Gosford Park. Robert Altman, 2001.
😿
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.