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.

Hard To Be a God

Hard To Be a God (Trudno byt bogom). Aleksey German, 2013.
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Edition screened: Arrow Blu-ray, released 2015. Russian language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 177 minutes.

Summary: Displays of dead animals.

Details:
1) Backgrounds frequently include animal carcasses hanging from architecture or in storage rooms.
2) The camera strolls down a hallway with 15 or so dead rabbits suspended by their feet from the ceiling, apparently waiting food preparation, 1:04-08-1:04-20.
3) Numerous hanged dogs (wolves?) are present in a storage room 1:23:00-1:32:02. Important dialogue takes place in this claustrophobic space that contains many jumbled things.
4) Another dog or wolf carcass as the film nears its close 2:47:57-2:48:10, and at a final campfire 2:52:40-2:53:18.

Bonus Points! …
Bonus Points? With three hours of dead animals hanging from almost every ceiling? Bonus Points?

This is an unusual film that merits unusual consideration. Our genius director has created a fictionalized quasi-medieval environment of filth and hardship. The scenery of Hard To Be a God is filled with outhouse pits, leeches, birth defects … and animals presumably killed for food or dead for other reasons. 

I object greatly to Bernardo Bertolucci’s glorification of ‘unspoiled’ 20th-century Europeans reveling in mutilating live animals and throwing the entrails around in joyous celebration, and specifically that Bertolucci wants us to identify with those celebrants as salt of the earth folks, our precious bon vivant ancestors.

I object greatly to Les Blank’s glorification of low-income southerners mutilating animals and clowning around with their quivering carcasses as normal good-old-days happy times before dang blasted ‘political correctness’ ruined everything that was good about the U.S. of A., dang blast it.

I object greatly to the gratuitous Hunting Porn so frequently forced into films, designed to make us feel that these are great guys, real men, regular fellas just like our husbands and neighbors who compensate for their repressed tendencies in exactly the same way.

I have great respect for Aleksey German’s refreshing ability to simply depict the reality of dead animals in a landscape, without forcing in irrelevant scenes of painful slaughter and mutilation. Hard To Be a God does not even include the expected scenes of spit-roasting and drumstick wrenching. And why should it? The more appropriate question is: Why are such scenes forced into so many movies? Be aware of the unflattering condescension usually shoved at us. 

While I am astounded by the absence of animal cruelty in Hard To Be a God, that absence is not a didactic point or theme. The film is a visual circus, often hilarious, sometimes confusing, always captivating. The young genius film scholar Daniel Bird provides an excellent introduction and explanation in The History of the Arkanar Massacre, included on the Arrow Blu-ray.

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