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.