haunted castle; Bugs Bunny climbing over annoyed film watchers and jockeying for a better seat; Elmer’s whirlwind problems in crowded restaurants and doctors’ offices; uncountable vignettes of pastoral splendor humorously sullied by modern intrusions. Warner Brothers didn’t exactly invent all of these gags either, but Étaix’s versions are really similar to the animated antecedents.

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