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.

Gosford Park

Gosford Park. Robert Altman, 2001. 
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Edition screened: Arrow Blu-ray, released 2018. English language. Runtime approximately 138 minutes.

Summary: Hunting violence.

Details:
1) From 55:00 to 56:30 is a pheasant hunt scene with birds being shot out of the sky and dogs retrieving them. Not graphically violent, but the demeanor of the hunters is realistically repugnant.
2) At 1:35:45 we see a few seconds of the kitchen staff carrying the dead pheasants by their feet.  The birds are barely in the frame and the image is not graphic.

Altman is obliged to acknowledge the famous hunting scene in the Jean Renoir film he revisits in Gosford Park. Altman’s shoot is far less explicit than the surprisingly graphic hunt Renoir shows in The Rules of the Game.

Comments for Swept Away (Wertmüller, 1974) suggest that “Respectful hunting in a genuine survival context might be one of the least offensive types of animal violence.” Hunts like in Gosford Park or The Rules of the Game are quite the opposite and more correctly mirror real life: self-absorbed people killing for fun. Even in Altman’s mild example, the tweed shooting jackets and stylized brit-chat do not differentiate this hunting party from urban hoodlums driving around and shooting from a car, sport.


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