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.

Häxan

Häxan. Benjamin Christensen, 1922.
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Edition screened: Criterion DVD #134, released 2001. Danish intertitles with English subtitles, no dialogue track. Runtime approximately 105 minutes.

Summary: Theatrical use of animal body parts.

Details:
1) Intertitle cards tell us we are in the “Underground home of a sorceress” (13:40-18:10), interpreted as a modest Halloween vignette with boiling cauldrons, eerie drinking vessels, and other objet d’Spencer’s. Prominent in the decor is a suspended dog skeleton and a large skull, possibly from a horse. Nothing depicted is alarming. We leave the witch’s house with our purchase (‘Here, young maiden, take a potion of cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight’), but return for something stronger 20:48-21:40, and a third time to see the witch encounter The Devil, 28:09-29:44.

2) We see ten seconds of a medieval banquet spread, beginning at 32:13, with detail shots of a boar’s head on a platter and whole roasted birds, all decorated by knives that impale the animals.

Häxan is an early manifestation of the questionable historical examinations so popular on Cable TV. The film ‘documents’ witchcraft first through expressionistic art, then through a long fictional drama, stops to examine antique implements of torture (loot from a Christian’s yard sale, not a witch’s!) and “brings it into the present” with a look at seances in the 1910s. All said, an entertaining mixture of theatrics, information and bigotry, made more interesting by color-tinting and other early filmic techniques.

The Criterion DVD also includes the 76-minute 1968 edition of Häxan usually titled Witchcraft Through the Ages, with narration by William S. Burroughs and music by Jean-Luc Ponty.

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