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.

Santa sangre

Santa sangre. Alejandro Jodorowsky, 1989.
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Edition screened: Severin Blu-ray, released 2011. English language. Runtime approximately 123 minutes.

Summary: No particular depictions of violence or harm to animals.

Details:
1) A crowd of circus performers gathers mournfully at 22:00 as a young elephant lies dying. The depiction of blood coming from the elephant’s trunk is very sad, but the narrative suggests no cruelty to the elephant, only compassion.
2) At 26:00 the elephant’s funeral procession concludes with the huge and ornately decorated coffin being slid off of a wagon and down a bank into the garbage dump. Waiting peasants swarm the coffin, rip away the lid, and begin to butcher the carcass. We do not see the butchering as it takes place inside the large coffin, and the several pieces of meat thrown out are not particularly graphic or identifiable. But the violence implied by contrasting the somber circus mourners with the rabid peasants is effectively shocking.
3) A hallucinatory scene at 1:21:00 shows a man in an abandoned wooden church, the floor filled with chickens. Suddenly many more (real, live) chickens are dropped from an unseen height into the room. Some clearly are badly injured when they hit the floor, with some dying while the scene concludes. A very distressing transgression.

Santa sangre retains the No Guts No Glory conceptual aesthetic of Jodorowsky’s earlier films, but as a product of the late 80s rather than the early 70s it is more narrative and less intellectually demanding.

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